"authentic? not authentic? not authentic, again!"

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"Authentic? Not authentic? Not authentic, again!" Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor' Tale. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Review by: Charles J. Halperin Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 54, H. 4 (2006), pp. 556-571 Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41051748 . Accessed: 07/10/2014 02:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Franz Steiner Verlag is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 24.202.138.154 on Tue, 7 Oct 2014 02:19:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: "Authentic? Not authentic? Not authentic, again!"

"Authentic? Not authentic? Not authentic, again!"Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor' Tale. Harvard Series in Ukrainian StudiesHarvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Davis Center forRussian and Eurasian StudiesReview by: Charles J. HalperinJahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 54, H. 4 (2006), pp. 556-571Published by: Franz Steiner VerlagStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41051748 .

Accessed: 07/10/2014 02:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Franz Steiner Verlag is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Jahrbücher fürGeschichte Osteuropas.

http://www.jstor.org

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DISKUSSION

Charles J. Halperin, Bloomington, Indiana

"Authentic? Not authentic? Not authentic, again!"

EDWARD L. Keenan Josef Dobrovsk? and the Origins of the Igor' Tale. Cambridge, MA: Dis- tributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2003. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, xxiii, 541 pp. Figures, Appendices, Bibliography, Indexes, Cloth/

When Edward L. Keenan, Jr. published his monograph arguing that the sixteenth-century Correspondence between Tsar Ivan IV and prince Andrei Kurbskii was a seventeenth- century apocrypha,1 he did not allude to the debate of long standing over the authenticity of the twelfth-century epic poem the "Slovo o polka Igoreve" ("Lay of the Host of Igor'")» the most controversial text in all early East Slavic literature. At that time Keenan did not share the skepticism of the Igor* Tale's detractors.2 Over thirty years later3 Keenan has turned his attention to that epic and published a monograph impugning its authenticity.

A lively scholarly debate over Keenan's book is now in progress. Keenan's thesis has been the object of both pre-publication4 and post-publication5 Round Tables at national conventions in the United States, as well as of additional talks and discussions there and in

* All page references given in parentheses in the text refer to this publication. 1 Edward L. Keenan The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha. The Seventeenth-Century Origin of the "Cor-

respondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV. With an appendix by Daniel C. Waugh. Cambridge, MA 1971.

2 Keenan Josef Dobrovsk^ p. xxii, although Keenan earlier referred to his "long-held position of non- combatant skepticism" (p. xx).

Keenan's conclusions have been well-known since talks he gave as long ago as 1996, and to a wider audience, from more recent articles: Edward L. Keenan Was Iaroslav of Halych Really Shooting Sultans in 1185?, in: Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998) pp. 313-327 and elsewhere; idem Turkic Lexical Elements in the Igor Tale and the Zadonshchina in: Slavonic and East European Review 80 (2002) 3, pp. 479-482, which is consistently miscited in Keenan Josef Dobrovsk^ pp. 147, n. 35; p. 399, n. 2, and (Bibliography) p. 506 as the "Slavic and East European Review". This article elicited a reply from Nicholas Poppe A Further Note on the Turkic Lexical Elements in the Slovo o polku Igoreve and the Zadonshchina in: Slavonic and East European Review 82 (2004) 1, pp. 74-78 before the appearance of Keenan Josef Dobro vsk£

Round Table "The Igor Tale in Perspective," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Convention, Pittsburgh, November 22, 2002, chaired by Daniel Kaiser, with Bill J. Darden, Rich- ard Hellie, Norman W. Ingham, David Kirk Prestel, and Dean Stoddard Worth participating. Unfortu- nately, I did not attend that session.

5 Round Table "Josef Dobrovsk^ and the Origins of the Igor Tale," American Association for the Ad- vancement of Slavic Studies Convention, Boston, December 7, 2004, moderated by Donald Ostrowski, with presentations by Edward L. Keenan, Ladislav Matejka, Simon Franklin (in place of the absent Hans Rothe), and Francis Thompson. Even though this panel was scheduled in the last time-slot of the conven- tion, when many people have traditionally already left, it drew such an overflow crowd that it had to be moved to a bigger room, and it still exceeded that larger room's capacity even after additional chairs were imported.

Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54 (2006) H. 4 O Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, Sitz Stuttgart/Germany

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Russia and Europe.6 Book reviews by Robert Mann7 and Ireneusz Szarycz8 are in print, Olga Strakhov has published two relevant articles,9 Andrii Danylenko a review article,10 and Andrei Zalizniak devoted a substantial chapter in his book on the Igor* Tale to Keenan's monograph.11 Simon Franklin's review article is forthcoming.12 Norman Ingham, who has taken the lead in the US in organizing discussions of Keenan's arguments, such as the first AAASS Round Table mentioned above, and also publicized his critique in lectures and on- line, is preparing an article which will supersede his prior expositions. Ingham will discuss linguistic methodology, literary studies and folklore. These will not be the last words on the subject.14

I have no intention, for reasons which will become obvious, of attempting a comprehen- sive review of this discussion comparable to my previous surveys of the debate over the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence.1 However, I have been intrigued by some methodologi- cal parallels between Keenan's two monographs. It is after all striking, to say the least, that the only two topics that have sufficiently motivated Keenan to research, write and publish monographs, especially at such a great interval, have both been attacks on the authenticity of texts. Not that ¿here's anything wrong with that. Scholarship benefits enormously from its gadflies and iconoclasts, even when they are wrong, or especially when they are wrong. There are continuities and discontinuities in Keenan's arguments which shed some light on his newer publication.

6 In November, 2004 a discussion was held at a meeting of the Slavonic and East European Studies Group at Oxford University, in which Francis Thompson, Simon Franklin and Susan Reynolds partici- pated (in: Newsletter of the Early Slavic Studies Association 18,1 [April, 2005] p. 12). 7 In: Slavic and East European Journal 48 (2004) 2, pp. 299-302; Norman Ingham kindly called my attention to this review.

