03 — The Sources
The three foundational texts on which nearly everything known of Boris and Gleb rests: the Russian Primary Chronicle‘s annalistic account under the year 1015, the anonymous Skazanie (the Tale, Passion, and Encomium), and the monk Nestor’s Chtenie (the Lesson on the Life and Murder). These files set out what each text is, when and where it was compiled, how the three relate to one another — and why the question of their relative dating is among the most contested problems in early Rus’ literary history.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)
Almost nothing of the deaths of Boris and Gleb survives apart from works composed to honor them. There is no neutral chronicle of the killings, no administrative record, no independent witness from outside the dynasty Yaroslav founded except the discordant Norse Eymundar þáttr (treated in Section 08). What there is — and it is a remarkably rich body for so early a moment in Slavic letters — is three closely related Church Slavonic texts: a chapter of the Primary Chronicle, a long anonymous Tale, and a formal vita by Nestor of the Kiev Caves. This section examines each in turn, and then the problem that binds them: their order of composition and their dependence on one another, which scholars from A. A. Shakhmatov to the present have argued without settling. Source-criticism is not a preliminary to this collection’s subject; for Boris and Gleb it is the subject, because the saints are known to us only as these three texts present them.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Primary Chronicle | The Povest’ vremennykh let — what it is (compiled at Kiev c.1113; Laurentian and Hypatian redactions; the Nestor attribution and its limits), its narrative of 1015–1019, its character as the dynasty’s own account, and its relation to the hagiography. |
| The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie | The two hagiographies — the fuller, more literary anonymous Skazanie with its miracle collection, and Nestor’s more “Byzantine” Chtenie — and the contested centerpiece: which came first, and how both stand to the Chronicle. |
See Also
- The Killing of Boris — the event these sources narrate, on the river Alta
- The Killing of Gleb — the death near Smolensk as the texts tell it
- The Succession Crisis of 1015 — the political setting the Chronicle supplies
- Dating and Embellishment — how the legend’s layers are weighed against the events
- Holy Tradition — the wider question of how the Church transmits and venerates its memory
References
- Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953.
- Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.
- Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989.
- Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996.