Shakhmatov's Legacy and the Chronicles of Kievan Rus'.

Aleksei Tolochko, Ocherki nachal'noi Rusi (Studies of Early Rus'). 336 pp. Kiev: Laurus, 2015. ISBN-13 978-9662449686.

Tat'iana Vilkul, Litopis i khronograf: Studii z tekstologii domongol's 'kogo kiivs 'kogo litopisannia (The Chronicle and the Chronograph: Textual Criticism Studies of Pre-Mongol Kievan Chronicles and Early Rus' Chronographs). 518 pp. Kiev: Natsional'na akademiia nauk Ukraini, 2015. ISBN-13 978-966075546.

The legacy of Aleksei A. Shakhmatov (1864-1920), a philologist and historian who left a fundamental mark on the field of Russian chronicle studies, has been under careful examination for over a century. His ideas and hypothesis about the early history of Rus' chronicle writing made up a complicated theory, based on the construction of hypothetical layers, or stages, (svody) of the chronicles that preceded the earliest surviving Kievan chronicle, Povest' vremennykh let (PVL). (1) This chronicle, which survives in five main copies dated from 1377 to the 16th century, has customarily been called The Primary Chronicle in English, even though it is precisely this primacy that Shakhmatov questioned. Although Shakhmatov was challenged even by some of his contemporaries--for example, Vasilii M. Istrin, Sergei A. Bugoslavskii, and Nikolai K. Nikol'skii--the core parts of his vision were accepted until the beginning of the present century. (2) Today we are witnessing a renewed interest in textual criticism, and various articles have challenged Shakhmatov's theory. The best-known efforts may be those undertaken by Donald Ostrowski of Harvard University and Aleksei Tolochko of the Center for Kievan Rus' Studies in Kiev. (3) The two monographs under review here grew out of active investigations by the two arguably most dynamic historians from the Center for Kievan Rus' Studies of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences: Tat'iana Vilkul, senior fellow of the Institute of Ukrainian History; and Tolochko, who is also a corresponding member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Law.

As a general rule, every historian using early chronicle sources has had to adopt some kind of stance vis-a-vis Shakhmatov's theories. In particular, he or she must decide whether to believe in the existence of the pre-PVL chronicle layers (svody)--especially in reference to what is called the Nachal'nyi svod (Beginning Compilation). Based on the theory of prior chronicles, Shakhmatov and his followers have claimed that a tradition of chronicle writing existed in Novgorod and Kiev 100 years or so before our earliest text witness--the Primary Chronicle.

Tolochko sharply disagrees with Shakhmatov's thesis of earlier layers underlying the PVL on the grounds that this theory opened a kind of Pandora's box, revealing old chronicle layers wherever one looked. In this way, Tolochko claims, Russian and Soviet scholars have created a national myth about medieval sources that never existed but are treated as if they did. Identifying these layers make it possible to accept the PVL as an authentic witness to each historical incident that it describes. The idea that each historical report, or annal, was supposedly recorded not long after the date cited in the chronicle is used to support the view that the PVL offers a real eyewitness report of the events it describes.

The chronographs form part of Shahmatov's circular argument, which led him to analyze the text of the Novgorod I Chronicle in Its Later Redaction (Novgorodskaia pervaia letopis' mladshaia redaktsiia, hereafter NIml) as derived from the pre-PVL text. This text he designated as Nachal 'nyi svod. Shakhmatov argued that both the PVL and the Nachal 'nyi wWbore evidence that linked them to the chronographs. This argument placed the chronographic tradition in Rus' as already having been established before the 1090s, which was the date of Shakhmatov's hypothetical Nachal 'nyi svod.

Emerging from this discussion is a major new contribution from Tat'iana Vilkul. A diligent writer, she has published several articles on textual criticism of chronicles and other Old Rus' texts. (4) In the monograph under review, she has completed a notable synthesis of her work, tying together the lines of her previous studies. The book is Vilkul's doctoral dissertation, an ambitious investigation that seeks to resolve one of the most important questions concerning Shakhmatov's hypothesis: namely, the problem of the pre-PVL Nachal 'nyi svod. It aims at finally resolving the complex textological problem by comparing the texts of the PVL and the NIml with medieval Rus' chronographs. By using chronographs as control texts for the texts of the Primary Chronicle and NIml, Vilkul argues for a very different dating of the sources.

