Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Peter&Susan Fischer]

Friends, Colleagues, Zemljaki-Seelangovtsy:

Until now I have remained steadfastly on the sidelines when the
occasional brouhaha erupted in our global SEELANGS village.  But as the
current disputation about the authenticity of the Igor Tale has
generated more and more commentary, the temptation to leap into the fray
became too strong to resist.  Still, I held back for a while expecting
my old friends and classmates in Roman Jakobson's Igor Tale seminar of
1960/61, Bob Rothstein and Earl Sampson, to wade in ahead of me because
a few months ago they had both reminisced here about that unforgettably
idiosyncratic seminar, surely one of Jakobson's last and greatest
classroom performances at Harvard.  True to the manner of Bojan 'on
rastekalsja mysliju po drevu...'

Itak, all that talk about whether the Igor Tale isn't, after all, an
18th century forgery is clear indication that our profession, too, has
its share of conspiracy buffs.  If English literature can have the
occasional Elizabethan scholar determined to prove to the world that
Shakespeare's plays were written by somebody else, or, if the
assassination of Jack Kennedy could spawn a regular industry producing
all sorts of conspiracy yarns, why then shouldn't we have our own set of
sleuths digging around the nooks and crannies of the Igor Tale.  Since
it evidently lacks a truly medieval mindset, we must suspect that it's a
fake cooked up by Count Musin-Pushkin and his learned cronies in some
masonic cabal.  Or how about those Ossianic echoes, even Plach'
Jaroslavny has a suspicious look and sound...  Might there not be some
MacPhersonov in the woodwork somewhere?

While I don't mean to make light of literary detective work, I wanted to
remind interested colleagues of the one hard, scientific fact that
remains, when all the shouting is over, the most compelling argument for
the authenticity of the Igor Tale.  Recall that Ol' Igor and his
druzhina don't just ride off into the sunset.  They ride smack into an
ecclipse of the sun which is not your everyday celestial event.  I
haven't checked my notes and can't cite references, but astronomers'
calculations confirm that in the year of Igor's campaign an ecclipse of
the sun did occur and could be seen from the area where Prince Igor went
to do battle with the Polovtsians.  I think it's fair to postulate that
no 18th century literary forger, be he a latter-day Bojan, Nestor, and
Copernicus all rolled into one, could have gotten the dating of that
ecclipse right.  The conspiracy buffs will probably object that the
presumed forger could have worked from a reference to the ecclipse in
the Chronicle, itd, itp.  Anyway...

Apart from fond memories of Roman Jakobson and the conviction that the
Igor Tale couldn't be anything but the genuine article, that long-ago
seminar provided me with the most vivid and memorable dream of my life.
It started with an exhilerating sensation of flight.  Sitting astride a
huge bird I was soaring high in the sky, peering down at Igor and his
horsemen as they rode across the boundless steppe.  The one thing not
clear to me was wether I was flying 'sizym orlom pod oblaky' or riding a
'chernyj voron' who anticipated feasting on the warriors below in due
time.  But suddenly, in midflight, my mount turned into a skeleton, the
bones giving way and sending me into terrifying freefall toward the
ground.  And then I woke up, heart pounding, much surprised and relieved
to be still alive.  That dream should probably have made me realize that
the Igor Tale was built on thin air.

Peter A. Fischer
Adjunct Professor
Georgetown University