The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie

Beyond the Primary Chronicle, the cult of Boris and Gleb rests on two hagiographical works: the anonymous Skazanie i strast’ i pokhvala … Borisa i Gleba (the Tale of the Passion and Encomium), the fullest and most literary narrative, usually transmitted with an attached collection of the saints’ miracles; and Nestor of the Kiev Caves’ Chtenie o zhitii i o pogublenii … Borisa i Gleba (the Lesson on the Life and Murder), a more conventional, more “Byzantine” vita opening on universal sacred history. This file describes both texts and then takes up the contested centerpiece of all Boris–Gleb scholarship: which was written first, how each relates to the Chronicle, and why the dating remains genuinely unsettled.

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

Two Hagiographies for One Cult

The hagiographical dossier of Boris and Gleb is unusually rich for so early a moment in Slavic letters. Where many early Rus’ saints have a single short vita or none, Boris and Gleb have two substantial and very different Lives, in addition to the Chronicle’s annalistic account and a body of liturgical material. The two Lives — the anonymous Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie — are not two copies of one work but two distinct literary projects, differing in genre, in structure, in theological register, and in many details of the narrative. Both are translated in Paul Hollingsworth, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Harvard, 1992), the standard English rendering used throughout this collection. That a single cult, within roughly two generations of the events, generated two independent full-length hagiographies is itself a measure of the place Boris and Gleb came to hold in the religious imagination of Kievan Rus’ (Fedotov 1946, on the centrality of the cult; Lenhoff 1989, on the texts as cult instruments).

The Skazanie

The Skazanie i strast’ i pokhvala svyatuyu mucheniku Borisa i Gleba — the Tale, and Passion, and Encomium of the Holy Martyrs Boris and Gleb — is the fullest and most artistically developed of the narratives. It is anonymous: no author names himself, and the manuscript tradition attaches no name to it. As a literary work it is built on a tripartite design implied by its very title — tale (the narrative of the killings), passion (the brothers’ suffering rendered as a martyr’s passion), and encomium (a closing hymn of praise) — and it develops the events far beyond the Chronicle’s lean report (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the structure and pathos of the Skazanie).

What distinguishes the Skazanie is its interiority and its emotional amplitude. Where the Chronicle reports that Boris would not raise his hand against his brother, the Skazanie gives him long meditations and prayers: he weighs the world’s vanity, recalls the deaths of earlier saints, commends himself to Christ, and embraces his coming death as a sharing in the Lord’s Passion. Gleb, in the Skazanie, is portrayed as touchingly young, pleading with his killers in words that have become some of the most affecting in early Rus’ literature, begging to be spared as a green and unripe branch (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the portrait of Gleb’s youth and the Skazanie‘s pathos). The Skazanie is, in Fedotov’s reading, the text that most fully articulates the distinctive ideal of the strastoterptsy — the passion-bearers who die not for the confession of faith against pagans or heretics but in voluntary, Christ-imitating non-resistance to their own kin (Fedotov 1946; and see A New Category of Sanctity).

The Skazanie is most often transmitted together with a separate collection of miracles, the Skazanie o chudesakh svyatuyu strastoterptsu Borisa i Gleba (the Tale of the Miracles of the Holy Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb). This miracle dossier is a composite that grew by accretion: it records healings at the saints’ shrine at Vyshgorod and the successive translations of the relics, and its later miracles reach down into the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, well past the date of any single redaction of the narrative Skazanie (Lenhoff 1989, on the layered growth of the miracle collection; Hollingsworth 1992). The miracle collection is therefore datable, in its latest layers, more securely than the narrative Tale it accompanies — and because the two were transmitted together but composed and expanded at different times, the relationship between the narrative Skazanie and its attached Chudesa is itself part of the dating problem. The healings reported there are the subject of The Healing Miracles; here they matter as evidence for when, and in how many stages, the Skazanie dossier took shape.

