The Tale of Igor's Campaign: Encyclopedia II - The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Authenticity

The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Authenticity

The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Early reactions

When the first modern edition of the Tale was published, questions about its authenticity have risen, mostly centered on 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.

It should be noted that the authenticity of the monument hasn't been questioned by any professional linguist. According to the majority view, such a perfect imitation of 12th-century language could not be practicable before the discovery of birch bark documents in 1951, let alone two centuries earlier. Historians and journalists, however, continued to question the tale's authenticity well into the 20th century.

The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Modern developments

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. However, being a persecuted point of view does not imply its correctness. Mazon and Zimin's views were opposed, e.g., by Roman Jakobson, the most reputable Slavist of the 20th century, whose works were also banned from publishing in the USSR.

One of the crucial points of the 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 evidence of Slovo being original with respect to Zadonschina.

The Tale of Igor's Campaign - Recent views

Although many scholars uphold the authenticity of the work, some challenge it. 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) the Harvard Professor of History Edward Keenan states that Igor's Tale is a fake, written by Czech scholar Josef Dobrovsky.

A recent book by a Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak (2004) analyzes the arguments of both sides and concludes that the forgery version is virtually impossible. He also revokes some of Jakobson's linguistic arguments for the authenticity of the text. 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 candidature, fulfil such a task, as his views on Slavic grammar were strikingly different from the system found in Igor's Tale.

As Vladimir Nabokov put it, there is not a single work in world literature that could approach the Lay by sheer range and complexity of its prose rhythms. 18th-century Russia had neither the scholars to understand Old East Slavic so perfectly, nor the great poets capable of creating such a masterpiece.

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