The Tale of Igor's Campaign

Ivan Bilibin's illustration to the tale.

The Tale of Igor's Campaign (Old East Slavic: Слово о плъку Игоревѣ, Slovo o plŭku Igorevě; Modern Russian: Слово о полку Игореве, Slovo o polku Igoreve; Ukrainian: Слово о полку Ігоревім, Slovo o polku Ihorevim) is an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language. The title is also occasionally translated as The Song of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of Igor's Campaign, and The Lay of the Host of Igor.

The poem gives an account of a failed raid of Igor Svyatoslavich (d. 1202). The authenticity of the poem is disputed. Prevailing current opinion is that the poem is authentic and dates to the medieval period (late 12th century).[1]

The Tale of Igor's Campaign was adapted by Alexander Borodin into one of the great classics of Russian opera. Entitled Prince Igor, it was first performed in 1890.

Contents

Argument

800th anniversary of the masterpiece on the 1985 USSR commemorating stamp

The Tale has been compared to other epic poems including The Song of Roland, the Daredevils of Sasun, and The Song of the Nibelungs.[2]

The plot of this classic work is based on a failed raid of Kniaz Igor Svyatoslavich, Prince of Novgorod-Seversk (of the Chernigov principality of ancient Rus') against the Polovtsians (Cumans) living in the southern part of the Don region in 1185.

Other Rus' historical figures are mentioned, including the bard Boyan, the princes Vseslav of Polotsk, Yaroslav Osmomysl of Halych, and Vsevolod the Big Nest of Suzdal. The author appeals to the warring Rus' princes, pleading for unity in the face of the constant threat from the Turkic East.

An interesting aspect of the text is its mix of Christianity and ancient Slavic religion. Igor's wife Yaroslavna famously invokes natural forces from the walls of Putyvl. Christian motifs present along with depersonalised pagan gods in the form of artistic images. Another aspect, which sets the book apart from contemporary Western epics, are its numerous and vivid descriptions of nature, and the role which nature plays in human lives.

Discovery and publication

The only manuscript of the Tale, claimed to be dated to the 15th century, was discovered in 1795, in the library of a Yaroslavl monastery, where the first library and school in Russia had been established back in the 12th century. The monks sold it to a local landowner, Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, as a part of a collection of ten texts. He realised the value of the book, and made a transcription for the empress Catherine the Great in 1795 or '96, and published it in 1800 with the help of leading Russian paleographers of the time, Alexei Malinovsky and Nikolai Bantysh-Kamensky. The original manuscript was claimed to have burned in the great Moscow fire of 1812 (during the Napoleonic occupation), together with Aleksei's entire library.

The release of this historical work into scholarly circulation created quite a stir in Russian literary circles, because the tale represented the earliest Slavonic writing without any mixture of Church Slavonic. Ukrainian scholars in the Austrian Empire declared, upon linguistic analysis, that the document contained transitional language between a) earlier fragments of the language of Rus' propria (the region of Chernihiv, eastward through Kiev, and into Halych) and, b) later fragments from the Halych-Volynian era of this same region in the centuries immediately following the writing of the document.

Vladimir Nabokov produced a translation into English in 1960. Other notable editions include the standard Soviet edition, prepared with an extended commentary, by the academician Dmitry Likhachev.

Authenticity debate

According to the majority view, the poem is a composition of the late 12th century, perhaps composed orally and fixed in written form at some point during the 13th century. Some scholars consider the possibility that the poem in its current form is a national Romanticist compilation and rearrangement of several authentic sources. The thesis of the poem being a complete forgery has been proposed in the past but is widely discredited based on the poem's language being closer to authentic medieval East Slavic than practicable by a late 18th century forger before the discovery of birch bark documents in 1951.

One of the crucial points of the authenticity controversy is the relationship between Slovo and Zadonschina, an unquestionably authentic poem, preserved in six medieval copies and created in the 15th century to glorify Dmitri Donskoi's victory over Mamai in the Battle of Kulikovo. It is evident that there are almost identical passages in both texts where only the personal names are different. The traditional point of view considers Zadonschina to be a late imitation, with Slovo being its pattern. The forgery version claims vice versa that the Igor's Tale is written using Zadonschina as a source. Recently, Jakobson's and Zaliznyak's analyses show that the passages of Zadonschina with counterparts in Slovo differ from the rest of the text by a number of linguistic parameters, whereas this is not so for Igor's Tale. This fact is taken as evidence of Slovo being original with respect to Zadonschina.

Current dialectology upholds Pskov and Polotsk as the two cities where the Tale was most likely written. Numerous persons have been proposed as its authors, including Prince Igor and his brothers.

Early reactions

When the first modern edition of the Tale was published, questions about its authenticity were raised, mostly on account of its language. Suspicion was also fueled by contemporary fabrications (for example, the "Songs of Ossian" which were actually written by James Macpherson). Today, majority opinion accepts the authenticity of the text, based on similarity of its language with that of other texts discovered after the Tale.

Proposed as forgers were Aleksei Musin-Pushkin himself, or the Russian manuscript forgers Anton Bardin and Alexander Sulakadzev (Bardin was publicly exposed as the forger of four other copies of 'Slovo'). One of the notable early proponents of the falsification theory was the notorious journalist and orientalist Josef Sienkowski.

Soviet period

The problem was politicized in the Soviet Union: any attempts to question the authenticity of 'Slovo' (for example, those by French Slavist André Mazon or by Russian historian Alexander Zimin) as well as the non-standard interpretations, based on Turkic lexis, such as proposed by Oljas Suleimenov (who considered Igor's Tale to be an authentic text), were officially condemned. Mazon and Zimin's views were opposed, e.g., by Roman Jakobson.

