Life of Alexander Nevsky

Life of Alexander Nevsky (Russian: Житие Александра Невского, Zhitiye Aleksandra Nevskovo) is a Russian literary work of the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

For the 16th-century work, see Life of Alexander Nevsky (illuminated manuscript).
Life of Alexander Nevsky
Russian: Житие Александра Невского
LanguageOld East Slavic and Old Church Slavonic

It describes the life and achievements of Alexander Nevsky, a Russian ruler and a military leader, who defended the northern borders of Rus against the Swedish invasion, defeated the Teutonic knights at the Lake Chud in 1242 and paid a few visits to Batu Khan to protect the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality from the Khazar raids. The work is filled with 'patriotic spirit' and achieves a 'high degree of artistic expressiveness' in its description of Alexander's heroic deeds and those of his warriors.

Textual history

Iurii Begunov (1965), basing himself on thirteen stand-alone manuscripts,[1] dated the first redaction of the Life of Alexander Nevsky to the 1280s, hypothesising that it had been composed in the Rozhdestvensky (Nativity) monastery in Vladimir-on-Kliazma.[2] Begunov reasoned that during this recension, a passage was added mentioning that metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev declared that "the sun has set in the Suzdalian Land" at Nevsky's funeral.[2]

According to scholar Donald Ostrowski (2008), the original text of the Life of Alexander Nevsky was a secular military narrative, written by a layman in the late 13th century, who made no mention of "the Suzdalian Land", nor of "the Rus' Land".[1] Some hagiographic motifs would be inserted by a cleric a century later, but still no reference to "Suzdalian/Rus' Land".[1] Ostrowski argued that the earliest redaction of the Life should be dated to the mid-15th century, because it used the Novgorod First Chronicle Older Recension as a source.[1] It would be this editor who added an allusion to Volodimer I of Kiev's conversion of "the Rus' Land", and two mentions of "the Suzdalian Land", one of them the setting sun passage.[1]

References
  1. Halperin 2022, p. 55.
  2. Halperin 2022, p. 54.

Bibliography
  • Halperin, Charles J. (2022). The Rise and Demise of the Myth of the Rus' Land (PDF). Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. p. 107. ISBN 9781802700565.
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