The Primary Chronicle Account

The Povest’ vremennykh let — the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kiev in the early twelfth century — supplies the earliest and most nearly contemporary narrative of the Caves monastery’s founding, above all in its long entry under the year 1051, which tells of the priest Hilarion’s cave, of Anthony’s tonsure on Mount Athos and his return to Rus, of Varlaam and Theodosius, and of the community’s growth from a hole in the hillside to a monastery on the surface; a further notice under 1074 records Theodosius’s death and the elders of the house. This file sets out what the Chronicle says, weighs what is plausibly early or contemporary against what is later editorial or legendary, and treats — cautiously — the long-standing hypothesis, associated with A. A. Shakhmatov, that monks of the Caves monastery were themselves among the Chronicle’s redactors.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)

The Povest’ vremennykh let as a Source

The Povest’ vremennykh let (PVL, “Tale of Bygone Years,” conventionally the Russian Primary Chronicle) is the foundational narrative source for the history of Kievan Rus, compiled at Kiev around 1113 and surviving in later copies, of which the Laurentian (1377) and the Hypatian are the principal witnesses (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction; Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, ch. 1). The standard English translation is that of Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Medieval Academy of America, 1953), and references here are given by year-entry (sub anno, “s.a.”), the stable internal division that holds across editions.

Two features of the Chronicle bear directly on its use for the Caves. First, it is a composite work: a compilation that drew on earlier annals, Byzantine chronicles in Slavonic translation, oral tradition, documents, and discrete narrative tales, stitched together and re-edited in successive layers — the standard scholarly view holds the surviving PVL to be the product of more than one redactor working over the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction; and the consensus represented by such scholars as D. Ostrowski, who in his critical edition stresses the layered, multi-source character of the text). Second, it was compiled within the orbit of Kievan monasticism — the Caves monastery itself being one of the chief centers of letters in the city — so that its account of that monastery is, in part, the monastery’s account of itself. Both features make the 1051 entry simultaneously precious (early, close to the events) and in need of careful reading (edited, and not disinterested).

The Foundation Narrative s.a. 1051

The Chronicle’s principal Caves narrative is placed under the year 1051, immediately after the notice of the elevation of Hilarion as the first native-born metropolitan of Kiev (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see Kievan Rus After the Baptism). The placement is itself revealing: the chronicler moves from Hilarion’s elevation to the prehistory of the Caves by way of Hilarion’s own earlier cave.

The narrative runs, in substance, as follows (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor):

Hilarion’s cave. Before his elevation, Hilarion — a priest of the prince’s church at the village of Berestovo — was a man of holy life who used to go out to a wooded hill above the Dnieper and there dig himself a small cave, two fathoms deep, in which he would withdraw to pray. When he was made metropolitan, the cave stood empty. This little hermit’s pit is the physical seed of the monastery.
Anthony’s tonsure on Athos. The Chronicle then introduces a man of Liubech (Lyubech) who, drawn to the monastic life, journeyed to Mount Athos, was there tonsured, lived as a monk, and was sent back to Rus by his abbot with a blessing — the abbot foreseeing that many monks would come from him (see Tonsure on the Holy Mountain). This is Anthony. Returning to Kiev and finding the existing princely monasteries not to his liking, he settled in Hilarion’s abandoned cave on the hill, where he gave himself to extreme asceticism, prayer, and fasting.
The gathering of brethren. Anthony’s reputation for holiness drew others. Among the first to come were Nikon (a priest), and then a young man named Theodosius (Feodosii), whom Anthony received and had Nikon tonsure. As the brethren multiplied, they enlarged the cave, dug a church and cells within the earth, and lived the hidden life of the hill.
The move to the surface. When the community had grown to about twelve, Anthony — true to his eremitic vocation — appointed Varlaam as superior over them and withdrew to a separate cave to live alone, later moving to another hill where he dug a new cave (the origin of the distinction between the “Far” and “Near” caves). The brethren, grown too numerous for the underground, built a church and cells on the surface above the caves, and so the monastery proper came into being (see From Hermitage to Monastery and Anthony’s Withdrawal).

This single entry is the backbone of everything that can be said about Anthony’s external career. It is the source for his Lyubech origin, his Athonite tonsure, his occupation of Hilarion’s cave, his role as tonsurer and elder of the first brethren, his appointment of Varlaam, and his characteristic withdrawal into solitude even as the community he had gathered moved toward cenobitic order.