In her dissertation, Vilkul examines a variety of chronographic borrowings from the PVL, taken either from the chronographs or from the full texts of the Slavonic translations of George Hamartolos or John Malalas. She argues that because the chronographs have survived in many variants and in many redactions dated to different times, it is possible to search for the dates of these chronographic borrowings in the chronicles. Her argument is logical, insofar as it is possible to date the chronicles according to their chronographic borrowings. In her monograph, she examines the chronographic borrowings of the PVL, a Kievan svod from the early 13th century, and the NIml (Shakhmatov's Nachal 'nyi svod) in an attempt to track down their chronographic sources.

The book is divided into five parts. In the first part, Vilkul lays out her methodology and the research literature related to it. In the second part, she clarifies the research history of the Nachal 'nyi "Wand the proto-chronograph behind the Nachal 'nyi svod text. The third part examines the chronographic borrowings of the PVL, comparing them both to chronographs and to their sources, the full Slavonic texts of George Hamartolos and John Malalas. Based on detailed textual criticism, she points out that there is no indication that the PVL used the chronograph as its source; instead, the borrowings from the chronicles of Malalas and Hamartolos reflect the full texts of these authors.

Vilkul demonstrates how the chronographic borrowings from the NIml are mixed in origin; they come both from the Chronograph of the Great Description (Khronograf po velikomu izlozheniiu, hereafter HVT) type and directly from the Slavonic Hamartolos and Malalas. Vilkul shows that there is a contamination from the PVL in the NIml text, which evidently makes the NIml text younger than PVL. Most important, in examining the influence of HVT in MIml, Vilkul points out that it originates in HVI texts dated to the 14th or 15th centuries, which were circulating around Novgorod at that time. Therefore, the NIml text cannot be considered an archetype of the PVL but in fact appeared later and reflects the 14th-or 15th-century chronographs. This analysis and Vilkul's conclusion make a huge contribution to the study of Rus' chronicles, offering a well-argued and thoroughly grounded theory aimed at replacing Shakhmatov's controversial and problematic one.

The fourth part of the book examines the early 13th-century Kievan Svod. (5) Vilkul compares the text with the Suzdalian svod preserved in the Laurentian manuscript of the PVL, concluding that they both derive from a mutual source, which is better reflected in the Laurentian text. She points out how the Kievan svod added large chunks of text to its content, including passages derived from the Chronicle of Hamartolos, the Alexander Romance (Aleksandriia), and The Jewish War of Josephus. As with the PVL, Vilkul finds that these passages are not taken from the chronographs but derived directly from the translated full texts.

Thus the work of Tat'iana Vilkul offers a richer overall picture concerning the mechanisms of chronicle writing in Kiev, in reference both to its early stage, reflected in the PVL, and to its later stage associated with the early 13th-century Kievan svod. Regarding the latter, one of the most interesting findings of Vilkul's study is that many of the eloquent speeches attributed to Kievan rulers were borrowings from literature, mostly the. Alexander Romance. As a result, we can finally reject the idea that these speeches preserve the documents of a prince's office or chancellery. (6) Vilkul's study points out that what appears to be authentic evidence because of its realistic sentiment is actually well-used literary rhetoric taken from the chronicler's library.

In the fifth part of her book, Vilkul examines the relationship between the chronographs and the chronicles. Her most important conclusion is that chronographs began to be compiled only after the writing of letopisi. Based on textual evidence, she argues that the compiling of the chronographs probably began in the first half of the 13th century. The earliest borrowings from the chronographs appear in the Chronicle of Galich, from the second half of the 13th century, and these were derived from the so-called Jewish Chronograph (Iudeiskii khronograf), not even from the HVI type found in NIml, which Shakhmatov regarded as representing the oldest form of the chronographs.