8 In: Slavic Review 64 (2005) 1, pp. 218-219. v Olga B. Strakhov The linguistic Practice of the Creator of the Igor' Tale and the Linguistic Views of Josef Dobrovsk^ in: Palaeoslavica 11 (2003) pp. 36-67 [in Russian: O. B. Strakhova Iazykovaia praktika sozdatelia "Slova o polku Igoreve" i lingvisticheskie vzgliady Iosifa Dobrovskogo in: Slaviano- vedenie [2003] no. 6, pp. 33-61; all references will be to the English version] and idem A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale: A Backward Step in: Palaeoslavica 12 (2004) 1, pp. 204-238. 10 Andrh Danylenko The Latest Revision of the Slovo o polku Igoreve, or Was Jaroslav of Halych Really Shooting From His * Altan' in 1185?, in: Slavonic and East European Review 84 (2004) 2, pp. 921-935 (p. 921, n. 2 refers to Ukrainian-language reviews inaccessible to me). 11 Andrei Anatol'evkh Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" - Iosif Dobrovskii in: "Slovo o polku Igoreve": vzgliad lingvista. Moskva 2004 pp. 265-323, but the entire volume is relevant to this discussion.

12 Simon FkANKLiN The Igor* Tale: A Bohemian Rhapsody?, the basis for his AAASS remarks, forth- coming in: Kritika I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to Professor Franklin for providing me with a pré-publication copy of his essay. (Now in: Kritika 6 [Fall 2005] 4, pp. 833-845, which arrived too late to incorporate page references into this essay). 13 Norman Ingham Once More Around the Igor' Tale in: Russian History/Histoire russe, forthcoming.

For example, Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" p. 4, cites an un- published article by V. M Zhivov, which one hopes will see the light of day. 15 Charles J. Halperin A Heretical View of Sixteenth-Century Muscovy: Edward L. Keenan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha in: JBfGOE 22 (1974) pp. 161-186; idem Keenan's Heresy Revisited, ibidem 28 (1980) pp. 481^99; idem Edward Keenan and the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence in Hind- sight, ibidem 46 (1998) pp. 376-403.

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Keenan's thesis is neatly encapsulated in his title: the Igor* Tale is not authentic, but was written by the great Czech Slavist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Josef Dobrovsky . The volume consists of five main chapters, a postscript, and four appendices.

In Chapter 1 'The Legend of the Igor' Tale" (pp. 1-63), Keenan recapitulates the history of the Igor' Tale, which, following the skeptical tradition, he relates to the "Ossian craze" of the late eighteenth century. Keenan's iconoclastic dissection of the accepted scholarly opin- ion on the Igor' Tale is of a piece with his earlier, equally informed and sarcastic, philippic against the received wisdom on the Ivan IV-Kurbskii Correspondence. Keenan concludes that the Igor' Tale has always been, and deserves to be, suspect. He paints a very unflatter- ing portrait of the central protagonists in the discovery and publication of the text as ethi- cally challenged. Musin-Pushkin always mixed 'fact with fantasy," his contemporaries thought him a liar (for example, p. 38, n. 118; p. 40; n. 128). Kalaidovich's retrospective account of the fate of the manuscript is impugned by his mental illness and concomitant memory loss (p. 49); it was Kalaidovich who proposed that the original manuscript had perished in the 1812 Moscow fire, which no one else has ever corroborated. Malino vskii, who bore the primary responsibility for editing the text for publication in 1800, later tried to foist the forged "1375" Bardin manuscript of the Igor* Tale on Count Rumiantsev (pp. 52- 55). This colorful crew, Keenan implies, simply cannot be trusted. However, not one of them, he avers, had the linguistic skill to compose the Igor* Tale: "It is highly improbable that any East Slav active in 1800 could have composed this unique text" (p. 62).

Keenan rejects all evidence that the Igor* Tale manuscript even existed, calling the Musin-Pushkin manuscript a "ghost". This contention has been vigorously contested; Strakhov and Franklin point out that Keenan omits evidence that Karamzin and Elagin saw the manuscript.16

The authenticity of the Igor* Tale was called into question almost immediately upon its publication for what Keenan terms valid reasons: unanswered questions of "literary history, linguistic probability, and common logic" (p. 8); the absence of any comparable "East Slavic secular poetical narrative" in Rus' until the fifteenth century (p. 29); and lexical, geographi- cal, and historical contradictions and incongruities in its putative realia (pp. 60-61). Keenan summarizes the attacks on the text's authenticity by the French Slavist Mazon and the Soviet historian Zimin. Keenan is unsparing in his narration of the fierce tactics used by the Igor' Tale's defenders, including his own former teacher, the great linguist Roman Jakobson, against those who questioned its authenticity. Keenan quotes from a now published letter of Academician D. S. Likhachev to Academician B. A. Rybakov on the need to crush Zimin' s objections. Keenan calls the letter "damning" and "shocking" (p. 21, n. 61; p. 25 n. 80). If anything, he understates. It is repulsive that the man who became the voice of the Russian cultural tradition and the conscience of the academic intelligentsia would collaborate on any task, no matter how "patriotic," with a rabid anti-Semite and chauvinist. Zalizniak, who has a very low opinion of Zimin' s competence as a linguist, nevertheless insists that Zimin' s courage in disparaging the Holy Grail of Soviet scholarship deserves respect.17

In Chapter 2 *The Witnesses" (pp. 65-98), Keenan discusses the relationships among the surviving copies of the text of the Igor* Tale, the published version, the Catherine copy (so- named because it was supposedly written for Catherine the Great, which Keenan believes is

wrong), and especially a series of hand-written textual segments in the possession of Ma- lino vskii called the "Malinovskii Fragments." Keenan's textual comparison leads him to the

16 Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 206-217. 17 Zalizniak No veishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" p. 159.

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conclusion that the Malinovskii Fragments were not excerpts from the complete text of the Igor' Tale, since they can be removed from that text without impairing it, but rather were written separately and then inserted into the text. Keenan discerns a two-phase composition of the Igor* Tale: the text now known as the Igor* Tale is the result of the fusion of an "original" version and the Malinovskii Fragments. Critics agree that Keenan' s analysis of the relationship of the Malinovskii Fragments to the text is unconvincing.18

In this chapter Keenan displays the same textual skills he brought to bear on Kurbskii's First Epistle to Ivan IV and Ivan's First Epistle to Kurbskii, replete with the requisite tex- tological stemmas and charts. Keenan uncovered two redactions of Kurbskii's First Epistle to Ivan IV just as he now sees two versions of the Igor* Tale. His elucidation of the evolu- tion of the manuscripts echoes his earlier analysis of the manuscript miscellanies and con- voys which contained the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence. In that case, however, Keenan drew significant conclusions about the authenticity of the Correspondence from his textual and convoy analysis; here Keenan ends his discussion by observing that none of his conclu- sions about the witnesses entails any consequences for the question of the origin or author- ship of the text.

In Chapter 3 "The Blue Abbé" (pp. 99-136), Keenan introduces his candidate for author of the Igor* Tale, Dobrovsky. Keenan highlights his mental illness, which included psy- chotic hallucinatory episodes (pp. 108-1 17), although Dobrovsky at his worst could still function as a scholar. Dobrovsky visited Russia in 1792-1793 and worked in Russian ar- chives on manuscripts of the very texts someone would have needed to create the Igor* Tale. Keenan argues that Dobrovsky and Dobrovsky alone had the requisite linguistic expertise and textual access to do so. His scholarly behavior was not always above reproach. Do- brovsky did not uncover the forgery of "Old Czech" poems by his students "until he had been grievously insulted on other grounds" (p. 124). It is not just Dobrovsky's knowledge and textual access that qualify him as the most probable author of the Igor* Tale, but also the limits of his knowledge of East Slavic, East Slavic Slavonic, and modern Russian, a point Keenan makes explicitly in the following chapter.19 In rebuttal Strakhov objects that the Igor* Tale does not reflect Dobrovsky's distorted view of Church Slavonic grammar and linguistics; Zalizniak seconds her analysis.20

Keenan toys with the idea of using Dobrovsky's mental illness as an explanation for his memory loss, that Dobrovsky defended the authenticity of the Igor* Tale on its publication because he had "forgotten" he wrote it. Keenan also tentatively connects the text's attention to mental states with Dobrovsky's history of mental illness (p. 228), a very forced point since these Ossianic clichés were ubiquitous at the time. Keenan concludes this chapter by determining that there is sufficient evidence for an "indictment" of Dobrovsky for authoring the Igor* Tale, a curious term, as we shall see, because Keenan is quite ambivalent on whether "fabricating" (which he prefers to "forging") the Igor* Tale was a "crime."

Chapter 4 "Reading the Igor* Tale*' (pp. 137-396) is obviously the "heart" of the book, 260 pages out of 434 of text, approximately 60%. This chapter is a verse by verse, line by line, almost word by word examination of the lexicon of the Igor* Tale, primarily looking for Bohemisms and anachronistic anomalies which preclude its authenticity. Comprehensive

18 Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 223-230. Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o pollai Igoreve" p. 278. Strakhov The Linguistic Practice of the Creator of the Igor* Tale passim, and idem A New Book

on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 230-237; Zaljzniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 312-314.

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multi- volume dictionaries of the text, admittedly by its defenders, provided Keenan with an invaluable starting point. It appears to me that Keenan is more exacting in defining what is "unique" than the Igor* Tale's defenders, because he will not accept a parallel word unless it has the same meaning, nuances, prefixes and suffices, part of speech, prepositions, etc. In general the defenders of the Igor* Tale try to amplify the number of lexical similarities be- tween it and late twelfth-century Kievan Rus' literary texts in order to decrease its "unique- ness" and blunt the objection that its vocabulary is out-of-place at that time. In explaining his methodology (pp. 137-154), Keenan emphasizes how little "reliable" textual material there is, original or, grudgingly, translated, to attest to the language available to a late twelfth-century author. Keenan rejects all "so-called" (Keenan' s quotation marks) folklore, to which Robert Mann has already replied at length. Everyone agrees that it is very difficult to understand the Igor* Tale, which overflows with unique words. Even the Igor* Tale's defenders have been compelled to emend the text in order to interpret or translate it. Keenan follows this tradition, but he proposes a radically different cultural context for doing so. Keenan attempts to analyze the words of the text from the point of view of Dobrovsky' s language skills, that is, as if they were really Czech and Old Czech in origin, written by someone imitating what he thought was twelfth-century East Slavic, but wasn't, because of the weaknesses of his expertise. Dobrovsky did not distinguish between Ukrainian and Be- larusian, on the one hand, and Russian on the other. He thought East Slavic (Rus') contained features of Old Czech and Church Slavonic which it did not. The result of these flaws in his knowledge were "inter-Slavic malapropisms," mistakenly taken for "poetic" license by traditionalists (pp. 149-151). Keenan also identifies words which he thinks Dobrovsky just made up. The language of the text constitutes, to Keenan, the most persuasive clue to Do-

brovskiy's authorship. Keenan does not discuss the text from start to finish. Rather, for unstated reasons, he be-

gins with the Malinovskii Fragments, which he believes were written later, and then moves on to the remaining text, which he argues was written earlier. Although Keenan often pro- vides English translations of the passages he thinks he has corrected or deciphered, he does not provide a complete English translation of the Igor* Tale, which would have been outside his purpose, although it would have helped readers to appreciate how Keenan' s interpreta- tion changes our understanding of the text by comparing it to previous English translations.