Olzhas Suleimenov in 1975 challenged the mainstream view of Tale in his book Az i Ya. Suleymenov's research is claimed to reveal that Tale cannot be completely authentic since it appears to have been rewritten in the 16th century.[3][4] Az i Ya was followed by criticism from mainstream Slavists, including Dmitri Likhachev,[5] and Turkologists as well,[6] qualifying Suleymenov's etymological and paleography conjectures as amateurish.

Recent views

The field of Igor Svyatoslavich's battle with the Polovtsy, by Viktor Vasnetsov.

Historians and philologists, however, still continue to question the tale's authenticity, due to an uncharacteristic modern nationalistic sentiment (cf. Panslavism) contained therein (Omeljan Pritsak inter alia).

The Tale is sometimes considered to have an agenda similar to that of Kraledvorsky Manuscript. For instance, in his article "Was Iaroslav of Halych really shooting sultans in 1185?" and in his book Josef Dobrovsky and the origins of the Igor's Tale (2003) Harvard historian Edward L. Keenan states that Igor's Tale is a fake, written by Czech scholar Josef Dobrovsky. It has also been suggested that the Tale is a recompilation and manipulation of several authentic sources put together similarly to Lönnrot's Kalevala.[7]

A 2004 book by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak analyzes the arguments of both sides and concludes that the forgery theory is virtually impossible.[8] Only in the late 20th century, when hundreds of bark documents were unearthed in Novgorod, was it demonstrated that the puzzling passages and words from the tale actually existed in everyday speech of the 12th century, although they didn't find their way to chronicles and other written documents. Zaliznyak concludes that no 18th century scholar could possibly imitate the subtle grammatical and syntactical features that are present in the known text. Nor could Dobrovsky, Keenan's candidate, fulfill such a task, as his views on Slavic grammar were strikingly different from the system found in Igor's Tale.

Juri Lotman's opinion supports the view of authenticity of the Tale, based on the absence of a number of semiotic elements in the Russian Classicist literary tradition before the publication of the Tale, notably "Russian Land ("русская земля")" that becomes popular only in the 19th century, so a presumed forger of the 1780s-1790s could not use such elements while composing the text.[9]

Orality

Robert Mann (1989, 2005) argues that all the leading studies of the Tale have been mistaken in their view that the Tale is the work of an ingenious poet working in a written tradition. Mann maintains that there is no substantial evidence that the Tale was first composed in writing, and he points to an array of evidence suggesting that the Tale first circulated as an oral epic song for several decades before it was eventually written down - most likely in the early 13th century.

Among his evidence are the opening lines of the Tale as they appear to read at face value: "Was it not fitting, brothers, to begin with the olden words of the heroic tales about the campaign of Igor..." That is, the narrator has begun according to the strains of oral epic tales about Igor's defeat that are already old and familiar. Mann has found numerous new parallels to the text of the Tale in wedding songs, magical incantations, bylinas and other Old Russian sources. Mann was the first researcher to point out unique textual parallels in a rare version of the Tale of the Battle against Mamai (Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche) published by N.G. Golovin in 1835, which contains what Mann claims is the earliest known redaction of the Skazanie, a redaction that scholars posited but could not locate.

Using his findings in byliny and Old Russian sources, Mann has attempted to reconstruct the basic outlines of an early Russian song about the conversion of the Kievan State. Mann believes that this early conversion cycle left its imprint on several passages of the Tale, including the motif sequence in which the pagan Div warns the Tmutorokan idol that Igor's army is approaching.[10][11]

Editions and translations

Notes

  1. ↑ The poem itself proposes to cover the tale "from the elder Vladímir up to our contemporary Ígoŕ" (отъ стараго Владимера до нынѣшняго Игоря), indicating composition before Igor's death in 1202.
  2. ↑ Likhachev. "'Слово о полку Игореве'", p. 16.
  3. ↑ (Russian) Сон Святослава. Татарская электронная библиотека.
  4. ↑ (Russian) Царь Додон и Геродот. Татарская электронная библиотека.
  5. ↑ (Russian) Likhachev, Dmitri S. "'Слово о полку Игореве' в интерпретации О.Сулейменова" in Русская литература (Russian Literature). Leningrad: Nauka, 1985, p. 257.
  6. ↑ (Russian) Baskakov, Nikolay A. "Слово о полку Игореве" in Памятники литературы и искусства XI-XVII веков (Literary Monuments and Art in the Eleventh to Seventeenth Centuries). Moscow, 1978, pp. 59-68.
  7. ↑ (Russian) "Проблема подлинности 'Слова о полку Игореве' и 'Ефросин Белозерский'" ("The Problem of the Authenticity of 'A Word about the Leader Igorev' and 'Efrosin Belozerskij'"). Acta Slavica Iaponica, Issue: 22, 2005, pp. 238-297.
  8. ↑ (Russian) Zaliznyak, Andrey. Слово о полку Игореве: взгляд лингвиста (Языки Славянской). Moscow: Kultura Publishing, 2004.
  9. ↑ Ю. М. Лотман «СЛОВО О ПОЛКУ ИГОРЕВЕ» И ЛИТЕРАТУРНАЯ ТРАДИЦИЯ XVIII — НАЧАЛА XIX в.
  10. ↑ See Mann, Robert; Lances Sing: A Study of the Old Russian Igor Tale. Slavica: Columbus, 1989.
  11. ↑ Mann, Robert. The Igor Tales and Their Folkloric Background. Jupiter, FL: The Birchbark Press of Karacharovo, 2005.

Further reading

See also

External links