Vilkul cites her sources in great detail, and her study makes a well-grounded argument challenging the old, problematic theories that have dominated the field of Rus' chronicle studies since the turn of the 20th century. Her book provides a coherent and logical explanation for the history of both the chronicle and the chronographic traditions of medieval Rus'. It is of fundamental value to future studies in this field. In this sense, the value of her work is immense; it is innovative research with great international significance.

In his new book, Ocherki nachal'noi Rusi, Aleksei Tolochko lays out his views on the topic of early Rus' history and its sources in a coherent and easily available format, directed at a larger audience. In his preface Tolochko stresses that the book comprises themes of various lectures that he has given and therefore cannot be considered an academic monograph. In some parts, the discussion indeed takes place on a relatively general level, but all in all, the book has adequate references to the literature and can easily fulfill the demands of an academic book.

Tolochko sharply criticizes historians who, in the Russian and Soviet tradition, have investigated history mainly through the prism of the development of the state, where Kievan Rus' has been regarded as the beginning point of "national" history. This approach, to some degree, unfairly weighed down the history of Rus' with heavy expectations and moral evaluations, leaving aside many important historical phenomena, such as the importance of the slave trade to Rus' merchants.

In general, Tolochko presents the early history of Rus' as the story of a loose network of commercial groups that stabilized their hegemony in Eastern Europe from the 9th century on. The book is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the sources that preserve early Rus' history. In the second part, Tolochko discusses how historians have interpreted these sources and claims that the early history of Rus' has been presented by national historians merely as a series of scholarly myths. In the third part, Tolochko replaces these myths with his own interpretation of the history of early Rus' from the beginning of the 9th century until the end of the 10th.

Throughout his academic career, Tolochko has shown a distaste for the overly complicated, hypothetical, and for the most part contradictory theory of A. A. Shakhmatov. He has suggested that we view the Primary Chronicle as the product of Sil'vestr, who wrote the text in 1116. (7) One of Shakhmatov's most important constructs was his view that the PVL was edited soon after its creation in the 1110s. Shakhmatov created a kind of detective story in which historians searched the chronicle for passages that had been altered by later writers, because the ruling princes of Kiev had their own propagandists who rewrote the annals to make political claims that best suited their own purposes.

But how, asks Tolochko, was this editing done? Shakhmatov insisted that each redactor charged with changing the chronicle had the previous editions physically present and selected from them only the passages that best suited the purposes of the moment. Tolochko asks how this could have worked in practice, however. Writers in those days did not have large writing desks where they could spread several manuscripts out in front of them. Would the chronicler rip a few pages away from the manuscript that he wanted to alter, and sew his newly written pages into the manuscript instead, or would he have to make a whole new copy to have these small details changed throughout the chronicle? These questions are relevant, because writing a chronicle was a tedious process that consumed both time and money. Tolochko argues that the lighthearted changes in the chronicles seem to contradict what we know about the ordering and writing of manuscripts in the Middle Ages.

If Sil'vestr knew of a previous chronicle edition, it is likely that he would have used it as his source. Why then, Tolochko asks, does Sil'vestr not mention that he uses this valuable source, as he does in referring to other sources containing much less information, such as the Chronicle of George the Monk and the Apocalyptic Revelation of Pseudo-Methodios? Parchment codices are very durable, and their rates of preservation are excellent. If a copy of Nachal 'nyi svod existed, one would expect it to be in excellent condition and at Sil'vestr's disposal. Yet, as Tolochko notes, the writer of the PVL does not openly state that he used an earlier chronicle. Tolochko also doubts the existence of two competing chronicle traditions, those of the Cave Monastery and the nearby Vydubich Monastery. His view of early chronicle writing is clear: there were no competing chronicles and no prior chronicles. Some written notes, Tolochko admits, probably existed, but there is no reason to assert real chronicle writing before the earliest surviving evidence. Thus we should regard Sil'vestr's chronicle as the first one written in Kiev, in 1116. By the same token, Tolocho argues, since there was no Nachal 'nyi svod to give rise to the NIml, chronicle writing probably began in Novgorod a few decades after the PVL was written in Kiev, in the archbishop's court.