Nestor’s Chtenie

The second hagiography is the work of a named author: Nestor, a monk of the Kiev Caves Monastery (the Pechersky monastyr’) in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries — the same Nestor traditionally associated with the Primary Chronicle and the author of the Life of Theodosius of the Caves. His Boris–Gleb work is the Chtenie o zhitii i o pogublenii blazhennuyu strastoterptsu Borisa i Gleba — the Lesson (or Reading) on the Life and Murder of the Blessed Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb. The term chtenie, “reading,” marks its intended use: a text for reading, in the monastic and liturgical setting (Hollingsworth 1992, introduction to the Chtenie).

The Chtenie is generically more conventional and more “Byzantine” than the Skazanie. Where the anonymous Tale plunges into the events of 1015, Nestor frames his Life within universal sacred history: he opens with a prologue surveying the fall of Adam, the long ages of unbelief, the coming of Christ, and the late conversion of the Rus’ — placing Boris and Gleb at the culmination of a providential history, as the fruit the newly baptized land at last offered to God (Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the Chtenie’s historical-theological framing). This is the standard architecture of the Byzantine enkomion and vita, and it gives the Chtenie a more learned, more universalizing, less locally circumstantial character than the Skazanie. Nestor also tends to smooth and conventionalize: some of the vivid, concrete detail of the Skazanie is absent or generalized in the Chtenie, in keeping with the decorum of the genre (Fedotov 1946, contrasting the two Lives; Lenhoff 1989).

The two Lives diverge not only in register but in detail: they differ in points of chronology, in the disposition of incidents, and in elements of the brothers’ portraits — divergences that are themselves data in the question of how the texts relate, since a straightforward derivation of one from the other would not easily explain them (Lenhoff 1989; Hollingsworth 1992). Both, however, agree on the essentials — the innocence and meekness of the brothers, the guilt of Svyatopolk, and the sanctity that crowns their non-resistance.

The Contested Centerpiece: Dating and Priority

The relationship and relative dating of the Skazanie, the Chtenie, and the Chronicle account is the central and most stubbornly contested problem of Boris–Gleb scholarship. It is not a marginal philological puzzle: because these three texts are essentially the whole record of the saints, the question of which was written when, and which depends on which, bears directly on how close any of our information stands to the events of 1015. The problem has been worked since A. A. Shakhmatov’s foundational studies in the early twentieth century and remains open today; the honest position, stated plainly, is that no reconstruction commands consensus.

[Disputed: the relative dating and direction of dependence among the Skazanie, Nestor’s Chtenie, and the Chronicle’s Boris–Gleb tale are unresolved, and several distinct scholarly positions are in play.

(1) The older, Shakhmatovian framework. A. A. Shakhmatov’s source-analysis, foundational for all later work, treated the surviving texts as descending from earlier, now-lost Boris–Gleb material and reconstructed a stratified relationship among the Chronicle layers and an early hagiographical narrative. Within this tradition the Skazanie was often taken to rest on, or share a source with, the early Chronicle account, and to stand close to the earliest stratum of the cult (on Shakhmatov’s stratification and its influence, Lenhoff 1989).

(2) The priority of the Chtenie (Skazanie-later view). One major position holds that Nestor’s Chtenie is the earlier of the two Lives — composed in the late eleventh century, plausibly in connection with the 1072 translation of the relics — and that the anonymous Skazanie is the later, fuller work, drawing on the Chtenie and on the Chronicle and expanding them into its more literary and emotionally developed form, perhaps around the 1115 translation. Ludolf Müller is associated with arguments bearing on the dating and interrelation of the texts in this region of the debate.

(3) The priority of the Skazanie (Skazanie-earlier view). The opposing major position holds that the anonymous Skazanie is the earlier and more “primary” narrative — closer to the original cult-text and to a Yaroslav-era layer — and that Nestor’s Chtenie is the later, secondary reworking that conventionalizes the Skazanie’s vivid material into Byzantine vita form. A strand of the older Russian scholarship favored the Skazanie’s primacy on the ground of its concrete, less “literary-theological” character.

