Ways of authors’ presence in the First Novgorod Chronicle

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the ways of authors’ presence in the First Novgorod Chronicle, such as first-person narration, rhetorical questions and exclamations, some chronological formulas. At first, they are consequently considered in fragments presumably written by a single author. After that, the researcher dwells upon similar phrases in fragments written by different authors. The combination of first- and third-person narration, cases of quotes from authoritative texts as well as attention of the chroniclers to weather phenomena, indications of a moment in time or a time interval in chronological formulas are noted. Remarks of the chroniclers from Novgorod and from Kiev are compared. The number of authors’ explications in the text of the First Novgorod Chronicle starts to decrease in the end of the 13th century. Discrepancies in the ways of the authors’ presence in the texts of the senior and junior editions of the Novgorod First Chronicle are given. Some cases of lexical and grammatical substitutions by scribes are revealed. The possibility of updating the authenticity and subjectivity of the chronicle narration through the authors’ explications, as well as cases of using similar expressions by different scribes as possible manifestations of the chroniclers’ self-awareness are discussed.