Keenan' s linguistic methodology has elicited major objections by linguists and philolo- gists. Ingham will discuss the legitimacy of extracting words or part of words out of context in order to compare them to Czech. Ingham, Strakhov,21 Danylenko22 and Zalizniak all insist that lexical analysis which takes no account of other spheres of linguistics, such as grammar, graphics, dialectology, phonology, semantics and orthography, is unacceptable. Keenan contends such matters can be left to another discussion. Zalizniak observes that Keenan is

continuing a line of argument common to critics of the Igor* Tale, even the very few critics who are linguists, of reducing linguistic analysis to lexicon, and then finding foreign words. Mazon found Gallicisms, Trost Germanisms, Aizetmüller Polonisms.23 These authors, in-

cluding Keenan, argued that "unique" words in the Igor* Tale were of foreign origin. Zal-

21 Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 230-237. 22 1 am puzzled by Szarycz's review, which finds the monograph as a whole '^unconvincing," adorned by "sometimes swift and forced conclusions," yet describes Chapter 4 as the "best and most convincing." 23 Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 13, 19, 29-30, 206-264. Zalizniak observes that Keenan did not cite German and Austrian critics of the Igor* Tale from the 1970s and 1990s, either from ignorance or from a judgment they were not worth citing (ibidem p. 206, n. 44).

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izniak replies, following Zhivov, that the birchbark documents contain many "unique" words, some of which only match Polish, Czech, or Serb, that the Zadonshchina, if the Igor

*

Tale were not authentic, would contain many unique words, which could not have been written by Dobrovsky and cannot be Czech. Zalizniak expresses amazement that Keenan explicates a word in the Igor* Tale as a Bohemism despite the fact it appears in the Zadonshchina. To have forged the Igor* Tale Dobrovsky had to be a linguistic genius who anticipated the results of linguistic research for two centuries and at the same time a careless scholar who made mistakes.24 Obviously, Zalizniak does not find Keenan's contradictory assessment of Dobrovsky' s scholarly prowess convincing. Since I am not a linguist and do not know Czech, I have to recuse myself from expressing an opinion on whose linguistics arguments are more persuasive.

Keenan has buried numerous observations corroborating his evaluation of the text's er- rors in history, geography, genealogy, even ornithology, within his massive lexical analysis. It would have been useful if this material had been brought together and published sepa- rately in a more accessible format.

Keenan' s "reading" of the text highlights its playfulness, word-play, sound-play, bilin- gual (Czech and Russian) puns, and "painstaking wordsmithery" (p. 370). As with Keenan's analysis of the creative process behind Kurbskii's First Epistle to Ivan, one instinctively wonders whose "playfulness," whose creativity, and whose imaginative verbal talents are at issue, Keenan's or the author's, since Keenan is quite capable of describing his purpose as "to lay the ghost to the 'Lay of the Host of Igor'" (p. xvii).

Keenan places enormous weight upon his supposed discovery in the Igor* Tale of a He- braism, Urim, from an untranslatable Biblical phrase, urim vthummim, apparently referring to part of a priest's breastplate, a matter of such great interest in the late eighteenth century that it wound up on the seal of Yale University (pp. 31 1-323, reproduction of seal p. 321), and an Italian architectural term, altana, meaning a small tower (pp. 329-331, illustration p. 331), neither of which could possibly have been written in the late twelfth century.

Keenan's imaginative re-creation of the creative process in the writing of the Igor* Tale has not, in the end, led him to an exalted evaluation of its aesthetic value, an issue to which he explicitly accords secondary importance: "For the essentially forensic purposes of this book, it doesn't really matter whether the [Igor* Tale] is a great masterpiece or a playful trifle" (p. xxi). He does permit himself the observation that its literary value is "modest"; Keenan is more impressed with the author's "wordcraft" than his artistry, although he rates the Zadonshchina even lower on the literary food chain. The Igor* Tale would seem to be more of a puzzle than a pleasure to read.

A reader ignorant of Czech is definitely at a serious disadvantage dealing with a chapter of comparisons between passages from the Igor* Tale (thankfully, like all passages from East Slavic texts, in Cyrillic) and quotations from Old and modern Czech.25

Keenan's "opponents" reject outright his claims for urim instead of u Rim ("at Rim," a place-name), and s altana ("from the altana") instead of sultana (sultan),26 which Keenan considers his most irrefutable evidence.

24 Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" dd.120-125, 177. 296-297. 322. Francis Butler commented to me that since all of Keenan's supposed Bohemisms can be attested in

East Slavic, there is no excuse for looking for Bohemisms, and a reader of the book need not know Czech. Zalizniak similarly observes that not one of Keenan's Bohemisms is conclusive since alternative explana- tions arc also available (Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igorcve" p. 286). Keenan sometimes claims that Bohemisms provide better, not exclusive, meanings.

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A final comment on this chapter. Dobrovsky's students defamed his intellectual merits when they were trying to discredit their mentor for unmasking their forgeries. Their slander was reflected after Dobrovsky's death in the words of Sir John Bowring, publisher of an anthology of Czech literature, that Dobrovsky "was [...] a grammarian, not a poet. [...] He had the verbo-mania upon him, and prized any three Slavonian letters which he could dis- cover combined in the five or six centuries of Bohemian history, more than the coin- collector values his brass Otho [...]" (p. 122). Judging by Chapter 4, Keenan may share verbo-mania with Dobrovsky.

In Chapter 5 "Conclusions"27 (pp. 397-429) Keenan pulls together otherwise scattered observations on the relationship of the Igor* Tale to the Zadonshchina and other texts, his previously published material on "orientalisms" in the Igor* Tale, and a more "speculative" reconstruction of the process of its creation and dissemination, including Dobrovsky's moti- vation. Keenan endorses Mazon's notion that the Igor* Tale, with its devotion to princely and Slavic unity, was a response to the Partitions of Poland and the Treaty of Ja§i, geo- graphically oriented on Austrian Galicia. It could be objected that a twelfth-century East Slavic epic would have constituted an anemic response to such earth-shattering events.

The text per se concludes with a postscript called Envoi2* (pp. 431-434) in which Keenan ruminates on relevant research questions to which answers may never be found.

