Primary Chronicle: Encyclopedia II - Primary Chronicle - Two manuscripts

Primary Chronicle - Two manuscripts

The original of the chronicle is lost, and the earliest known copies are the Laurentian codex and the Hypatian codex, so it is difficult to establish the original content of the chronicle, word by word.

The Laurentian codex was copied by the Nizhegorod monk Laurentius for the Prince Dmitry Konstantinovich in 1377. The original text he used was a lost codex compiled for the Grand Duke Mikhail of Tver in 1305. The account continues until 1305, but the years 898-922, 1263-83 and 1288-94 are for some reason omitted. The manuscript was acquired by the famous Count Musin-Pushkin in 1792 and subsequently presented to the Russian National Library in St Petersburg.

The Hypatian codex was discovered at the Ipatiev Monastery of Kostroma by the great Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin. The Hypatian manuscript dates back to the 15th century, but it incorporates much precious information from the lost 12th-century Kiev an and 13th-century Halychian chronicles. The language of this work is Old Church Slavonic with many East Slavisms.

The Primary Chronicle may be one of the most intensively studied texts in history. Numerous monographs and published versions of the chronicle have been made, the earliest known being in 1767. Aleksey Shakhmatov published a pioneering textological analysis of the narrative in 1908. Dmitry Likhachev and other Soviet scholars partly revisited his findings. Their versions attempted to reconstruct the pre-Nestorian chronicle, compiled at the court of Yaroslav the Wise in the mid-11th century.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Two manuscripts", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki