To the Editors

Because my review of historian A. A. Zimin's book on the Slovo o polku Igoreve (the Igoŕ Tale) was to appear in a review forum, you kindly allowed that I might make a comparison of his work with that of my old friend Professor Edward Keenan on the same subject that appeared somewhat before Zimin's book, though written many years later.¹ I took advantage of the opportunity to make a few comparisons because of parallels I saw between the two studies, and because I had not published a review of Keenan's.²

No doubt I should feel flattered that in his letter to you Professor Keenan associates me with the late Professor Roman Jakobson and sometimes even seems to confuse me with him.³ Jakobson had one of the great minds of the 20th century, and certainly I do not merit the compliment of being identified with him. I have never called myself a filolog/philologist. This is an old-fashioned European term that, as far as I know, never caught on in the United States. Rather, I call myself a literature specialist, there being no adequate single word in English for literaturoved. In the unlikely event that my family, none of whom knows Russian, might mistake my intentions, I will immediately write them directions not to inscribe filolog or any Russian word on my gravestone. Our 18th-century Yankee ancestors who slumber nearby might be puzzled.

My own puzzlement at the moment comes from Mr. Keenan's remark that "the question of how and when a text [the Slovo o polku Igoreve] appeared is essentially a historical one."⁴ Well, yes, it is a texthistorical question—that is, one most safely dealt with by specially qualified historians of literature, not by general historians untrained in this specialty. How, then, does Mr. Keenan make his great, unwarranted leap from "historical" to general "historians" such as himself?

The fact is that we are all historians if we deal with anything that happened before today. It is then a question of fields, and we all tend to be combinations of the fields we prepared in. It is a question of knowledge and skill, not of "attitude" (and I never suggested the latter). I was trained as a historian of languages and told Roman Jakobson at my Ph.D. orals that my main field was historical linguistics. I left linguistics soon thereafter and made my career instead in the history of medieval Slavic literatures, especially East Slavic. I cared little for textology and concentrated on "history of ideas." (Jakobson was not at all pleased.) At the University of Chicago for 30 years I also taught with Professor Richard Hellie in the pre-Petrine part of the interdisciplinary history sequence "Russian Civilization," where I perforce learned much about subfields of history, and this influenced my work in literature.⁵

I can, of course, see that instead of responding directly to specific arguments made by me and other scholars (which, so far, he nowhere has done), it is much easier for Professor Keenan simply to ignore our arguments with the startling excuse that he does not accord us a right to say anything about the subject. Quite a few specialists will be surprised to learn that they have been disenfranchised and perhaps are about to have their doctorates revoked. On the other side, Professor Keenan, I believe, would be surprised to hear how many historians seem to think that certain colleagues and I have pretty much destroyed his case for Josef Dobrovský and the Igoŕ Tale.

I sincerely hope that, despite our disagreements, somehow Ned Keenan and I can get our long-standing friendship back on the track of cordial discussion.