The text is followed by four appendices, 1: "The Text of the Editio Princeps [first publi- cation]" (pp. 435-458), 2: "Dobrovsky's Underlinings in Skaryna's Bibliia" (pp. 456-463), 3: 'The First Translations of the Igor* Tale" (pp. 465-480), and 4: "The Chronology of Elagin's Quotations from the Igor* Tale" (pp. 481-483), the first published reference to the text. The book concludes with the "Bibliography" (pp. 485-529),

9 an invaluable "Index of Lexical Items of the Igor* Tale" (pp. 531-534), and a "Subject Index" (pp. 535-541).

It should be obvious that "Josef Dobrovsky and the Origins of the Igor* Tale" is a sub- stantial piece of scholarship, impressive in its scope and breadth, not to be dismissed lightly. In addition to familiarizing himself with the vast scholarship on the text, Keenan has done archival research in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the Jakobson archive at MIT), Prague (Dobrovsky materials), and St. Petersburg. Keenan remains a formidable polemicist. It is no surprise that defenders of the authenticity of the Igor* Tale have thought it worth their time to respond to his arguments. However, in the past all challenges to the text from any source have always met with a fierce response, so Keenan' s case is par for the course.

Keenan' s research on the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence elicited one, thankfully atypical, ad hominem argument from the Russian émigré historian Nikolay Andreyev that Keenan had not consulted anyone who was "Russian in culture," a nationalist slur at Keenan' s Ukrainian- American colleague Omeljan Pritsak. Given that scholars in Russia and the Ukraine are likely to react as one to Keenan' s critique of the Igor* Tale, at least there

26 Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 234-236 about u Rim and pp. 236-237 about saltana; Zaljzniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 301-307 on u Rim and pp. 307-309 on saltana.

27 This chapter is called 'Findings" in the "[Table of- CJH] Contents". 28 To my inquiry, Professor Keenan informed me (e-mail, Jan. 3, 2005) that he used envoi in an archaic

meaning, "postscript, parting words". 29 Note that of two seminar papers that Keenan, ever the supportive pedagogue, cites in the text

(Keenan Josef Dobrovsktf p. 61 n. 193; p. 148 n. 36), only one is included in the Bibliography. 30 Even Zalizniak calls it "interesting," "well-founded," "clearly written", and superior to the research of several German and Austrian linguists who have attacked the authenticity of the Igor* Tale (Zaljzniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" p. 265).

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should be no repetition of that kind of comment concerning Keenan's new monograph. However, apparently31 a different apparently ad hominem argument has surfaced in Russia, namely that Keenan is not a linguist. No one who has read Keenan's previous research would be foolish enough to dismiss his linguistic skills out of hand. He has traced Iranian etymologies of upper Volga place names and derived Muscovite chancery language from Ottoman Turkish formulae. The question is not whether Keenan is a professional linguist, but whether his linguistic arguments are valid or not. If Keenan was referring to Zalizniak, then it should be noted that Zalizniak is, if not contemptuous, then highly skeptical of lin- guistic arguments by non-linguists, or even bad linguistic arguments by bad linguists. The point is that Zalizniak does not just dismiss Keenan's linguistic arguments ex cathedra but engages in a detailed scholarly refutation. Zalizniak' s disciplinary pride against amateur poachers cannot be held too strongly against him.32

Keenan's linguistic turn inspires a different observation. It is fair to say that until he be- gan working on the Igor* Tale, Keenan was not known for his expertise on Czech linguis- tics. Indeed he admits as much by thanking Ladislas Matejka in his "Preface" for assistance with Czech because of his "nearly complete innocence in matters Czech" when he began research. It is apposite to recall that in 1980 Keenan described himself as a "stumbling auto- didact in Latin", the language of Dobrovsky's greatest opus, his Institutiones. It is safe to say that Keenan does not lack for self-confidence in his acquired linguistic skills.

Languages also prompts another comment on the intended audience of this monograph. Obviously Keenan's argument requires linguistic comparison of East Slavic, in various forms, with Czech, both Old and modern. The highest target audience of the monograph would thus be defined by knowledge of East Slavic, Russian, and Czech, which would favor philologists.34 Even so, Keenan has chosen to make the volume even less accessible to scholars who wish to sample the book despite ignorance of Czech by quoting material he is not using for textual comparison in the original Czech, as well as Russian, French, German, Italian, and Ukrainian, not to mention the occasional word in the Hebrew or Greek alpha- bets. Granted, illustrating Dobrovsky's unique mixture of Latin and Czech does serve to make a point, but there was nothing stopping Keenan from translating even those passages into English.

Keenan's linguistic arguments necessitate the usage of the appropriate technical vocabu- lary, thus lexeme (p. ix), morphology (p. 139, n. 7), pleophany (p. 159, n. 57; p. 417) and pleophonic (pp. 197, 359, 416), epenthetic (p. 260), hendiadys (p. 319, n. 798), "voiced velar spirant became a voiced stop" (p. 377, n. 1077), desinence (p. 382), intervocalic liquids (p. 414), jotization (p. 415) and joticized (p. 416). In addition there is the terminology of textual and literary study: pericope (p. 6), hapax legomena (p. 13, explained p. 139), Editio Prin- ceps (passim, acronym EP' opinio communis (p. 71), incipit (p. 78), recto, verso (p. 91), dittography (pp. 91, 354), realia (p. 128), exordium (p. 146), paraphrasis and paraphrastic

31 Judging from Keenan's remarks at the AAASS. Again and again Zalizniak argues that only linguistic arguments are scientific, objective, and con-

vincing enough to resolve the question of the authenticity of the Igor* Tale, that compared to history or literature, linguistics is the most "effective" discipline (e.g. Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 10, 177). 33 Edward L. Keenan Review of Hugh G. Graham (ed.) The Moscovia of Antonio Possevino, S.J. Pittsburgh 1977, in: Slavic Review 39 (1980) pp. 1 1 1-113, quotation p. 1 1 1.

Historians not willing to hazard Czech linguistics, or even textual comparison, can still benefit greatly from Chapters 1, 3, the "Introduction" to 4, 5, and "Envoi."

