Slovo o polku Igoreve

[Alina Israeli]

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere wrote:

>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.

This is not just policing "which works belong to which literary traditions"
as J. Douglas Clayton wrote, but ideological control of language and
linguistics. By the same token, Portugese should hate Spaniards for common
cultural history, and French should have it in for Italians for the common
Latin literature and language, and we should all hate each other for having
shared the common Indo-European language. And we should certainly support
the Greeks in their claim to the word Macedonian.

Alina Israeli