A Text That Survives Only Inside Later Books

There is no manuscript of the chronicle as such. What survives are later compilations that open with it, the earliest of them copied in the late fourteenth century and another in the fifteenth, each continuing into its own period with its own material and each differing from the others in the shared opening section. The work has to be reconstructed from those witnesses, and the reconstruction is an argument rather than a transcription.

Textual scholarship early in the twentieth century went further and proposed that the chronicle is itself a compilation, assembled at Kiev from earlier chronicle collections that no longer exist, with successive redactors adding, reordering and rewriting to suit the political situation of their moment. That layered model has been debated in detail ever since, but the basic point is not in dispute: the text has a history before the version we can read. The consequences for using it are practical. A statement in the chronicle is evidence for what someone at a particular stage of compilation wished recorded, and dating that stage is the first question in any argument that rests on it. The ascription of the whole to the monk Nestor comes from within that later tradition and is not accepted as established.