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(pp. 167, 231), locus classicus (p 185, n. 191), trope (p. 207), onomatopoetic (p. 218), apos- trophic (p. 224), lectio difficilior (p. 241), florilegium (p. 304), and convolute (p. 397). Fi- nally, there is Keenan's habit of employing expressions from French, Italian, German, and Latin of varying commonality in English usage in his prose: grosso modo (pp. 83, 126), rarissime (p. 104), en vogue (p. 119), comparandi (p. 182) and comparando, (p. 182), mot juste (p. 213), ben trovato (p. 236, n. 394), via dolorosa (p. 261, n. 519), sotto voce (p. 337, n. 873), and Gelehrter (p. 401). In describing the text of the Igor* Tale, Keenan strongly emphasizes its polysemia (p. 154) and polysemy (p. 171). Keenan's cosmopolitan multilin- gualism is part and parcel of his own writing style, but it suggests another affinity between the polyglot Keenan and the polyglot Dobrovsky.

The impact of Dobrovsky on scholarship cannot equal that of Apocrypha. Keenan was the first specialist to raise any serious questions about the authenticity of the works attributed to Kurbskii and Ivan IV. (Only the modernist S. M. Dubrovskii did so in 1956, more as a comment on the application of the "cult of personality" to Ivan IV than anything else, and the specialist in Muscovy Platonov had only written that it was possible to do so, which he did not). As Keenan's survey of previous historiography shows, he is merely one in a long line of scholars to question the authenticity of the Igor* Tale. While his application of the lexical method to Czech is new, Keenan's research can hardly be as path-breaking in its implications as his attempt to turn sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite cultural history upside down.

Keenan's case against the Igor' Tale does not match the variety of his arguments against the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence. Concerning the latter Keenan raised a broad series of cultural, textual, convoy and manuscript, linguistic, and historical issues. In the case of the former, he mentions a wide array of issues, but largely confines himself to broad generaliza- tions or very specific examples buried in Chapter 4, because he is mostly relying on prior scholarship. On the Igor* Tale, Keenan puts his emphasis squarely on lexicon.

The issue of Kievan context - or, in Keenan's view, lack of context - is not as clear-cut as he suggests. The argument that the Igor* Tale does not "fit" the late twelfth century be- cause there are no other examples of secular epic poetry from that era is logically circular, since if the Igor* Tale is authentic, then secular epic poetry is part of the context. To com-

pare one text to East Slavic culture as a whole requires separating it from other texts.35 All the skeptics are saying is that the Igor* Tale was unique of its genre in its time, which no one disputes. Unique does not mean not authentic, however.

Moreover, Keenan provides a ready objection to his own statements about the "mis-fit" between the Igor' Tale and the late twelfth century. He so limits the number of Reliable" texts which evidence twelfth-century culture that it becomes possible to argue, reversing his own intent, that we do not know enough about the period to draw any conclusions.36

Nor has Keenan or any other skeptic dealt with a paradox created by their rejection of the authenticity of the Igor* Tale on the grounds that no other secular epic is extant from the twelfth century. Without the Igor* Tale, how does one explain the Zadonshchinal Is it not

unique in genre for Muscovy? Is it secular (a very complex matter)? The author of either the

Igor* Tale or the Zadonshchina was the first person on his block to write an epic poem; why should probability favor one over the other?

35 This reasoning was once suggested by Michael Cherniavsky in a colloquium at Columbia University either during Fall 1967 or between the Fall 1969 and Spring 1971. 36 This point is also noticed by Zauzniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" p. 283.

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The popularity of the Igor* Tale is also a sensitive point. Even the text's defenders can attest only a very small number of instances which "prove" that it was read, or at least quoted from memory - namely, its quotation in the Pskov "Apostle" in 1307,37 and its use by the fifteenth-century author and seventeenth-century copyists of the Zadonshchina and the sixteenth-century author and seventeenth-century copyists of the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche (another member of the "Kulikovo cycle"). The traditional schema posits the survival of a single, sixteenth-century Pskov manuscript of the Igor* Tale, which was dis- covered in the eighteenth century and burned in 1812. Such a paltry literary history pre- cludes arguing that the Igor* Tale was "the most popular literary work" in Ancient Rus'.39 Nevertheless, an unpopular text can still be authentic, as well as a literary masterpiece.

The issue of textual influences requires special treatment. The Igor* Tale, an epic about an unsuccessful campaign against the Polovtsy in 1185, and the Zadonshchina, an epic about a successful campaign against the Tatars in 1380, are so close textually that it is im- possible they were written independently; one must be dependent on the other. If the Zadonshchina is primary, then the Igor* Tale simply cannot be an authentic work of Kievan Rus' literature, since no text can be older than its sources. Keenan's pronouncements on this issue are therefore singularly important. He notes that traditionalists see the Igor* Tale as primary, but skeptics from die beginning argued that "the evidence is ambiguous as to the direction of influence" (p. 9). "[T]he questions of the relationship of the [Igor* Tale] to the several versions of the Zadonshchina and Skazanie [o Mamaevom poboishche], and the interconnections of those texts, are so complex as to be all but insoluble on hitherto available evidence" (p. 30). Keenan cannot, however, mean by this that he thinks the direction of influence between the Igor* Tale and the Zadonshchina is "insoluble," because he has no doubts whatsoever that in all cases of parallel passages between the Igor* Tale and the Zadonshchina, that the Zadonshchina is primary (Chapter 4, passim). Keenan just shows the matching passages and discusses how the author of the Igor* Tale adopted and adapted tex- tual elements from the Zadonshchina to serve his own ends. This is because Mazon and Zimin have already laid out all this evidence, and all Keenan has to do is agree with them. Since these passages rarely reflect Bohemisms, Keenan's contribution here is relatively passive.

