• Source: Life of Alexander Nevsky

      • The Life of Alexander Nevsky is an Old East Slavic hagiography about Alexander Nevsky, composed and edited in stages between the late 13th century and the mid-15th century. In most manuscript copies, its full title is Tale
about
the
Life
of
the
Brave,
Blessed,
and
Great
Prince
Alexander
Nevskii.


      Contents


      The Life of Alexander Nevsky describes the life and achievements of Aleksandr Yaroslavich (1220/21–1263), a prince of Novgorod (intermittently between 1236 and 1259) and a grand prince of Vladimir (r. 1252–1263). He is presented as having defended the northwestern borders of Rus against a Swedish invasion in the legendary Battle of the Neva (July 1240, for which he was nicknamed "Nevsky" in the 15th century, long after the Life was written), defeated the Livonian Order at the Battle of Lake Peipus in 1242 and paid a few visits to Batu Khan to protect the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality from the Khazar raids. The work is filled with 'patriotic spirit' and achieves a 'high degree of artistic expressiveness' in its glorification of Alexander's deeds and those of his warriors as heroic.


      Textual criticism




      = Manuscripts

      =
      The "First Edition" or "First Redaction" of the Life of Alexander Nevsky has been preserved in 13 manuscripts, with the oldest extant manuscripts dating from the 14th century, and the youngest to the 17th century. Yurii Begunov published the first list of all known 13 extant manuscripts in 1965. The 1377 Laurentian Codex only contains the Life's beginning, the c. 1486 Synodal manuscript 154 only the beginning and end, while the other 11 manuscripts contain the full text of the "First Edition".


      = Textual history

      =
      Historian Vasily Klyuchevsky (1871) was the first to make a distinction between different editions of the Life of Alexander Nevsky, naming the oldest edition the "First Edition" (Russian: Первоначальная редакция, romanized: Pervonachal’naya redaktsiya).
      Yurii Begunov (1965), basing himself on thirteen stand-alone manuscripts, dated the first redaction of the Life of Alexander Nevsky to the 1280s, hypothesising that it had been composed in the Rozhdestvensky (Nativity) monastery in Vladimir-on-Kliazma. Begunov reasoned that during this recension, a passage was added mentioning that metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev declared that "the sun has set in the Suzdalian Land" at Nevsky's funeral.
      According to scholar Donald Ostrowski (2008), the original text of the Life of Alexander Nevsky was a secular military narrative, written by a layman in the late 13th century, who made no mention of "the Suzdalian Land", nor of "the Rus' Land". Some hagiographic motifs would be inserted by a cleric a century later, but still no reference to "Suzdalian/Rus' Land". Ostrowski argued that the "First Redaction" of the Life should be dated to the mid-15th century, because it used the Novgorod First Chronicle (NPL) Older Redaction as a source, whereas the NPL Younger Redaction incorporated parts of the Life. It would be this editor who added an allusion to Volodimer I of Kiev's conversion of "the Rus' Land", and two mentions of "the Suzdalian Land", one of them the setting sun passage.


      = Authorship

      =
      In two 1947 papers, Dmitry Likhachev asserted that the author of the Life of Alexander Nevsky had to have been metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev (died c. 1280), who allegedly simultaneously authored the Chronicle of Daniil (corresponding to the 1246–1262 segment of the Galician–Volhynian Chronicle) due to similarities in style. While this view soon became dominant amongst scholars (including Begunov, Günther Stökl, Norman
Ingham, S. A. Zenkovsky, John Fennell, and O. V. Tvogorov) for decades, Mari Isoaho (2006) and Ostrowski (2008) firmly rejected Kirill's authorship, pointing out numerous flaws in Likhachev's reasoning, and internal and external evidence to the contrary.


      Notes




      References




      External links


      Translation into modern Russian by the Federal Fund of Science Courses
      Audio recording of the full text


      Bibliography


      Begunov, Yurii K. (1965). Памятник русской литературы XIII века "Слово о погибели русской земли." (Pamyatnik russkoy literatury XIII veka. “Slovo o pogibeli Russkoy zemli”) [A Monument of Rus' Literature of the 13th Century. "The Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land."] (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka. p. 229. Retrieved 14 December 2024.
      Halperin, Charles J. (2022). The Rise and Demise of the Myth of the Rus' Land (PDF). Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. p. 107. ISBN 9781802700565.
      Isoaho, Mari (2006). The Image of Aleksandr Nevskiy in Medieval Russia: Warrior and Saint. Leiden: Brill. p. 428. ISBN 9789047409496. Retrieved 13 December 2024. (public version of PhD dissertation).
      Ostrowski, Donald (2008). "Redating the Life of Alexander Nevskii". In Dunning, Chester S.L.; Martin, Russell E.; Rowland, Daniel (eds.). Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey. Bloomington: Slavica Publishers. pp. 23–39. Retrieved 18 December 2024.

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