Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Markus Osterrieder]

On 03.05.1998 23:29 Uhr frosset at wheatonma.edu wrote:
>The other crucial point to remember on the issue of authenticity
>is that not every word nor even every concept in the *Slovo* need be
>authentically traceable to a medieval original. It is likely that
>items were added by successive transcribers, without making it a fake.
>Since many medieval manuscripts/texts all over Europe suffered or were
>embellished by various "remaniements," and since such additions cannot
>be purged without the existence of an provably authentic original manu-
>script, the consensus I heard was that the *Slovo* is most probably a
>true original with likely layers of additional material.

Yes, this could be a possibilty, nevertheless there *is* the unsolved
problem of the related "Zadonshchina" (Andre Mazon discussed this already
back in 1940), and the rather mysterious circumstances of the discovery
of the Ms. of "Slovo" and the circle of Count Musin-Pushkin with its
Masonic connections (cf. Walter Schamschula's important recent
contribution: The Igor' tale from Its Czech to Its Gaelic Connection. //
American Contributions to the XIth Congress of Slavists. Ann Arbor 1993,
130-153).

I again insist on the "spiritual tone" of the text. In *Western Europe*,
this "tone" is not to be found before the 14th/15th century, during Early
Renaissance. But in Rus'? Read Zadonshchina, there you have the same
motives and even whole phrases *without* these odd invocations of the Old
Gods, but of course just the "defense of the Rus'ian Land and the
Christian Faith" (which is one and the same).

>The concept of author as we know it now did not exist then -- roughly put,
>a modern author is the spiritual and legal "owner" of a text, and changes
>to the text which are not his/her work or at least accepted by him/her are
>not considered part of the "authoritative" text. Hence copyrights etc.
>This view would be irrelevant to the Middle Ages. More relevant, especially
>to the issue of the *Slovo*, is the concept of an "open tradition"
>throughout the European Middle Ages.

Even if the author was irrelevant, the tradition of the text itself was
not. It is not possible to read the "Slovo" purely as a work of art,
there is a political-ideological message in it as well, and this was
clearly intended, whether the text originated in the 12th or was
composed/rearranged in the 18th century under the reign of "Astraea"
Catherine II. And the political implication is even more dubious...


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Markus Osterrieder, M.A.

u9511bw at mail.lrz-muenchen.de

CeltoSlavica - where East meets West
<http://www.geocities.com/~celtoslavica>

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