Nazarii Nazarov Pověstʼ vremennyh lět as the literary corpus of Kyivan Rus’

The oldest chronicle of the Kyivan Rus, preserved under the conventional title The Tale of Bygone Years (Pověst' vremennyh lět), has almost always been the focus of attention for historians, but much less often for linguists and literary scholars. Therefore, its composition as a literary monument remains not fully researched, and the status of individual episodes is uncertain. In the present article, the author attempts to carry out a comprehensive study of various witnesses to the text of the chronicle, which convey its composition at different stages of formation. Finally, after comparing independent evidence (the Latin translation by Jan Dlugosz, the outline by Jan Binwilski, Novgorod 1st Chronicle, Radziwiłł and Hypatian manuscripts), the author concludes that the chronicle was the result of the gradual integration of independent corpora of texts – historical, documentary, legal, literary, religious, including those with pagan motifs – and thus can be considered a summa textorum of Kievan Rus of the pre-Mongol period. The list of episodes of the chronicle up to the 1070s was studied (up to this moment, common episodes can be traced in the Novgorod and Kyivan chronicles) at various hypothetical stages of its formation. As a result of the comparison of textual layers within the annals, the hypothesis is substantiated that to explain each stage of formation it is necessary to operate with units smaller than the entire chronicle compilation. Independent functioning of compositionally completed episodes should be assumed. So each episode deserves to be explored in terms of its individual textual history and aesthetic features. The article proposes to reassess the literary heritage of Kyivan Rus' and to talk not about a unique chronicle, but about a substantial library of texts, united into one corpus at a certain stage of the existence of literature of Kyivan Rus. The proposed theory is proposed to be called a dynamic model of compilation of the chronicle text.