A History of Old Russian Literature

Every other book on this list was written to argue. This one was written to teach.

Vladimir Kuskov's university survey covers the writing of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries: the Primary Chronicle, Ilarion's Sermon on Law and Grace, Vladimir Monomakh's Instruction, the lives of Boris and Gleb, The Lay of Igor's Host, the tales of the Time of Troubles, and the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum. It is a proper textbook, organised by period and genre, and it is one of the few serious English-language accounts of the field.

What makes it unexpectedly interesting is the problem it cannot avoid. A Marxist-Leninist textbook on this material faces a difficulty no other volume in the catalogue faces: the literature is, on its own surface, wholly religious. Kuskov states the difficulty himself and states it honestly. Of the surviving parchment manuscripts from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, he notes, only twenty do not deal with religious concerns - twenty out of roughly fifteen hundred. Books were stored and copied primarily by monks, who had little reason to preserve secular texts, so the overwhelming majority of what survives is ecclesiastical.

He even concedes the distortion this introduces into his own subject, observing that Old Russian literature consequently appears more ecclesiastical than it may in fact have been. That is a scholar telling his reader on the first pages that the archive is a church.

The manuscript closed around 1979, citing scholarship recent to the printing.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.