Dating and Embellishment

Beneath the elaborate hagiography of Boris and Gleb lies a small core of securely datable fact, and the historian’s task is to keep the two apart. What can be fixed with confidence — the deaths of 1015, the existence of a cult by the mid-eleventh century, the translation of the relics recorded under 1072 — is overlaid by a rapidly developed devotional narrative: the long speeches and psalms placed in the brothers’ mouths, the deliberate doubling of motifs between Boris and Gleb, the assimilation of their deaths to the Passion of Christ, and a miracle collection that visibly grew over time. This file sets out the layers, names the scholars who have analyzed the textual strata (Shakhmatov, Müller, Ingham, Lenhoff, Fedotov), and states the honest residue: a core event richly overgrown with legend.

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

The Two Things That Must Be Kept Apart

The narratives of Boris and Gleb are among the most artful in early Slavic literature, and their artistry is exactly the problem for the historian. A reader of the Skazanie meets Boris meditating at length on the vanity of earthly glory, reciting psalms as his killers gather, foreseeing his death and embracing it; meets Gleb pleading in the accents of a frightened boy and then yielding; meets the devil prompting Svyatopolk and angels attending the victims. None of this is reportage. It is hagiography doing what hagiography does — shaping a death into a meaning. The discipline this section applies, per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, is to pin the devotional material to the texts that attest it without certifying it as event, and to ask, separately, what can be securely dated as fact underneath. The answer is that the core is real but small, and the overlay is large and early.

What Can Be Dated Securely

The deaths of 1015

That Boris and Gleb died in 1015, in the violence following Vladimir’s death on 15 July of that year, is as secure as anything in early Rus’ history. It is attested by the whole Rus’ tradition and corroborated externally by Thietmar of Merseburg’s near-contemporary notice of the succession struggle (Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon; Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; and see Who Killed Them). The bare event — two princely sons of Vladimir killed in the contest for Kiev — is the bedrock; what is built on it is what requires sifting. (That a third brother, Svyatoslav, also died in flight belongs to the same secure stratum of event, even where the agency is disputed.)

An early cult, by the mid-eleventh century

A cult of the brothers was in existence well within the eleventh century, not merely after the great twelfth-century redactions. The evidence is convergent: the dedication of churches at Vyshgorod, the early liturgical commemoration, and the integration of the brothers into the dynastic and ecclesial self-understanding of Yaroslav’s reign all point to veneration taking hold within a generation of the deaths (Lenhoff 1989; Fedotov 1946; and see The Formation of the Cult). The cult is thus not a late literary construction projected backward; something was venerated early, even if the texts that survive to describe it are later and layered.

The translation of 1072

A fixed point in the cult’s development is the translation of the relics recorded under the year 1072 in the Chronicle, when the relics of Boris and Gleb were solemnly moved to a new church at Vyshgorod in the presence of the sons of Yaroslav and the metropolitan — an event the Chronicle dates and describes, and which a second translation under 1115 would later echo (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1072; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; and see Vyshgorod via the cult section). The 1072 translation matters for dating because it is a datable public act around which textual and liturgical material clusters: it gives a terminus by which the cult was established and ceremonially elaborate, and it serves the textual critics as a chronological peg for the growth of the narrative and miracle traditions.

These three things — the deaths of 1015, the early cult, the translation of 1072 — are the secure scaffolding. Almost everything else in the surviving narratives belongs to the devotional overlay, and developed, much of it, fast.

The Accreted Embellishments

The speeches and the psalms

The most conspicuous embellishment is verbal. The Skazanie in particular places in the mouths of Boris and Gleb long, theologically polished speeches and extended quotations from the Psalter, composed in the idiom of Byzantine-Slavic hagiography rather than the speech of eleventh-century princes (the Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; on the literary character, Fedotov 1946). Boris’s meditation as death approaches, his psalm-laden prayer, Gleb’s lament — these are the hagiographer’s art, the means by which the deaths are interpreted as willing, Christ-like self-offerings. No source could have recorded such interior monologues; they are constructed to carry meaning, and the careful reader takes them as the tradition’s theology of the deaths, not as transcript.

The doubling of Boris and Gleb

A second mark of literary shaping is the deliberate doubling of the two brothers. The narratives pattern Gleb’s death on Boris’s: both are warned, both pray, both refuse resistance, both are killed by treachery (Boris by Svyatopolk’s men, Gleb by his own cook at the killers’ urging), both are assimilated to the same model of meek non-resistance. The parallelism is too neat to be wholly historical; it is the work of a hagiography that has fused two deaths into a single category — the passion-bearer — and narrated them as matching panels of one diptych (Lenhoff 1989, on the literary construction of the paired cult; and see A New Category of Sanctity via the cult section). Where the doubling is tightest, the suspicion of embellishment is strongest, since the historian expects two real deaths to differ in their particulars more than two literary set-pieces do.