(4) Layering rather than simple priority. A more recent tendency, represented by Gail Lenhoff (1989) and reflected in the studies surveyed by Paul Hollingsworth (1992), resists reducing the problem to a single line of descent. On this view the dossier grew in stages — a Yaroslav-era nucleus, the 1072 and 1115 translations as occasions of expansion, the separately accreting miracle collection — so that “which came first” is the wrong shape of question for texts that were repeatedly redacted; the Skazanie and Chtenie may each combine early and late material. N. Ingham’s work on the early cult and its texts likewise stresses the complexity of the textual history over any clean stemma.

The scholars whose names mark the debate include A. A. Shakhmatov, Ludolf Müller, Gail Lenhoff, Paul Hollingsworth, and N. Ingham. The translations and the most accessible English survey of the competing reconstructions are in Hollingsworth, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (1992); Lenhoff (1989) is the fullest dedicated study of the texts and the cult. This collection does not adjudicate among the positions, and treats no date for either Life as fixed beyond the broad span of the late eleventh to early twelfth century.]

Two anchors, however, constrain the disagreement and keep it from being a free-for-all. First, the developed cult and its texts cannot predate the events: the terminus a quo is 1015, and the cult’s growth is tied to the translations of the relics — to Vyshgorod under Yaroslav, then the translation of 1072 under his sons, and the translation of 1115 under Vladimir Monomakh — which are the natural occasions for the composition and expansion of hagiography (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the translations and the cult’s promotion). Second, the latest datable miracles in the Skazanie’s attached Chudesa reach into the early twelfth century, fixing a terminus ante quem non for the dossier as a whole even if the narrative core is older (Lenhoff 1989; Hollingsworth 1992). Within those anchors — roughly the 1070s to the 1110s — the order of the two Lives is argued; outside them it is not. The layering question is treated further, from the historical side, in Dating and Embellishment.

Why the Dating Matters

It would be possible to treat the priority dispute as a specialists’ quarrel of no consequence for the saints’ veneration. It is not, for two reasons that this collection keeps in view. First, the dating governs the distance between text and event. If the earliest narrative layer is a Yaroslav-era cult-text of the mid-eleventh century, our record stands a generation from 1015; if the fullest narrative is an early-twelfth-century literary composition, the most detailed things we “know” of the brothers’ deaths — Boris’s meditations, Gleb’s pleading, the worked-up speeches — are a century of devotional reflection removed from the event, and are to be read as the tradition’s theology rather than as report (Fedotov 1946; Lenhoff 1989). Second, the dating bears on the independence of the witnesses. Because the Chronicle, the Skazanie, and the Chtenie are kin — sharing plot, motifs, and a moral frame — their agreement corroborates the tradition robustly but the event only as far as their common source reaches; if all three descend from a single early cult-narrative, three texts are in evidential terms closer to one. This is the proper application of source-criticism to a saint’s dossier, in line with the methodology this collection follows (METHODOLOGY §3.5; and the parallel handling of a thin, contested record in the St. Polycarp collection): the texts are pinned to their attestation, the miraculous is reported as what they claim, and the genuinely open questions of date and dependence are left open and named.

None of this unsettles the veneration. The Church of Rus’ did not canonize Boris and Gleb on the strength of a critical edition; it recognized in their deaths an image of Christ’s own non-resistance, and built around that recognition a cult and a literature. What source-criticism adds is honesty about how that literature came to be — and the recognition that the Skazanie and the Chtenie, whichever came first, are not transcripts of 1015 but the considered work of a Church learning to read its own first martyrs.

References

Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie in English; the introductions surveying authorship, structure, and the competing reconstructions of date and priority.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The fullest dedicated study of the texts and cult; Shakhmatov’s stratification; the layered growth of the dossier and the miracle collection; the priority debate.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The literary character and pathos of the Skazanie; the historical-theological framing of the Chtenie; the passion-bearer ideal.)
Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The Chronicle’s parallel Boris–Gleb account, the third member of the textual cluster.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The translations of the relics and the promotion of the cult under Yaroslav and his successors; the context of the hagiography’s composition.)