The textual relationship between the Igor*s Tale and the Zadonshchina is more compli- cated than that, however, because of the nature of the Zadonshchina' s manuscripts. Skeptics have argued that the Kirillo-Belozerskii manuscript represented a Primary, Short Redaction of the Zadonshchina, roughly the first half of the "füll" text, and the other manuscripts a Secondary, Long Redaction. Since the Igor* Tale parallels the entire Zadonshchina, that meant it was closer to the later redaction of the Zadonshchina than the earlier, making it

37 Aleksandr Bobrov Problema podlinnosti "Slova o polku Igoreve" i Efrosin Belozerskii, in: Acta Slavica Iaponia 22 (2005) pp. 280-281 further notes parallels to the Igor* Tale in the 'Tale of Afanasii Nikitin". Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 116-117, advances a much longer list of texts which he or D. S. Likhachev believe a writer would have had to know to forge the Igor* Tale.

38 For convenience, I use Keenan's datings of these texts. His argument that a seventeenth-century manuscript of the Molenie of Daniil Zatochnik was a source of the Igor* Tale is refuted by Strakhov, so no reverse textual relationship need be posited; see Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale pp. 227-228.

This argument was suggested by a comment of Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich in a discussion in his Moscow apartment some time during 1971-1972. Bobrov Problema podlinnosti "Slova o polku Igoreve" p. 258, calls attention to the paucity of the Igor* Tale's manuscript tradition.

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more likely that the Igor* Tale was based on the Zadonshchina than the other way round (pp. 127, 400-404). Defenders of the Igor* Tale advocated a different textological schema for the Zadonshchina, which placed the Kirillo-Belozerskii and Synodal manuscripts in one group, the other five manuscripts (including the Undol'skii) in the other, thus rejecting the notion of "short" and a "long" redactions in favor of an original "full" prototype which was abbreviated in the Kirillo-Belozerskii manuscript. Keenan is the first critic of the Igor* Tale to accept the Zadonshchina schema of the defenders of the Igor* Tale.40

Keenan contends that the two versions of the Igor* Tale drew on different manuscripts of the Zadonshchina (pp. 85-87), and the author of both versions of the Igor* Tale "double- dipped" into manuscripts of the Zadonshchina. This obviates a major previous argument of the skeptics, which does not phase Keenan. Dobrovsky, Keenan claims, "utilized at least two, and probably several, copies of the Zadonshchina" and "in any case, the anachronisms mentioned above [...] [Hebrew Urim and Italian altana] make it impossible that the Zadonshchina [...] was derived from the" Igor* Tale (pp. 394-395). The evidence that Do- brovsky saw manuscripts of the Zadonshchina will be considered below, but it is obvious that Keeenan must take it as already proven that Dobrovsky wrote the Igor* Tale in order to infer that the textual relationship between it and the Zadonshchina cannot be decisive for its authenticity. Keenan later argues that the traditional arguments in favor of the Igor* Tale are not dispositive, and hence the issue of the textology of the Zadonshchina is moot (p. 402). Keenan wants it both ways concerning the relationship of the Igor* Tale and the Zadonshchina - they both prove the Igor* Tale is secondary, and they don't count. Keenan's discussion of the Zadonshchina is obscured by being distributed across multiple chapters of the book.41 Strakhov criticizes Keenan's conclusions on the relationship of the two versions of the Igor* Tale to different manuscripts of the Zadonshchina.42 Keenan's schema of the connections between versions of the Igor* Tale and manuscripts of the Zadonshchina is far too clever, involved, artificial and convoluted to be persuasive.

Another of Keenan's observations is tossed off so cavalierly that it is barely intelligible. Keenan finds it "hard to imagine" that a Muscovite of the fifteenth century, i.e. the author of the Zadonshchina, would have any "literary or programmatic" purpose to inspire him to turn to a twelfth-century text (pp. 402-404). Indeed, it is "hard to imagine," if one follows Keenan's other articles in rejecting any cultural continuity between the secular elites of Kievan Rus' and Muscovy, an issue that cannot be explored here.

To compose the Igor* Tale in the eighteenth century, its author must have had access to the Zadonshchina. There is no other possibility. Keenan's discussion of Dobrovsky's access to the manuscripts of the Zadonshchina and other related texts merits close scrutiny (p. 127). "One can confidently assume," Keenan writes, that Dobrovsky saw the Kirillo-Belozerskii

manuscript, although "there appears to be no indication of it in Dobrovsky's notes." Strakhov presents evidence that Dobrovsky could not have seen this manuscript.43 Accord- ing to Keenan, Dobrovsky did see and, as was his wont, take copious notes on Synodal 790,

40 Bobrov Problema podlinnosti "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 238-298, who does not mention Keenan, inversely accepts the Zadonshchina textual scheme of the sceptics and the primacy of the Igor* Tale, but he dates the Igor' Tale to no eaiiier than the second decade of the fifteenth century, and strongly implies that Efrosin of Belozero, who Bobrov identifies with prince Ivan Dmitrievich Shemiakin, composed the Igor* Tale. Bobrov attributes the Zadonshchina to Efrosin as well.

41 Keenan Josef Dobrovsky "Subject Index" s.v. Zadonshchina, p. 541. 42 Strakhov A New Book on the Origin of the Igor Tale pp. 21 8-223. 43 Ibidem pp. 218-219.

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"and in particular knew the Zadonshchina from that copy, although he seems to have kept that information to himself." If he kept that information to himself, then how does Keenan know it? Because the Igor* Tale used the Synodal manuscript, which is a circular argument. Strakhov questions whether the Synodal manuscript Dobrovsky saw was 790.44 There is no record Dobrovsky ever saw the Undol'skii manuscript. Moreover, Keenan continues, "Do- brovsky never, so far as I am aware, mentioned the Zadonshchina, which clearly he had read." Dobrovsky handled the Pskov "Apóstol," but he left no record of the scribal note with the textual similarity to the Igor' Tale. "But it is highly unlikely that a scholar of his experi- ence and prescience would fail to look for a colophon on the last page of so ancient a manu- script. He simply must have seen it" (p. 129). That Dobrovsky "must have seen" a manu- script or a scribal note means nothing more and nothing less than "It cannot be demon- strated" that Dobrovsky did any such thing.

