History, Nationalism, and the Written Language of Early Rus'

Abstract

Books, as a rule, reflect in important ways the common assumptions of the milieu in which they were written. Soviet books are inevitably influenced by the atmosphere of the last few decades. In 1990 it is no longer possible to pretend to evaluate Soviet scholarly works unless we include some attention not only to the known ideological requirements but in particular to the tacit presuppositions that underlie the overt premises and theses utilized in specific investigations. Foremost among them is a complacent Russocentric point of view that sees anything Russian as automatically superior. A major consequence is the fundamental axiom that a Russian ethnos, vaguely associated with a wider Slavic social and kinship unity, existed in the shadowy centuries long before the Slavs burst onto the historical scene by crossing the Danube early in the 500s. Essentially this unexamined principle rests on the eighteenth-century view that because the new Russian Empire is mighty and is possessed of a vital and burgeoning culture, Russians must always have been powerful and cultured. Though its roots go back to sixteenthcentury chronicles, the twentieth-century versions of this Russian nationalist axiom come largely from V. N. Tatikev's Icmopurz poccuiicKas, first published in 1768.1 A corollary was the unexamined belief that the familiar seventeenth-eighteenth century model of legal and social relationships based on writing must also have been valid in the ninth and tenth centuries. Of course the princes who ruled Rus' before Volodimir required written accounts, it was assumed, and therefore they had a chancellery with archives. Because the Rus' were widespread, powerful, and cultured at least by 900, the argument runs, they must have made considerable use of Old