Textual criticism of the Primary Chronicle

In 1981, Donald Ostrowski identified 5 'most serious problems' in the publication of the Povest' vremennykh let that were unresolved at the time:[2]

1. 'which manuscript copies to use as witnesses to the PVL;
2. whether to publish the PVL as a separate text or as part of another chronicle;
3. which principles of textual criticism to employ in editing the text;
4. which variants from other copies to put in the critical apparatus; and
5. whether to be content with a modified extant copy or to strive for a dynamic critical text.'[2]

The first time the PVL was published was in 1767, as part of a faulty Radziwiłł Chronicle edition.[2] Attempts to publish the PVL as part of another chronicle in 1804 and 1812 were abandoned.[2] 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).[8] 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.[9] 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.[9] 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.[9]

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.[9] 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.[9] 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.[9] However, because they presented confusing or contradictory information about the interrelationships between the early copies and the autograph, neither attempt was successful.[10]

Russian scholar Aleksey Shakhmatov (1864–1920) was a pioneer in textual criticism of the PVL, doing much ground-breaking work,[lower-alpha 3] although his reconstruction has been repeatedly criticised for its subjectivity.[5] 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.[12] Ukrainian scholar Serhii Buhoslavskyi (1941)[13] advanced a more systematic approach, but his work was lost during World War II and only rediscovered decades later.[14][5]

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."[15] 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 [the Laurentian text] has it.'[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]

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[5][19] by the publication of a new modern German translation by Ludolf Müller in 2001,[5] an interlinear collation of the six main copies and a paradosis by Ostrowski et al. in 2003,[5] [20] and various early 2000s publications by Oleksey Tolochko and Tat'iana Vilkul from the Centre of Kievan Rus' Studies (Ukrainian: Сектор досліджень історії Київської Русі) in Kyiv.[20] These early-21st-century publications were the first to challenge the core parts of Shakhmatov's views, which had until then been widely accepted.[19] Isoaho (2018) summarised Tolochko's critique as follows:

Tolochko sharply disagrees with Shakhmato'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 [as if] the PVL offers a real eyewitness report.[21]

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.[22]

Stemma codicum of the PVL according to the Shakhmatov school[41][42]

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 svods 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.[43][44][45][46]