The Notice s.a. 1074

A second relevant entry stands under the year 1074, recording the death of Theodosius (placed there, though Theodosius in fact died in 1074) and offering, in connection with it, a series of edifying recollections of the elders of the Caves — aged monks of exemplary ascetic life whose deeds the chronicler recalls (PVL, s.a. 1074; trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor). These elder-tales (of monks such as Damian the healer, Jeremiah and Matthew the seers, and Isaac the recluse and his combat with demons) are closely related in spirit and substance to the later Paterik (see The Kiev Caves Paterik), and indeed represent a stratum of Caves hagiographical tradition already present in the Chronicle. Anthony himself, by the most common reckoning, had died the year before, in 1073; the 1074 entry thus belongs to the immediate aftermath of the founder’s generation, and its elder-tales show the monastery’s memory of its own ascetic heroes already taking literary shape within decades of the events.

What Is Plausibly Early, What Is Later

Reading the 1051 and 1074 entries critically means distinguishing strata, even within a relatively early source. Several observations follow the standard scholarship (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction; Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1; Franklin & Shepard 1996).

Plausibly early and well-founded. The core external framework of the 1051 narrative has strong claims to rest on genuine, near-contemporary monastic memory: that the monastery began in a hermit’s cave on the hill above Berestovo; that its founder Anthony had been a monk on Athos and returned with that formation; that the community grew underground before moving to the surface; that Anthony was the eremitic elder while Theodosius became the organizer of common life; and that Nikon, Varlaam, and Theodosius were among the early figures. These are the kinds of facts a monastery would remember accurately about its own origins within two or three generations, and they cohere with the independent witness of Nestor’s Life of Theodosius (composed at the monastery in the 1080s). The 1074 elder-tales likewise reflect a memory close in time to its subjects.

Later, editorial, or legendary. Other features bear the marks of editorial shaping and hagiographical convention, and should be read accordingly under METHODOLOGY §3.5:

The retrospective placement and framing. The whole foundation narrative is told retrospectively, under 1051, as a flashback prompted by Hilarion’s elevation; its internal chronology is loose, and the 1051 date attaches to the entry’s occasion, not to every event it relates (Anthony’s Athonite period and return precede it). The chronicler’s ordering is thematic and providential, not annalistic.
The Athonite blessing-prophecy. The motif of the Athonite abbot foreseeing that “many monks” would spring from Anthony is a recognizable hagiographical topos — the founder commissioned and foreseen — and is reported here as the Chronicle’s account, not as an independently established event (see Sent Back to Rus).
The wonder and elder material. The miracle-tales of the 1074 elders, like those of the Paterik, are devotional narratives, named to the Chronicle and reported as its testimony rather than asserted as fact.
A second tradition of Anthony’s Athonite journeys. [Disputed: the Caves tradition is not wholly consistent on Anthony's Athonite formation. The *Primary Chronicle s.a.* 1051 (trans. Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor) relates a single tonsure on Athos and return; Nestor's *Life of Theodosius* and the later Paterik tradition (Heppell 1989, introduction) preserve elements suggesting two visits to the Holy Mountain or a more complicated itinerary. The discrepancy is a known crux of the dossier and cannot be resolved from the sources; it is treated where the journeys are narrated, in [Tonsure on the Holy Mountain](../02-athos-and-return/tonsure-on-the-holy-mountain.md).]

The Shakhmatov Hypothesis: Caves Monks as Chroniclers

Behind the question of the Chronicle’s reliability for the Caves lies a larger question about the Chronicle’s own composition — and here the name of Aleksei Aleksandrovich Shakhmatov (1864–1920) is unavoidable. Shakhmatov’s monumental textual studies, undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, argued that the surviving Povest’ vremennykh let is the last in a series of redactions standing on top of earlier lost compilations — most famously a reconstructed Nachal’nyi svod, a “Primary Compilation” or “Initial Compendium,” which he placed in the 1090s and behind that still earlier annalistic layers (Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction, which summarizes and adopts much of Shakhmatov’s reconstruction; Franklin & Shepard 1996). Crucially for our subject, Shakhmatov located the chief work of compilation in the monasteries of Kiev, and specifically associated stages of the Chronicle’s redaction with the Caves monastery — proposing that monks of the Caves were among its compilers and that figures such as Nikon (the same Nikon who appears in the 1051 foundation tale) and, in tradition, Nestor of the Caves had a hand in the work.