According to this view, at the beginning of the 12th century the Kievans had mainly oral stories concerning the history of the town and the people of Rus'. For example, the grave mounds of Askold, Dir, and Oleg were known then within the living folk tradition, and the chronicler was tempted to tell a story in which all the characters find their places on the pages of the chronicle. Tolochko argues that Sil'vestr more or less invented the story of the Rurikid clans' entry into Kiev, so as to produce a meaningful reconstruction of past events and include these well-known names in his historical scenario.

In writing his history, Sil'vestr faced a serious structural problem, for his chronicle was an annal ordered by the steady flow of years. As the chronicler had no way of knowing the actual years of the earliest events of Rus'ian history, he was forced to invent those as best he could. V. G. Lushin has already established that the compiler of the Primary Chronicle had a taste for symmetry in his chronology when dating the reigns of the early rulers of Rus'. (8) Tolochko here argues that the inspiration and the anchor of these dates were the three copies of the Rus'-Byzantine peace treaties (from 912, 945, and 971) that Sil'vestr had at his disposal, which were attached to his chronicle. Tolochko shows that these treaties could not have been known in Kiev before 1106, and when they reached the city, they inspired our chronicler to include descriptions of these wars in his chronicle. They provided the dates of the wars, or at least the dates of the peace treaties, of Oleg, Igor', and Sviatoslav. These diplomatic sources, Tolochko argues, gave our Kievan chronicler the chronological skeleton for the reigns of the early Rus' rulers. By analyzing the use of indictions in the chronicle, Tolochko concludes that the man behind the chronological apparatus in the Primary Chronicle could not have been anyone other than Hegumen Sil'vestr of Vladimir Monomakh's family monastery.

Also of interest is Tolochko's proposal regarding the chronicler's understanding of the ethnic term "Slavs," which contradicts both archeological evidence and the chronicle's own description of the urheimat of the Slavs in the Danube region, Illyria and Pannonia. Tolochko identifies important Kirillo-Methodian sources that located the Slavs in Illyria and Pannonia. To the Kievan chronicler, Slavonic was a sacred language in which biblical texts could be realized, and Slavs as an ethnic term became significant only within this context. The Slavic tribes described in the chronicle were thus semi-fictitious entities corresponding to the division of the nation of Israel into tribes. The writer could not invent a single tribal name for the population of Novgorod, so they were only "Slavs." The citizenry of Kiev were assigned the same name as the people of Poland--that is, poliane, a term that was supposed to mean people living in open fields--although they were living in the high hills of Kiev and the surrounding woods. Tolochko thus concludes that tribes like the Slaviane of Novgorod and the Poliane of Kiev were fictional constructs developed by the chronicler himself. He needed this construct to show how the people of Kiev were above all other Slavic tribes.

One of the most interesting themes of Tolochko's book deals with the question of the origin of the Rus' state. He notes that when the Primary Chronicle was written, Rus' included only the lands around Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereiaslavl'. Even though Novgorod was clearly the first point of contact for the people of Rus' and their ruling clan, it was not considered as representing Rus'. Instead, only Kiev played this role. Tolochko suggests that Rus' as a state was a later invention, established long after the northern Varangians settled among the Slavs.

The second part of the book opens with a long excursus on the history of the Hudson's Bay Trading Company, which Tolochko compares with Rus' activity on the Volga and Dnieper rivers from the middle of the 8th century through the 9th. He is interested in the organization, which was not a proper state but nonetheless an organization with its own military forces, its own flag and lands. He presents the early history of Rus' as growth from a trading company into a state, describing how the monetary crisis influenced the birth of the Kievan state. A silver crisis in the east caused the flow of dirhams to drop dramatically in the middle of the 1 Oth century. The collapse of the eastern trade had dramatic consequences for Rus'. On the Volga route, the Rus' organizations broke up and disappeared from the sources. They faded away, whereas the Dnieper Rus' survived and grew stronger, because their commercial activities were not aimed directly at the Abbassid caliphate but rather at Byzantium's silk market. This focus then strengthened Kiev's position among the other Rus' settlements, which were also caught up in the economic crisis caused by the silver crisis. The trading company became a dynastic state by the year 1000, a change that brought to power the dynasty of Prince Vladimir. After that, he and his heirs blocked outsiders' access to power.

