Textual Criticism Of The Primary Chronicle

Textual criticism or textology of the ''Primary Chronicle'' or ''Tale of Bygone Years'' ( orv, Повѣсть времѧньныхъ лѣтъ, translit=Pověstĭ vremęnĭnyxŭ lětŭ, commonly transcribed ''Povest' vremennykh let'' and abbreviated PVL) aims to reconstruct the original text by comparing extant witnesses. This has included the search for reliable textual witnesses (such as extant manuscripts and quotations of lost manuscripts); the collation and publication of such witnesses; the study of identified textual variants (including developing a critical apparatus); discussion, development and application of methods according to which the most reliable readings are identified and favoured of others; and the ongoing publication of critical editions in pursuit of a paradosis ("a proposed best reading").

Overview

In 1981, Donald Ostrowski identified 5 'most serious problems' in the publication of the ''Povest' vremennykh let'' that were unresolved at the time:
# 'which manuscript copies to use as witnesses to the ''PVL'';
# whether to publish the ''PVL'' as a separate text or as part of another chronicle;
# which principles of textual criticism to employ in editing the text;
# which variants from other copies to put in the critical apparatus; and
# whether to be content with a modified extant copy or to strive for a dynamic critical text.'

History of scholarship

The first time the ''PVL'' was published was in 1767, as part of a faulty ''Radziwiłł Chronicle'' edition. Attempts to publish the ''PVL'' as part of another chronicle in 1804 and 1812 were abandoned. Ya.I. Berednikov prepared the publication of the ''Laurentian Codex'' for the first edition of the PSRL of 1846, whereby he divided the Codex text into "Nestor Chronicle" (up to the year 1110) and "Continuation of the Laurentian Chronicle" (after 1100). Berednikov freely altered readings of the ''Laurentian'' text as he saw fit, as well as from his ''Radziwiłł'', ''Academic'', ''Hypatian'', and ''Khlebnikov'' control texts, without providing a rationale, resulting in an arbitrary mixture containing many errors. Similarly, Palauzov (1871) prepared an edition of the ''Hypatian'' text with ''Khlebnikov'' and ''Pogodin'' as control texts, while Bychkov prepared an edition of the ''Laurentian'' text with ''Radziwiłł'' and ''Academic'' as control texts. Neither of them described which principles they applied for altering readings, neither was reliable in reporting textual variants, and neither divided their text between ''PVL'' and non-''PVL'' parts.

1871 and 1872 also saw the emergence of a new approach in textology, namely, publishing the ''PVL'' as a separate text rather than as part of another chronicle. Those years, lithographic versions of the ''Hypatian'' and ''Laurentian'' texts of the ''PVL'' were published, although both titles claimed to represent "the" ''Povest' vremennykh let''. Lev Isaevich Leibovich (1876) and Aleksey Shakhmatov (1916) would further develop the ''PVL''-only approach, attempting to reconstruct a composite version of the ''PVL'' based on the earliest extant textual witnesses. However, because they presented confusing or contradictory information about the interrelationships between the early copies and the autograph, neither attempt was successful.

Russian scholar Aleksey Shakhmatov (1864–1920) was a pioneer in textual criticism of the ''PVL'', doing much ground-breaking work, although his reconstruction has been repeatedly criticised for its subjectivity. He contributed to the idea that ''Hypatian'' was necessarily inferior to ''Laurentian'', which gave the latter an often-undeserved privileged status for reliability that would hamper further research. Ukrainian scholar Serhii Buhoslavskyi (1941) advanced a more systematic approach, but his work was lost during World War II and only rediscovered decades later.

Dmitry Likhachev (1950) rejected both the goal of establishing "a 'composite text' 'according to all copies'" and of "a hypothetical reconstruction of the original text"; he would only print "a text that really has reached us in the Laurentian Chronicle." Ostrowski (1981) accused Likhachev, Bychkov and Karski of submitting to what leading textual critic W. W. Greg called "the tyranny of the copy-text": they assumed the ''Laurentian'' text to be superior, and repeatedly persisted in maintaining an inferior reading not found in any other of the main witnesses (a ''lectio singularis''), 'apparently for the sole reason that he ''Laurentian'' texthas it.' Furthermore, Ostrowski demonstrated Likhachev also favoured readings of ''Radziwiłł'' and ''Academic'' over (generally more reliable) readings from ''Hypatian'', apparently just because the former two were more closely related to ''Laurentian'' than ''Hypatian'' was. He criticised Likhachev as failing to provide justification for prioritising the ''Laurentian'' in virtually all cases, and undermining his own claim of printing "a text that really has reached us" due to numerous alterations Likhachev made to his copy of the ''Laurentian'' text based on superior readings from his control texts.

Interest in textual criticism declined in the second half of the 20th century, but was given a new impulse at the beginning of the 21st century by the publication of a new modern German translation by Ludolf Müller in 2001, an interlinear collation of the six main copies and a paradosis by Ostrowski et al. in 2003, and various early 2000s publications by Oleksiy Tolochko and Tetyana Vilkul from the Centre of Kievan Rus' Studies ( uk, Сектор досліджень історії Київської Русі) in Kyiv. These early-21st-century publications were the first to challenge the core parts of Shakhmatov's views, which had until then been widely accepted. Isoaho (2018) summarised Tolochko's critique as follows:

Vilkul (2015) demonstrated that the '' Novgorod First Chronicle in the Younger Redaction'' (''Younger NPL'') has been contaminated by the ''PVL'', so that the ''PVL'' text must necessarily be older, and the ''Younger NPL'' text reflected the 14th- or 15th-century chronographs and could not be an archetype for the ''PVL'' text.

