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"The Tale of Igor’s Campaign" – Unraveling the Author’s Identity
Boris Rybakov’s seminal works, published in the early 1970s, propose a bold hypothesis: the author of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was a 12th-century Kievan boyar, Pyotr Borisovich. Rybakov argues that this figure also wrote a lost chronicle, surviving fragments of which appear in the Hypatian Codex and Vasily Tatishchev’s “History of Russia.” By reconstructing the literary style and political ideology of this hypothetical chronicler, Rybakov concluded that the same hand authored the “Tale.”
However, skepticism persists regarding the authenticity of Tatishchev’s “news” – information in his work that cannot be verified against surviving ancient sources. In 1994, historian Leonid Milov used early computational methods to test this hypothesis, but his analysis neither confirmed nor refuted the shared authorship. The question remains open.
Despite this, Rybakov’s methodology – treating the “Tale” as a unique historical witness – remains relevant for modern scholars. He interprets the work as a treatise on the foundations of Russian statehood, its pitfalls, and the author’s anxiety for the country’s fate. Rybakov’s portrait gallery of the “Tale’s” participants convincingly demonstrates that only a perceptive contemporary, a living participant in those events, could know the hidden motives and relationships of all characters. Such intimate knowledge, Rybakov argues, is beyond any later imitator.
This book is for historians, philologists, political scientists, and students of humanities.
