Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Milman/Rancour-Laferriere]

7 May 1998

Colleagues:

Edward L. Keenan has just driven another one of his golden nails into the
coffin of Russian nationalist scholarship.  Not only is the Igor tale not
part of "Russian" literature, it is not even a part of "Rusian" (Lunt)
literature.

Another way to look at this is to observe that there is one less reason for
conflating things Rusian with things Russian, because there is one less
Rusian cultural object for Russian culture to claim for itself.

And this is good for Ukrainians, who are naturally offended by expressions
such as "Kievan Russia" ("Rossiia kievskaia" - Berdiaev) in reference to
Rus' before Russia existed.

Let's just adopt Horace Lunt's term "Rusian" and stop offending the other
East Slavs.


Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
University of California, Davis
BarDan at compuserve.com