Life of Alexander Nevsky
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| Life of Alexander Nevsky | |
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| Russian: Житие Александра Невского | |
| Language | Old East Slavic and Old Church Slavonic |
The Life of Alexander Nevsky (Russian: Житие Александра Невского, romanized: Zhitie Aleksandra Nevskogo) is an Old East Slavic hagiography about Alexander Nevsky from the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
Textual criticism
[edit]Manuscripts
[edit]The Life has been preserved in 13 manuscripts,[1] with the oldest extant manuscripts dating from the 14th century,[2] and the youngest to the 17th century.[1]
Yurii Begunov published the first list of all known 13 extant manuscripts in 1965:[1]
- 1377, Laurentian Codex, short fragment.[1][3]
- c. 1486, State Historical Museum, Synodal Collection, No. 154.[3][4]
- Pskov Cave Monastery.[3]
- c. 1560–1570, Life of Alexander Nevsky (illuminated manuscript).
Textual history
[edit]Historian Vasily Klyuchevsky (1871) was the first to make a distinction between different editions of the Life of Alexander Nevsky, naming the oldest edition the "First Edition" (Russian: Первоначальная редакция, romanized: Pervonachal’naya redaktsiya).[2]
Yurii Begunov (1965), basing himself on thirteen stand-alone manuscripts,[5] dated the first redaction of the Life of Alexander Nevsky to the 1280s, hypothesising that it had been composed in the Rozhdestvensky (Nativity) monastery in Vladimir-on-Kliazma.[6] Begunov reasoned that during this recension, a passage was added mentioning that metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev declared that "the sun has set in the Suzdalian Land" at Nevsky's funeral.[6]
According to scholar Donald Ostrowski (2008), the original text of the Life of Alexander Nevsky was a secular military narrative, written by a layman in the late 13th century, who made no mention of "the Suzdalian Land", nor of "the Rus' Land".[5] Some hagiographic motifs would be inserted by a cleric a century later, but still no reference to "Suzdalian/Rus' Land".[5] Ostrowski argued that the earliest redaction of the Life should be dated to the mid-15th century, because it used the Novgorod First Chronicle Older Recension as a source.[5] It would be this editor who added an allusion to Volodimer I of Kiev's conversion of "the Rus' Land", and two mentions of "the Suzdalian Land", one of them the setting sun passage.[5]
Contents
[edit]The Life of Alexander Nevsky describes the life and achievements of Aleksandr Yaroslavich (1220/21–1263),[7] a prince of Novgorod (intermittently between 1236 and 1259) and a grand prince of Vladimir (r. 1252–1263). He is presented as having defended the northwestern borders of Rus against a Swedish invasion in the legendary Battle of the Neva (July 1240, for which he was nicknamed "Nevsky" in the 15th century, long after the Life was written), defeated the Livonian Order at the Battle of Lake Peipus in 1242 and paid a few visits to Batu Khan to protect the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality from the Khazar[clarification needed] raids. The work is filled with 'patriotic spirit' and achieves a 'high degree of artistic expressiveness' in its glorification of Alexander's deeds and those of his warriors as heroic.[citation needed]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d Isoaho 2006, p. 19.
- ^ a b Isoaho 2006, p. 17.
- ^ a b c Begunov 1965, p. 16.
- ^ Okhotnikova, V. I. "Житие Александра Невского". Pushkin House (in Russian). Retrieved 14 December 2024.
- ^ a b c d e Halperin 2022, p. 55.
- ^ a b Halperin 2022, p. 54.
- ^ Isoaho 2006, p. 1.
External links
[edit]- Translation into modern Russian by the Federal Fund of Science Courses
- Audio recording of the full text
Bibliography
[edit]- Begunov, Yurii K. (1965). Памятник русской литературы XIII века "Слово о погибели русской земли." (Pamyatnik russkoy literatury XIII veka. “Slovo o pogibeli Russkoy zemli”) [A Monument of Rus' Literature of the 13th Century. "The Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land."] (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka. p. 229. Retrieved 14 December 2024.
- Halperin, Charles J. (2022). The Rise and Demise of the Myth of the Rus' Land (PDF). Leeds: Arc Humanities Press. p. 107. ISBN 9781802700565.
- Isoaho, Mari (2006). The Image of Aleksandr Nevskiy in Medieval Russia: Warrior and Saint. Leiden: Brill. p. 428. ISBN 9789047409496. Retrieved 13 December 2024. (public version of PhD dissertation).