To build a coherent picture of the formation of the Scandinavian-based power along the Dnieper River, Tolochko erases historical details that do not fit the bigger picture. Therefore he discusses the question of Khazar authority quite thoroughly. He deals with one of the most persistent controversies on the nature of early Rus' power: that is, whether or not the Kievan Rus' can be considered as the continuation of the Khazar khaganate. This very actively and often-presented hypothesis Tolochko rejects outright, labeling it just another fictitious invention of historians. He prefers to use the word konunganat in referring to Rus' power. Tolochko's study presents Kiev as very Scandinavian from its early history. From archeological evidence we know that settlement in Kiev emerged around the 880s, first on the high riverbank hills. At the beginning of the 1 Oth century, the settlement reached the shore of the Dnieper River, an area today known as Podol'e. This new settlement was oriented toward the river, and its houses made it remarkably different. Around the same time, the flow of dirhams reached the town.

Tolochko does not believe that the Khazars had any significant settlement in Kiev. He presents the case of the so-called Kievan letter, a Hebrew-language letter, in which the Jewish community of Kiev asks for help to ransom one of its members. He casts doubt on its dating to the 930s and points out that there is no evidence that the Jews in Kiev were Khazar in origin. (9) As evidence, he notes that the letter uses monetary terms that were known only 100 years later among Western Ashkenazi Jews. He concludes that there were no Khazar settlements in early Kiev and that the letter belongs to a community of 12th-century Ashkenazi Jews who originated in the West (289-96).

The starting point for the argument in favor of the Rus' khaganate is the enigmatic reference to Rhos in the Bertinian Annal sub anno 839, where the chronicle mentions people who call themselves Rhos arriving in Ingelheim at the court of Louis the Pious. (10) A brief survey of the origin of these people led to their identification as Swedes. When they were asked who their chieftain was, they answered that he was a khan, chacanus. This is the key source that has led to theories of how Rus' power in Kiev was strongly linked to the Khazar khaganate in the 9th century. Tolochko, however, rejects such far-reaching interpretations, merely suggesting that individual Rhos traders may have been in the service of the Khazar khan, in which case they would in principle acknowledge the khan's supreme power, something that in practice meant no more than acknowledging that the king of England had power over the Hudson's Bay Trading Company (133). According to Tolochko, Kiev was in practice totally independent from the Khazar realm (198).

The overriding message of Tolochko's monograph is that historians have distorted the history of the 9th- and 10th-century Rus' by presenting them as a people belonging to an early state. Instead, Tolochko argues throughout his book that we are speaking, instead, about a loose group of people who identified themselves as Rus' but acted independently and made no dynastic claims before the end of the 10th century. He sees all the early attacks on Constantinople as typical Viking-type campaigns undertaken by individual groups seeking the riches of Constantinople by trading or looting. They were based on no political program and not organized by any state. In contrast to the portrayal in the Primary Chronicle, which reflects Sil'vestr's interpretation of the past, Kiev did not have a ruling dynasty at that time. Tolochko sees the 860 attack on Constantinople as one of those great Viking expeditions: it lasted a few years, but after it ended, the men returned to their homes without leaving any permanent mark on the lands they had raided. Thus Tolochko argues that until the end of the 10th century there was no such thing as a Rus' state, only several independent groups who identified themselves as Rus'. At around the end of the 10th century, this independence came to an end through the birth of the early Kievan state.

As for Sil'vestr, the writer of the Primary Chronicle, Tolochko says that there was no way for him to know what life for the Rus' was like during the 9th and 10th centuries. The Primary Chronicle describes the world of early Rus' as one in which Kievan princes waged war against their neighbors and subjugated their own territories. This world, according to Tolochko, was the reality in Sil'vestr's own day but not for the Swedish Vikings trading along the Dnieper route to Constantinople, who operated more like an international trading company. The known 10th-century Byzantine sources, most of all De administrando imperii of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus and the three abovementioned Rus'-Byzantine peace treaties included in the Primary Chronicle confirm this view.

