The Book of Vles: Saga of a Forgery

Maya Kaganskaya's The Book of Vles, Saga of a Forgery, published in Jews and Jewish Topics in Soviet and East-European Publications in 1986, is a scholarly article establishing the so-called Book of Veles, a purported ancient Slavic religious text, as a modern forgery rather than a genuine ancient document. Its authority rests on Kaganskaya's philological analysis demonstrating the text's actual modern origin, and it is cited by later scholarship on Slavic neopaganism as part of the standard case against the Book of Veles's authenticity. Its limit is that it is one scholarly article making the forgery case rather than a comprehensive history of the text's subsequent reception and continued use within some modern Slavic neopagan movements despite that established forgery finding, which this atlas addresses through its own separate account of that reception.