Abstract

This chapter explores how Rus' chronicles from the late eleventh century onwards included deeds of princes, town assemblies, invaders, and reverend men and women. These chronicles make up the bulk of the historical writing available for the entire period. Compiled in a few urban centers, they focus on their respective regions and only fitfully offer panoramas of goings on throughout the land of Rus'. They neither formulate nor imply a philosophy of historical development, issuing forth streams of factual data. The one exception is the Povest' Vremennykh Let, a compilation and historical composition looking beyond recorded time to answer fundamental questions. It is both incomparable and significant: incomparable, in that no subsequent work articulated quite such a vision of Rus' as a polity to be held together; significant, in that its text was incorporated into subsequent Rus' chronicles until the sixteenth century.

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