The Primary Chronicle

The Povest’ vremennykh let (the Russian Primary Chronicle or “Tale of Bygone Years”), compiled at Kiev around 1113 and surviving in the Laurentian and Hypatian redactions, gives the earliest connected narrative of the killings of Boris and Gleb in its entry under the year 1015. This file sets out what the Chronicle is and how it was made, what it relates of Vladimir’s death and the war among his sons, why its account is the testimony of the side that won, and how its Boris–Gleb tale stands to the separate hagiographical works — a relationship of disputed priority.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

What the Chronicle Is

The Povest’ vremennykh let is the foundational narrative source for the early history of the Rus’. It is an annalistic chronicle — a year-by-year record, each entry headed by its date anno mundi in the Byzantine reckoning — running from the division of the earth among the sons of Noah down to the early twelfth century. As it stands, the Chronicle was compiled at Kiev around 1113, drawing on earlier Kievan annalistic compilations, on Byzantine chronicles in Slavonic translation (above all that of George Hamartolos), on treaty texts, oral tradition, and saints’ lives (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, introduction; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the making of the Chronicle). It is not the work of a single author at a single moment but the last in a series of redactions of a growing text, and the events it narrates for the tenth and early eleventh centuries reach the surviving manuscripts through a century or more of compilation.

The Chronicle does not survive in its original form. Its text is reconstructed chiefly from two later manuscript traditions: the Laurentian redaction (the Lavrentevskaia letopis’), copied by the monk Lawrence in 1377, which carries the Chronicle as the opening section of a larger Suzdalian compilation; and the Hypatian redaction (the Ipatevskaia letopis’), of the early fifteenth century, which preserves a southern, Kievan-Galician continuation. The two redactions descend from a common archetype but differ in their later portions and in numerous readings; the Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor translation used throughout this collection renders the Laurentian text (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953, on the manuscript basis). The Boris–Gleb material falls in the early, shared stratum and is substantially common to both.

The Chronicle has traditionally been attributed, in whole or in part, to Nestor, a monk of the Kiev Caves Monastery active in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries — the same Nestor named as author of the Chtenie on Boris and Gleb (see The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie). The attribution appears in the Hypatian redaction’s heading and in later monastic tradition. Modern scholarship treats it with caution. The Chronicle is a composite, the product of successive redactors; A. A. Shakhmatov’s foundational source-analysis, early in the twentieth century, resolved the text into layers reaching back through an early-twelfth-century compilation to an eleventh-century “Primary Compilation” (Nachalnyi svod) and earlier annalistic nuclei (on Shakhmatov’s stratification, Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996). Whether the historical Nestor compiled the c.1113 redaction, contributed to it, or was attached to it by later tradition is not settled — and, importantly, the Chronicle’s Boris–Gleb tale differs in detail and emphasis from the Chtenie that bears Nestor’s name, which itself tells against a simple single authorship of both. The honest description is that the Chronicle is the work of the Kievan monastic milieu of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, of which Nestor was a part, rather than the unmediated composition of one named monk.

The Entry Under the Year 1015

The Chronicle’s account of the killings stands under the year 6523 anno mundi, that is 1015 of the Common Era. It opens with the death of Vladimir: the prince died at Berestovo, his death was at first concealed because Svyatopolk was in Kiev, and his body was wrapped and lowered by night through a breach in the floor, carried off on a sledge, and laid in the Church of the Holy Mother of God that he had built (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The people, learning of the death, gathered and mourned him as their baptizer.

The narrative then turns to Svyatopolk’s seizure of power. Established in Kiev, he summoned the townspeople and distributed gifts to win their loyalty; they accepted, the Chronicle notes pointedly, though “their hearts were not with him,” because their brothers — meaning the men of Boris’s retinue — were away with Boris (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). At the moment of Vladimir’s death Boris was returning from a fruitless campaign against the Pechenegs, at the head of the Kievan host. Reaching the river Alta and learning his father was dead, Boris mourned; his retainers urged him to march on Kiev and take the throne, for the army was his, but Boris refused to lift his hand against his elder brother (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The host dispersed and left him.