Textual witnesses

Main textual witnesses

Because the original of the ''Primary Chronicle'' as well as the earliest known copies are lost, it is difficult to establish the original content of the chronicle. Although the ''Laurentian Codex'' (Lav.) has often been tacitly assumed to be the ''Primary Chronicle'' in much of scholarly literature, modern scholars seeking to understand the history of the ''Primary Chronicle'' use a range of sources. The six main manuscripts preserving the ''Primary Chronicle'' which scholars study for the purpose of textual criticism are:
* ''Laurentian Codex'' (1377)
* ''Hypatian Codex'' ( 1425)
* ''Radziwiłł Chronicle'' ( 1490 or 1500)
* ''Academic Chronicle'' ( 1500)
* '' Khlebnikov Codex'' ( 1560 or 1575)
* ''Trinity Chronicle'' ( 1450; excluded by some scholars who count only "five main witnesses")

Value of the ''Trinity Chronicle''

Stemmatics

The ''Primary Chronicle'' of the beginning of the 12th century is the oldest surviving Rus' chronicle, narrating the earliest history of Kievan Rus'. However Aleksey Shakhmatov paid attention to the abundance of entries about the 11th century Novgorod, which are also present in the ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' (of the 15th century), but absent in the ''Primary Chronicle''. This and some others textual facts were a base for Shakhmatov's theory that the beginning of ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' includes text that is older than that in the ''Primary Chronicle''. The scholar named it the ''Nachalnyi svod'' ("original collection") and dated it to the end of the 11th century. This svod was also a basis for the ''Primary Chronicle''. If two or more chronicles coincide with each other up to a certain year, then either one chronicle is copied from another (more rarely) or these chronicles had a common source, an older svod. Shakhmatov discovered and developed a method of study on the chronicle (svod) genealogy. Based on textual analysis, Shakhmatov built extensive genealogy of the old Rus' chronicles. He connected most of these chronicles and created a genealogy table, in which the extant chronicles of the 14–17th centuries went back not only to the ''Nachalnyi svod'', but also to earlier hypothetical of the 11th century and even to historical records of the end of the 10th century. Shakhmatov's method and theories became a mainstay in Rus' chronicle studies.Aleksey Shakhmatov. Investigation on the Oldest Kievan Rusʹ chronicle svods. - Saint Petersburg: Printing-House of M.A. Aleksandrov, 1908. — XX, 686 p. — Reprint from Chronicle of Work of Imperial Archaeographic Commission. — Vol. 20. (russian
Шахматов А.А. Разыскания о древнейших русских летописных сводах
— СПб.: Типография М.А. Александрова, 1908. — XX, 686 с. — Оттиск из кн.: Летописи занятий Императорской Археографической Комиссии. — Т. 20).Aleksey Shakhmatov. Review of Rusʹ chronicle svods of 14th—16th Century. Moscow / ed. by A.S. Orlov, Boris Grekov; Academy of Sciences of USSR, Institute of Literature. — Moscow, Leningrad: Publisher of Academy of Sciences of USSR, 1938. — 372 p. (russian: Шахматов А.А. Обозрение русских летописных сводов XIV—XVI вв. / отв. ред.: А.С. Орлов, акад. Б.Д. Греков; АН СССР, Институт литературы. – М.; Л.: Издательство АН СССР, 1938. — 372 с.).Гиппиус А.А. К истории сложения текста Новгородской первой летописи
// Новгородский исторический сборник. — СПб., 1997. — Вып. 6 (16) / Рос. акад. наук, Институт рос. истории, С.-Петербургский филиал; отв. ред. В.Л. Янин. — C. 3—72; Гиппиус А.А. К характеристике новгородского владычного летописания XII–XIV вв. // Великий Новгород в истории средневековой Европы: К 70-летию В.Л. Янина. – М.: Русские словари, 1999. — С. 345–364; Гимон Т.В. События XI — начала XII в. в новгородских летописях и перечнях // Древнейшие государства Восточной Европы: 2010 год: Предпосылки и пути образования Древнерусского государства / отв. ред. серии Е.А. Мельникова. Институт всеобщей истории РАН. – М.: Рус. Фонд Содействия Образ. и Науке, 2012. — С. 584–706.Бобров А. Г. Новгородские летописи XV века. — СПб. : Дмитрий Буланин, 2000. — 287 с.

By the 2010s, the scholarly consensus which largely had agreed with Shakhmatov's stemma codicum had been all but overturned.
In its place, several new stemmata had been developed and discussed by Müller, Ostrowski, Vilkul, and others. The mid-2000s polemic between Ostrowski and Vilkul revolved around assessing the most likely genetic relationships and contaminations between the various textual witnesses; according to Gippius (2014), 'Vilkul's approach seems the most promising at present.'

Notes

References

Bibliography

Primary sources

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* (assoc. ed. David J. Birnbaum (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, vol. 10, parts 1–3) – This 2003 Ostrowski et al. edition includes an ''interlinear collation'' including the ''five main manuscript witnesses'', as well as a new ''paradosis'' ("a proposed best reading").
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* – digitised version of the mid-15th-century Archaeographic Commission's edition (or "Younger Edition") of the ''Novgorod First Chronicle'' (''Komissionnyy'' NPL)

Literature

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** (review of Plokhy 2006, and a response to criticism)
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Further reading

* Inés García de la Puente
"Beyond the Sea: On the Use of ''за море'' in the ''Primary Chronicle''"
''Ruthenica''. 16. 28–36. 2022.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Textual criticism of the Primary Chronicle


Old East Slavic manuscripts
Old East Slavic chronicles
Old Church Slavonic literature