Primary Chronicle

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.

The chronicle's most famous passage sends envoys from Vladimir to inspect the religions on offer. They visit Muslims among the Volga Bulgars and object to the prohibitions, hear the Latin Christians and find nothing in their worship, question Jews and ask where their homeland is, and then reach Constantinople, where the liturgy in the great church leaves them unable to say whether they were on earth or in heaven. The report decides the matter.

As history the account has obvious difficulties. It arranges the alternatives in a sequence that leads to the conclusion the compiler wants, gives each rejected faith a single memorable failing, and turns a political and dynastic decision, negotiated with an empire and sealed by a marriage, into an aesthetic judgment. Comparable conversion narratives elsewhere use the same device. As a document of what the tradition wanted to say about itself, it is one of the most consequential passages in Slavic literature. It supplies the founding scene for Christianity in the East Slavic lands, and its authority has been claimed repeatedly since, in ecclesiastical argument and in national narrative, by more than one modern state with a stake in the inheritance. The atlas records the narrative and its literary character together, because the passage has done most of its work as a story.