The Tale of Igor's Campaign. In Search of the Author

His fundamental studies “The Tale of Igor's Campaign and Its Contemporaries,” followed by “Russian Chronicles and the Author of The Tale of Igor's Campaign,” were published by Boris Alexandrovich Rybakov in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, he first... expressed the version that its author was the Kyiv boyar of the second half of the 12th century, Pyotr Borisovich. Rybakov believed him to be the author of the chronicle, the original of which has been lost, while adaptations have been preserved in the Ipatiev Chronicle and in Vasily Tatischev's “History of Russia.” By reconstructing the literary style and political ideology of the hypothetical chronicler, Rybakov concluded that the “Tale” belonged to the same author. There were, and still are, significant doubts about the authenticity of the “Tatischev's accounts” (those pieces of information from his work that cannot be cross-verified with surviving reliable ancient sources). In 1994, this hypothesis was examined by historian Leonid Milov, one of the pioneers of the computerization of historical science. This analysis did not confirm or unequivocally disprove the fact that these texts were written by the same author. The question remained open. However, the very methodology of studying the source, using the author of the “Tale” as a unique historical witness, remains relevant for the contemporary researcher. The interpretation of the “Tale” as a treatise dedicated to the very foundations of the formation of Russian statehood, the pitfalls of this process, and the concern for the fate of the country emanating from the “Tale of Igor's Campaign,” from its nameless creator, allows for a new perspective on the problem of using historical sources.
Rybakov's portrait gallery of the participants of the “Tale” convincingly proves: only the most insightful contemporary, a living participant in those events, could so accurately know the intricacies of all his characters, their relationships with each other, their not always obvious intentions, their weaknesses, their virtues, and their yet unmanifested potentials. Such impeccable knowledge, in the scholar's opinion, is not accessible to an imitator from any subsequent era.