Svyatopolk, the Chronicle continues, sent men to kill Boris. They came upon him in his tent on the Alta as he prayed at matins, knowing his death was prepared; they ran him through with spears, struck down his servant — a Hungarian named George who threw himself over his master — and wrapped Boris, still breathing, in the tent-cloth. Learning he was not yet dead, Svyatopolk sent two Varangians who finished him with a sword-thrust to the heart (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). His body was brought to Vyshgorod and buried by the church of St. Basil. The Chronicle’s narrative of the killing on the Alta is the spine of the account this collection follows in The Killing of Boris.

The Chronicle then narrates the death of Gleb. Svyatopolk, intending to destroy all rivals, sent word to Gleb — who held Murom — summoning him to Kiev with the false report that their father wished to see him, concealing that Vladimir was already dead. Gleb set out; warning reached him on the way (in the Chronicle’s framing, from Yaroslav at Novgorod, who had learned of the plot through their sister Predslava) that his father was dead and his brother slain, yet Gleb continued. Near Smolensk, on the river Smiadyn, his boat was overtaken by Svyatopolk’s men; his own cook, named Torchin, was made to cut his throat (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Gleb’s body was left on the bank between two hollowed logs and only later recovered and brought to lie beside Boris at Vyshgorod — the detail taken up in The Killing of Gleb. The Chronicle adds that Svyatopolk also killed a third brother, Sviatoslav, who fled toward the Hungarian mountains and was overtaken and slain by pursuers (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953).

It is at this point that the Chronicle fixes on Svyatopolk the verdict that the cult would make permanent. The annalist denounces him as a new Cain and a new Lamech, multiplies the biblical comparisons, and lays on him the blood of his brothers — the rhetorical core from which the epithet Okayanny, “the Accursed,” grew (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; on the biblical typology, Fedotov 1946). The Chronicle’s Boris and Gleb are not yet the developed passion-bearers of the Skazanie, but the moral architecture — innocent brothers, fratricidal Cain, divine condemnation — is already laid down.

The War of 1016–1019

The killings open, in the Chronicle, onto a longer war whose victor is the figure under whose dynasty the Chronicle itself was compiled. From 1016 the narrative follows the struggle between Svyatopolk and Yaroslav of Novgorod. Yaroslav, who had been on the point of war with his father, now marched south with Novgorodian and Varangian troops; the armies met at Liubech on the Dnieper, and Yaroslav defeated Svyatopolk, who fled to his father-in-law, the Polish prince Bolesław I (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1016; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). In 1018 Bolesław invaded in Svyatopolk’s support, defeated Yaroslav on the river Bug, and entered Kiev; Yaroslav fell back on Novgorod and prepared to flee overseas, but the Novgorodians cut up his boats and raised fresh forces and money to keep him in the fight (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1018; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). In 1019 the decisive battle was fought on the river Alta — the same river on which Boris had been killed — where Yaroslav defeated Svyatopolk decisively; Svyatopolk fled westward and died, in the Chronicle’s lurid telling, a fugitive driven mad and pursued by the stench of his own crimes, somewhere “between Poland and Bohemia” (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1019; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). Yaroslav took Kiev and held it. The placing of the final victory on the Alta is unlikely to be accidental in the narrative’s design: the river of the martyr’s blood becomes the river of the usurper’s defeat. The political shape of these years is treated, from the foundations side, in The Succession Crisis of 1015.

