Historians and Textology

At long last, after more than a 40-year wait, we have before us historian A. A. Zimin's book arguing that Slovo o polku Igoreve (the Igor´ Tale for short in English, herein abbreviated IT) is not an authentic medieval work.¹ In the 1960s, he was permitted to publish only pieces of his case and under unfavorable conditions. Our pleasure at finally seeing his book is all the greater in that this is not simply the draft he exhibited to selected people in 1963 but is roughly twice the size of it and shows the development of his ideas over the remainder of his life (born in 1920, he lived until 1980). The book as we now have it includes responses to his opponents and further evidence that he collected.

No editor is named on the title page, but the author's widow, V. G. Zimina, and the scholar O. V. Tvorogov are credited on the copyright page as the responsible editors. She contributed an introductory "To the Reader" and he an "About the Book of A. A. Zimin." Tvorogov rightly stresses that the many years of work on the subject by this distinguished historian of medieval Russia produced an original thesis and a wealth of material that deserve to be published, even though long after his death. Tvorogov calls it a "moral duty" to place the book before the scholarly world, which needs to know it in order to continue an informed debate about the authenticity of IT. The press run was only 800 copies, and indeed this highly technical book is not aimed at a popular audience; we could hardly expect it to become a bestseller.

Tvorogov's principle was to present Zimin's book with very little editorial intervention. He added only a minimum of footnotes (in square brackets and unnumbered), mostly with the purpose of citing a few recent publications relevant to particular points, not attempting a complete updated bibliography. He also deemed it "not correct" for him to polemicize with the author in his own book, and so he just noted quietly at the end of his brief introduction that he himself remains unconvinced and continues to believe Slovo o polku Igoreve is a genuine medieval work (7). All this is an admirably fair approach for an editor to take. Presumably, it gives us Zimin's book pretty much as he wrote it.

The publisher's blurb—echoing Tvorogov's words—asserts that Zimin was the "best-founded" (samyi osnovatel´nyi) of the skeptics about IT. If we measure by the sheer weight of materials, this was certainly true in his time. But, of course, we must examine his use of that evidence carefully and evaluate his conclusions. The book, to be sure, is so densely packed with textological details that a reader could easily get lost in them, and to write a complete review of the arguments would require another book as large as or larger than Zimin's. I must resist my temptation to comment on nearly every sentence and instead attempt an overview while discussing sufficient examples to illustrate the monograph's qualities.

In order of composition, Zimin's was the second of three books that have challenged the genuineness of IT. The other two are André Mazon's Le Slovo d'Igor (1940) and Edward L. Keenan's Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor´ Tale (2003).² Let it be said immediately that despite the great amount of material and the painstaking study to which A. A. Zimin subjected it, the result is very disappointing. As a historian he appears to have lacked expertise in fields most relevant to his project: linguistics, literature, folklore, and indeed textology.

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