While arguing that Kiev was not a territorial state during the 10th century, Tolochko goes on to suggest that it was Sil'vestr's own idea to present the primacy of Kiev over other Rus' towns. The idea of Kiev having a primary position among Rus' towns was nowhere openly expressed before the famous Testament of Iaroslav in 1054. Most probably, the thought of a strictly ordered hierarchy of towns and princes came even later, with the triumvirate of Iziaslav, Sviatopolk, and Vsevolod. After the Council of Liubech in 1097, this thought was well established and put into practice and therefore would have been a familiar idea to Sil'vestr. As a result, Tolochko argues, Sil'vestr introduced the primacy of Kiev in his chronicle over that of Chernigov and Pereiaslavl'.

Tolochko pays great attention to the Rus'-Byzantine treaties in examining the inner structure of Rus'. He argues that the terminology used in the Greek documents gradually enhanced Rus'ian awareness of political hierarchy. It is obvious from the treaties that they were approved by a great host of the Rus' people, who significantly bear Scandinavian names. However, the Greek documents imply that this group of people had authorities, the bright princes (lamprotatoi archoutes), and that they had a land of their own (Rosia). According to Tolochko, this Greek vocabulary did not reflect reality. But little by little the vocabulary did affect the people of Rus', as they became more familiar with the political ideas of Byzantium--that is, the possibility of having a ruler and a land of their own.

The books by Tat'iana Vilkul and Aleksei Tolochko offer us two examples of how Shakhmatov's legacy is gradually crumbling, at least among some circles. It is obvious that Vilkul's study is likely to generate much comment in the future; indeed, not all responses are as favorable as mine. It comes as no surprise that this work has so powerfully emerged in Kiev, where, no doubt, the present-day situation and political tensions have given way to new evaluations of the past. On the one hand, we have a thorough textological survey by a philologist and, on the other, a new interpretation of the whole history of early Rus', which we actually should not call a "state" anymore. Of course, these books go hand in hand. They show how the careful study of the sources influence our historical interpretations. But the opposite is also true, for it is obvious that the need to reevaluate a national history also affects textual criticism of the sources.

(1) Shakhmatov is the founding father of the textological study of the Russian chronicles, whose most influential works were Razyskaniia o drevneishikh russkikh letopisnykh svodakh (St. Petersburg: M. A. Aleksandrov, 1908); and Povest' vremennykh let: Vvodnaia chast'. Tekst. Primechaniia (Petrograd: Izdaniia Arkheograficheskoi komissii, 1916). His studies have been reprinted in, e.g., A. A. Shakhmatov, Istoriia russkogo letopisaniia, 1: Povest' vremennykh let i drevneishie russkie letopisnye svody, pt. 2: Rannee russkoe letopisanie XI-XII vv. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2003). See also S. Ia. Senderovich, "Metod Shakhmatova: Rannee letopisanie i problema nachala russkoi istoriografii," in Iz istorii russkoi kul'tury, 1: Drevniaia Rus', ed. A. D. Koshelev (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 2000).

(2) For the most recent updating of the field, see O. N. Krylova et al., eds., Akademik A. A. Shakhmatov: Zhizn', tvorchestvo, nauchnoe nasledie (k 150-Letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia) (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2015). See also D. S. Likhachev, Tekstologiia: Na materiale russkoi literatury X-XVII vv. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1962, reprinted 1983, 2001). For a brief scholarly history of textological studies, see Donald Ostrowski's review in Kritika 9 4 (2008): 939-49.