The Winning Side’s Narrative

The single most important critical fact about the Chronicle’s account is its standpoint. The text was compiled at Kiev under the dynasty that Yaroslav founded and that his descendants ruled; its final c.1113 redaction was made in the reign of Yaroslav’s grandson. The narrative of 1015–1019 is therefore the narrative of the victors, written to vindicate the line that triumphed and to damn the rival it displaced. Svyatopolk is the villain; Yaroslav is the avenger who restores order and gathers the bodies of the martyrs; the killings are laid wholly at Svyatopolk’s door, and his defeat is presented as divine justice (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the partisan shaping of the account; Lenhoff 1989, on the cult’s service to the dynasty). This does not make the account false, but it makes it interested, and the discipline of this collection is to read it as such. The one early source that cuts across the official version — the Old Norse Eymundar þáttr, which has Yaroslav’s own retained Varangians kill a prince — is precisely the witness the Chronicle’s standpoint would suppress, and the historiographical weight of that discordance is taken up in Who Killed Them.

A second caution follows from the Chronicle’s compositional layering. Because the surviving text is the product of successive redactions reaching down to c.1113, the Boris–Gleb entry as we read it is roughly a century removed from 1015. The biblical typology, the worked-up speeches, and the developed condemnation of Svyatopolk belong to the literary culture of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries — the same culture that produced the hagiography — and cannot simply be read back as the report of 1015 (Lenhoff 1989; Fedotov 1946). The Chronicle is the earliest connected narrative, but it is not a contemporary one.

The Chronicle and the Hagiography

The Chronicle’s Boris–Gleb tale does not stand alone. It overlaps extensively with the two hagiographical works — the anonymous Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie — sharing the essential plot, many incidents, and a good deal of the moralizing framework, while diverging in detail, scope, and tone. The Chronicle is the leanest of the three; the Skazanie expands the same events with long prayers, laments, and a developed portrait of the brothers’ meekness (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946). The textual relationship among the three is one of the genuinely unsettled problems of early Rus’ literary history, and it is the centerpiece of the companion file.

[Disputed: the priority among the Chronicle account, the Skazanie, and Nestor’s Chtenie is contested and unresolved. A. A. Shakhmatov’s influential source-analysis treated the texts as drawing on a common older Boris–Gleb narrative and worked out a stratification in which an early hagiographical tale and the chronicle layers stand in a definite relation; later scholars have reordered the dependencies. The principal open questions are (1) whether the Chronicle’s tale and the Skazanie draw independently on a lost common source or whether one is derived from the other, and (2) in which direction the borrowing runs — whether the Chronicle’s annalist used a pre-existing Boris–Gleb tale, or whether the Skazanie expanded the Chronicle’s account. No single solution commands consensus; Lenhoff (1989) and the studies translated and surveyed in Hollingsworth (1992) lay out the competing reconstructions. This file therefore treats the Chronicle as one of three interdependent witnesses of disputed mutual priority, not as the demonstrable source or derivative of the others.]

What can be said with confidence is narrower than a stemma. The Chronicle, the Skazanie, and the Chtenie form a tight cluster produced within the same Kievan monastic culture across roughly the same two generations, all serving the same cult, all agreeing on the charge against Svyatopolk and the virtue of the brothers — and all separated from 1015 by the better part of a century. They corroborate one another precisely because they are kin, which is a reason for care, not for confidence. The Chronicle’s distinctive contribution within the cluster is its setting of the killings inside the full political narrative of the succession war, the dimension the hagiographies largely drop in favor of the brothers’ interior drama of meekness and prayer.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The making and manuscript basis of the Chronicle; the entry s.a. 1015 on Vladimir’s death, Svyatopolk’s seizure, the killings of Boris on the Alta, Gleb on the Smiadyn, and Sviatoslav; the war and Yaroslav’s victory on the Alta s.a. 1016–1019.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie, against which the Chronicle’s parallel account is read; the surveyed scholarship on the textual relationship.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The biblical typology of the Chronicle’s condemnation of Svyatopolk; the literary character of the Boris–Gleb material.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (Shakhmatov’s stratification of the Chronicle; the cult’s service to the Yaroslavichi dynasty; the competing reconstructions of textual priority.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The composition of the Chronicle; the partisan standpoint of the 1015–1019 narrative; the political course of the succession war.)