The Igor Tale : A Bohemian Rhapsody?

Edward L. Keenan, Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor´ Tale. xxiii + 541 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0916458962. $49.95.

The Igor´ Tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve, also transated as The Tale of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of the Host of Igor, etc.; henceforth IT) is a small text that has generated a big noise. No pre-Pushkinian work has stimulated a comparable mass of scholarly and sub-scholarly publications (not to mention the no-less-gushing stream of amateur and often downright crackpot effusions and ruminations). Indeed, if it were possible to calculate a ratio of pages of secondary literature per word of original text, then the IT might come close to rivaling even Aleksandr Sergeevich himself. Now the noted "Muscovist" Edward L. Keenan has added another 500-plus pages to the pile in order to present and substantiate a novel hypothesis on the IT's origin and author.

Arguments about the IT's origin and authorship are, of course, not new in themselves. The work is unsigned and undated, and as such has attracted speculation ever since it was first published in 1800. For most, it was and remains an anonymous medieval (late 12th- or early 13th-century) masterpiece: obscure in places, perhaps not preserved in pristine condition, but nevertheless a crucial—the crucial—witness to pre-Mongol secular literary culture that can stand proud alongside its equivalents in Western Europe. Others are frustrated by anonymity and seek to trace the medieval author. Candidates have included: a knizhnik by the name of Timofei; a bard called Mitusa; another bard, called Khodyna; the Chernigovan voevoda Ol´stin Oleksich; the Kievan boiar and chronicler Petr Borislavich; Prince Igor´ Sviatoslavich himself; and Prince Sviatoslav Vsevolodovich of Kiev.¹

Others have considered that this entire enterprise is misconceived: not only because none of these attributions can be supported with serious evidence, but because the scholars who propose them have been looking in the wrong place, in entirely the wrong epoch. Keenan places himself firmly on the side of the "skeptics," for whom the IT is a product not of the Middle Ages but of post-Enlightenment pre-romanticism, not of the 12th century but of the 18th. Authors proposed by the "skeptics" include: the archimandrite of the Monastery of the Savior in Iaroslavl´, Ioil´ Bykovskii; Nikolai Bantysh-Kamenskii, co-editor of the 1800 edition;² Count Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, ostensibly the erstwhile owner of the subsequently lost original manuscript;³ and even Musin-Pushkin's wife.⁴ Keenan's candidate, as the title of his book implies, is the brilliant Bohemian scholar Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829). For previous scholarly "skeptics" (principally André Mazon and Aleksandr Zimin, but to some extent also John Fennell), the main point was to demonstrate the late provenance of the text. The precise identification of the author was a secondary issue. By contrast, in Keenan's book the identification of Dobrovský as the author is a vital part of his case for an 18th-century dating of the text.

Before we survey his arguments, let us begin at the end, with a narrative summary of his main conclusions.

Keenan reconstructs the course of events approximately as follows. From August 1792 on, Josef Dobrovský spent several months in Russia, engaged in the intensive study of early manuscripts. During this period, he "composed some poetical fragments in the style of the medieval Slavic narrations that he had been reading in the manuscript collections" (418). There is no suggestion that he intended to deceive anybody, or to pass off his fragments as authentically ancient, or even to publish them at all. This was merely an exercise in erudite mimicry, not a plot to disseminate a forgery. He sent the pieces—or some of them—to the writer and courtier Ivan Elagin. Elagin then quoted the opening fragment in an addition...