Igor Tale and Golovin

[Richard Schultz]

I received this message from Robert Mann. It clarifies some of the issues regarding Golovin. -Richard

Dear Richard,

There is a lot of confusion surrounding Golovin's text of the Skazanie, and I'll try to clear up some of it. First, we have to judge Golovin's text on the basis of evidence that is presented within the text itself, the same way that we're forced to judge the Igor Tale. In order to do that, we have to read it. Unfortunately, it's available almost nowhere. I've located four copies of Golovin's little book so far and I've prepared an edition with the complete text that will soon be in press. The Houghton Library has given me permission to print a facsimile of their copy - the only copy I know of in America. 

As I try to show in my new book (Pesn' o polku Igoreve - Novye otkrytiia (2009) - not in The Igor Tales (2005), which was already being printed when I found the overlooked parallels in Golovin), some of Golovin's unique parallels to the Igor Tale are of the type described by Olga. In theory, they could have been added by someone who wanted to make his version of the Skazanie seem closer to the Igor Tale. (Lisitsy breshut na chervlennye shchity; ...aki buinii tury) But other overlooked parallels are not of this sort at all. More likely, they would have been fashioned by someone who was trying to HIDE the connection with the Igor Tale. Golovin himself overlooked them in his later study of the Igor Tale. As far as we now know, everyone who has ever studied the Igor Tale up until now has overlooked them! 

Golovin's text (identified by him as "15th-century", older than the other surviving versions of the Skazanie) contains readings that we find uniquely in each of the later redactions of the Skazanie. In some instances the later redactions that lack a passage from Golovin's redaction still contain traces of the passage that was eliminated. As you will see when you examine these passages carefully, Golovin would have needed superhuman savvy to pull this off.

Golovin was a distant relative of Pushkin. He and his father were enthusiastic collectors of antiquities of all sorts. Golovin's library contained around 50,000 items. Much of it was ancient books and manuscripts. It's unfortunate that Golovin didn't ensure that his collection would remain in safe hands after his death. Its whereabouts is mostly a mystery. Many of his ancient gramoty eventually ended up in archives in St. Petersburg, but larger texts such as narrative tales seem to have disappeared. In this situation, the disappearance of his unusual text of the Skazanie isn't an anomaly. It's worth noting that in his lifetime no one appears to have paid any attention to Golovin's text or ascribed any importance to it. They didn't understand why he had bothered to publish his short version when a longer version had already been published by Snegirev!

After Golovin died, it became clear that he had stolen a number of gramoty from archives by replacing them with fakes made on appropriately old paper. (That can be grist in your skeptical mill. Run with it!) This certainly makes it necessary to ask whether Golovin might have forged his version of the Skazanie. But the answer has to be found in the text, not in our own feelings of suspicion. Another complication is that, as Tvorogov saw or guessed in his encyclopedia entry for Golovin, the text seems to have abridgements. And there's evidence that Karamzin had a similar redaction... But it's a long story that I try to deal with in the introduction to my edition of Golovin's Skazanie.

It's great to see that you're interested in all the impractical puzzles of the Igor Tale in this era of careerism...

Bob Mann


      

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