This hypothesis, if accepted, would mean that the Chronicle’s account of the Caves is in some measure the monastery writing its own history — which would explain both its richness and its providential framing. Two cautions are essential, and both are required by sober method.

First, the attribution to “Nestor” must be handled carefully. Tradition names the monk Nestor of the Caves as author of the Chronicle, and the Laurentian manuscript’s heading associates the work with a Caves monk; but the identification of the chronicler-Nestor with the Nestor who wrote the Life of Theodosius and the Life of Boris and Gleb, and the extent of his contribution to the composite PVL, are not secure. [Disputed: the authorship of the *Primary Chronicle* is contested. The traditional and manuscript ascription names the Caves monk Nestor (and Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction, discuss this attribution); A. A. Shakhmatov's redaction theory instead distributes the work across multiple compilers and redactions (with Nikon and the abbot Sylvester among the names in play, Sylvester's colophon standing at 1116 in the Laurentian text); and the modern critical view (e.g., D. Ostrowski's edition and the scholarship summarized in Franklin & Shepard 1996) treats the PVL as a layered, multi-hand compilation whose individual contributors cannot be cleanly recovered. "Nestor the chronicler" is therefore best treated as a traditional designation, not a settled fact of authorship.]

Second, Shakhmatov’s reconstructed compilations are themselves hypotheses, not surviving texts. The Nachal’nyi svod and the earlier layers he posited are reconstructions inferred from the relationships among the surviving chronicles; they are widely influential and were adopted by Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, but they remain scholarly constructs, and later scholarship has refined, contested, and in places rejected parts of his stemma. [Disputed: Shakhmatov's reconstruction of a pre-PVL "Primary Compilation" (*Nachal'nyi svod*, c. 1090s) and his layered stemma are foundational but not unanimous; Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor (1953, introduction) present and largely follow them, while subsequent critics (the textual tradition culminating in D. Ostrowski's critical edition of the *PVL*) have revised the number, dating, and character of the redactions. The secure conclusion is the *composite* character of the Chronicle; the precise reconstruction of its lost layers is not secure.]

For the purposes of Anthony’s dossier, the Shakhmatov hypothesis is best used not as a proven account but as a reason for caution in the right direction: it warns that the Chronicle’s Caves narrative may be the monastery’s self-presentation, which counsels reading its providential framing critically while granting genuine evidential weight to its hard external memory. It does not license dismissing the 1051 entry, which remains the earliest and best source we have; it asks us to read that source knowing whose hand may have shaped it.

How to Read the Chronicle Account

The 1051 foundation narrative is the cornerstone of Anthony’s history precisely because it is early — within two or three generations of the events, and very possibly from within the monastery’s own memory. That earliness is its great strength against the much later Paterik (see The Kiev Caves Paterik), and where the two diverge, the Chronicle’s foundation tale and Nestor’s near-contemporary Life of Theodosius are the controlling witnesses. At the same time, the entry is editorial in arrangement, providential in framing, and possibly composed by the very community it celebrates; its hagiographical motifs and wonder-tales are reported as its testimony and pinned to it, never asserted as bare fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Read with that double awareness — trusting its remembered externals, weighing its framing, and naming its disputed points — the Povest’ vremennykh let yields the most reliable picture available of how monasticism took root in the Rus and of Anthony’s place at its origin (on that legacy, Father of Russian Monasticism; for the wider tradition, Russian Monasticism and the Russian Orthodox Tradition).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (Translation with introduction; the foundation narrative s.a. 1051 — Hilarion’s cave at Berestovo, Anthony’s Athonite tonsure and return, Nikon, Theodosius, Varlaam, the move to the surface; the elders and Theodosius’s death s.a. 1074; the summary and adoption of Shakhmatov’s redaction theory and the Nachal’nyi svod; Sylvester’s 1116 colophon.)
Shakhmatov, A. A. Razyskaniia o drevneishikh russkikh letopisnykh svodakh (Researches into the Oldest Russian Chronicle Compilations). St. Petersburg, 1908. (The foundational redaction-critical reconstruction of the lost compilations behind the PVL; cited for the hypothesis, not by page.)
Ostrowski, Donald, ed. The Povĕst’ vremennykh lĕt*: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis.* Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, Texts, vol. 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. (Critical edition representing the modern view of the PVL’s composite, multi-redaction character.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Chapter on the Kievan Caves; the spiritual reading of the foundation narrative and the elder-tales.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The PVL as a composite source; the monastic context of its compilation; the Caves monastery in eleventh-century Kiev.)