(3) Aleksei Tolochko, "O zaglavii Povesti vremennykh let," Ruthenica, no. 5 (2006): 248-51; Oleksiy P. Tolochko, "Christian Chronology, Universal History, and the Origin of Chronicle Writing in Rus'," in Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European Periphery: Early History Writing in Northern, East-Central, and Western Europe (c. 1070-1200), ed. Ildar H. Garipzanov (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 206-7; Donald Ostrowski, "Introduction" to The Povest' vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis, 3 vols., ed. Ostrowski and David J. Birnbaum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2003), 1:lxi-lxiii; Ostrowski, "Scribal Practices and Copying Probabilities in the Transmission of the Text of the Povest' vremennykh let," Palaeoslavica 13, 2 (2005): 48-77; Ostrowski, "The Nachal'nyj svod Theory and the Povest' vremennyx let," Russian Linguistics 31 (2007): 269-308; Ostrowski, "Pagan Past and Christian Identity in the Primary Chronicle," in Historical Narratives and Christian Identity, 229-53.

(4) The impressive list of Vilkul's articles is too long to be repeated here in its totality, but the most important ones concerning this subject were published in Palaeoslavica between 2003 and 2012.

(5) Vilkul accepts Aleksei Tolochko's argument about dating the Kievan svod after the death of Rurik Rostislavich, around 1212. See his "O vremeni sozdaniia Kievskogo svoda 1200 g. Ruthenica, no. 5 (2006): 73-87.

(6) Simon Franklin stated that "in a society where routine record keeping and archival habits were thin, the chronicles were the cumulative written record of the disputes, negotiations, and agreements of the Rus elite," in his Writing, Society, and Culture in Early Rus', c. 950-1300 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 172. But how was this supposed to be done? Some Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian scholars have suggested that the chronicles really did include princely archives in the form of direct speeches. See, e.g., B. A. Rybakov, Drevniaia Rus': Skazaniia. Byliny. Letopisi (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 316-36; V.T. Pashuto, Vneshniaiapolitika Drevnei Rusi (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), 40-41, 156-84, 242, 253, 260; A. V. Iurasovskii, "Gramoty XI-serediny XIV v. v sostave russkikh letopisei," Istoriia SSSR, no. 4 (1982); V. Iu. Franchuk, Kievskaia letopis': Sostav i istochniki v lingvisticheskom osveshchenii (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1986), 109-54; N. F. Kodiar, Diplomatiia Iuzhnoi Rusi (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2003), 6-7, 291-97; and A. V. Maiorov, Rus ', Vizantiia i Zapadnaia Evropa: Iz istorii vneshnepoliticheskikh i kul 'turnykh sviazei XII-XIII vv. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bui an in, 2011), 37.

(7) Tolochko, "O zaglavii Povesti vremennykh let," 248-51; Tolochko, "Christian Chronology, Universal History," 206-7. Other scholars have not accepted this argument unanimously, since the identity of the writer is a relatively complicated issue, not least when considering that the PVL text itself gives altogether three different names for the writer of the chronicle. This group includes Nestor, Vasilii, and Sil'vestr, but other candidates have also been suggested, such as the monk Grigorii (e.g., Viktor K. Ziborov, "Monakh Grigorii--avtor 'Povesti vremennykh let,'" in Akademik A. A. Shakhmatov, 272-78.

(8) V. G. Lushins arguments were published in three separate articles ("Nekotorye osobennosti khronologicheskoi segmentatsii rannikh izvestii Povesti vremennykh let"; "Simmetrichnost' letopisnykh dat IX-nachala XI v."; and "Istoriko-arkheologicheskie zapiski"), all in Istorikoarkheologicheskie zapiski, ed. E. P. Tokareva (Zimovniki: Zimovnicheskii kraevedcheskii muzei, 2010), 1:22-44.

(9) Although there is a clear indication that someone speaking Old Turkic read the letter at some point, because the letter includes a Turkic rovas inscription meaning "I have read it." Marcel Erdal has, however, suggested that the letter could also be Donau-Bulgarian in origin ("Hie Khazar Language," in The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, ed. Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, and Andras Rona-Tas [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 98).

(10) The Latin entry from the Bertinian Annal sub anno 839 is printed and translated in English in Wladyslaw Duczko's Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 12:16-17.

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Title Annotation:	Ocherki nachal'noi Rusi, Litopis i khronograf: Studii z tekstologii domongol's 'kogo kiivs 'kogo litopisannia
Author:	Isoaho, Mari
Publication:	Kritika
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Jun 22, 2018
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