The assimilation to Christ’s Passion

Underlying both the speeches and the doubling is the deepest embellishing impulse: the assimilation of the brothers’ deaths to the Passion of Christ. The Skazanie and Chtenie present Boris and Gleb as imitators of the suffering Christ, dying without resistance, forgiving their killers, offering themselves — the whole vocabulary of the Gospel Passion is laid over the political murders to make them legible as holy (Fedotov 1946; Ingham, on the passion-bearer typology and its Christ-conformity). This is not deception but interpretation: it is how the Church of Rus’ understood what had happened. But for the historian it means that the texts’ portrait of why and how the brothers died — willingly, meekly, in conscious imitation of Christ — is theological construction laid over an event whose actual character (resignation? helplessness? a failed bid resolved into submission?) the sources no longer let us recover.

The growing miracle collection

Finally, the miracle collection grew over time, and visibly so. The healing miracles and the wonders at the shrine attached to the cult are not a fixed deposit but an expanding one: the later redactions and the appended miracle-tales carry material absent from the earlier strata, and the collection of posthumous wonders accumulated across the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the cult flourished (Lenhoff 1989; and see The Healing Miracles via the miracles section). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, these are reported as what the texts attest, pinned to their attestation, and never certified as fact; for the purpose of dating, their importance is that their growth is itself a datable phenomenon — a measure of how fast and how far the devotional narrative outran the bare event.

The Relationship to the Text-Dating Problem

The layering of the legend cannot be separated from the unresolved question of how the surviving texts relate to one another and when each was composed — the text-dating problem set out in The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie. The two problems are one problem seen from two sides: to ask which embellishments are early and which late is to ask which text is early and which late, and how each depends on a hypothesized earlier source.

This is the terrain of A. A. Shakhmatov’s analysis of the textual strata. Shakhmatov’s source-critical work on the early Rus’ chronicles and hagiography posited layers of redaction and lost earlier sources behind the surviving texts, and his method — reconstructing hypothetical earlier versions from the relations among the survivors — frames every modern attempt to date the Boris-and-Gleb material (Shakhmatov, on the textual strata of the early Rus’ tradition). On Shakhmatov’s kind of analysis, the surviving Skazanie and Chtenie are not the first tellings but developed forms, behind which lie earlier, simpler accounts — so that the elaborate speeches and the dense doubling belong to the later shaping, while a barer narrative of the killings stands behind them. Ludolf Müller and Norman Ingham, among others, have pursued the same set of questions — the relative priority of the Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie, their dependence on a common source or on the Chronicle, and the consequent dating of the developed legend — without the field reaching consensus (Müller and Ingham, on the relations and dating of the texts; Lenhoff 1989, surveying the debate).

The upshot for dating-and-embellishment is this: the direction of growth is agreed — from a barer event toward an ever-richer devotional narrative — even where the details of which text grew from which, and exactly when, remain contested. The embellishments can be ranged on a relative scale (the long speeches and tight doubling later, the bare killings earlier) with more confidence than they can be pinned to absolute dates.

The Honest Residue

What survives the sifting is modest and real. At the bottom: two princes, sons of Vladimir, killed in the succession violence of 1015, dead before Yaroslav’s victory of 1019, venerated within a generation, their relics translated in a datable ceremony of 1072. Over that core: a devotional narrative that developed rapidly and richly — speeches and psalms the princes never spoke, a doubling that fused two deaths into one type, an assimilation to Christ’s Passion that reinterpreted political murder as voluntary martyrdom, and a miracle collection that kept growing. The relationship between core and overlay is the relationship between an event and its meaning, and the Church of Rus’ invested the event with meaning faster and more fully than almost any other in its early history. The historian’s residue — a core event overlaid by a swiftly developed legend — is not a debunking of the cult but a description of how it was made; the veneration is a fact of history even where the narrated details are theology. The reader who keeps the secure scaffolding and the devotional overlay distinct holds the honest picture.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The deaths s.a. 1015; the translation of the relics s.a. 1072.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie; the speeches, psalms, and the paired narration of the deaths.)
Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon (composed to 1018). (External, near-contemporary corroboration of the 1015 succession violence.)
Shakhmatov, A. A. (the textual-critical analysis of the strata and lost sources behind the early Rus’ chronicle and hagiographical tradition; cited generically as the foundation of the source-stratification approach).
Müller, Ludolf (studies of the Boris-and-Gleb texts, their relations, and their dating; cited generically).
Ingham, Norman W. (studies of the passion-bearer typology and the textual relations of the Boris-and-Gleb hagiography; cited generically).
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The literary construction of the paired cult; the growth of the miracle collection; the survey of the text-dating debate.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The literary character of the speeches; the Christ-Passion assimilation.)