In his past and present research Keenan defers to no one in the rigor of the methodologi- cal rules he applies to traditional historiography. He does not, however, apply these same rules to his own assertions. Let us apply them to the assertion that Dobrovsky read the Zadonshchina: - Dobrovsky never wrote, publically or privately, that he had seen the Zadonshchina, - Dobrovsky never took any notes which could only have come from the Zadonshchina,

despite the fact he was a "prodigiously industrious note-taker" (p. 105). - Dobrovsky never cited any lexical material in print which could only have come from the

Zadonshchina. Conclusion, there is absolutely no evidence that Dobrovsky read the Zadonshchina.

One may assume that Dobrovsky read the Zadonshchina or speculate that he did, but Do- brovsky 's supposed familiarity with the Zadonshchina cannot be used to substantiate his candidacy for authorship of the Igor* Tale.

It may be true that no historian can ever be totally consistent methodologically, but Keenan' s previous research included such methodological incongruities as his acceptance of the authenticity of epistles between Ivan IV's mother, Elena Glinskaia, and his father, grand prince Vasilii III, of which the manuscripts have disappeared, and his near-endorsement of the textual priority of Lyzlov's Skifskaia istoriia over Andrei Kurbskii's "History of the Grand Princes of Moscow" when manuscripts of Kurbskii's "History" antedate Lyzlov's work, despite according great significance in textual analysis to physical manuscripts and manuscript datings.

Keenan is not alone in inferring that in the late eighteenth century many scholars were familiar with "tales of the Don" (p. 402), but this statement is disingenuous. All scholars knew some narrative of the battle of Kulikovo Pole, most commonly what is now known as the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche45 through its multiple publication in the Synopsis and its fusion with the "Expanded Redaction" of the "Chronicle Tale of 1380" in the printed Nikon Chronicle. But no one ever wrote that he had seen the epic poem now known as the Zadonshchina. No one published the Zadonshchina until 1853. No one mentioned the Zadonshchina during the half-century debate over the authenticity of the Igor* Tale between 1800 and 1853, although anyone who did not notice the textual link between the two simply had not read them. It is inconceivable that, had the Zadonshchina been known, it would not have been published, or that it would not have been invoked in the debate over the authen-

44 Ibidem pp. 220-223 on the Synodal manuscript, pp. 219-220 on the Undol' skii manuscript. Keenan rightly calls attention to the textual affinities of this text to the Igor* Tale and the

Zadonshchina, but space precludes discussing the topic.

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ticity of the Igor* Tale, probably then as since by both its defenders and detractors. Indeed, by Keenan' s own depiction, the Ossianic mood of the Russian public guaranteed that the Zadonshchina would have received an enthusiastic welcome. This is more than a question of Dobrovsky's silence, it is a far broader question which has long been a staple of defenders of the Igor' Tale, and in nearly five hundred pages of text and appendices, Keenan alludes to it once. In commenting on Moiseeva's question as to why Dobrovsky, who she believes saw the manuscript of the Igor' Tale, did not mention it for seven years, Keenan wonders why he did not mention the texts of the Zadonshchina or the Skazanie, both of which he "must have seen". Keenan goes on to write that there is "no doubt [...] that several versions of both the Zadonshchina and the Skazanie were widely known in learned circles by 1813, and certainly even earlier" (p. 408). Such an assertion is only half true. It is true of the Skazanie, even

though it was not mentioned as a separate text until Kalaidovich in 1824 (p. 408, n. 33). But it is not true of the Zadonshchina. Of course manuscripts of the Zadonshchina existed in the late eighteenth century, else they could not have been discovered later. However, it cannot be proven that anyone, including Dobrovsky, knew of the existence of the Zadonshchina until 1853.

Keenan seems to be a practitioner of the Collingwood school of history, since he puts himself into the mind of historical figures and then thinks through why they did what they did. Of course, this is a common practice, but it is particularly obvious when a historian is

calling the person into whose mind he has entered a liar. Keenan is so convinced there never was nor could have been an "original" manuscript of the Igor' Tale that he can write, with- out resorting to the conditional mode or hypothetical reasoning, that "Kalaidovich knew

perfectly well that he had never laid eyes on any ancient copy," and the same applied to Malinovskii (p. 59), regardless of what they actually wrote.

Imputing motive becomes more blatant when considering Dobrovsky. From the com-

plexity of the Igor' Tale Keenan concluded that *this text was not tossed off in an evening -

even a hypomanic evening" (p. 370). Therefore, Keenan writes, he has surrendered "his earlier view [...] that the text was created as a diversion in a short time" (p. 396). Dobrovsky did not intend to publish the first version of the Igor' Tale. It is not known why or how

Elagin got his hands on it. It is impossible to discern how the Malinovskii Fragments wound

up in Malinovskii' s hands, since in all likelihood Dobrovsky wrote them in Prague. Keenan writes point-blank that "Malinovskii merged the two groups of passages (perhaps on the basis of indications of the originals)" (p. 420), although in Keenan's presentation Malinov- skii seems singularly unqualified to have done so, and the parenthetical caveat, which would relax the skills Malinovskii would have needed, is pure invention. Keenan implies that Dobrovsky's students or Russian contacts destroyed incriminating material on his

authorship of the Igor' Tale. It is "obscure" whether Dobrovsky knew what was going on in Russia between the time he gave and/or sent his "jottings" to Elagin and the publication of the Igor' Tale. "Dobrovsky's surprise on learning of the appearance in print of the [Igor' Tale] must have been considerable" but his behavior

"is not hard to explain: given his hopes for Russia's world-historical mission, his low opinion of Russian philology, and his knowledge that, being so closely based on the Zadonshchina, the text was in some sense largely authentic, he saw no risk, and indeed some gain for a Slavic revival, in maintaining his silence."

46 Strakhov A New Book on the Origin of the Igor Tale p. 205, n. 6, accuses Keenan of contradicting himself on whether Dobrovsky wrote the entire text, including the Malinovskii Fragments, and who assembled the "final" text

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And he was "disingenuous" on the question of its authenticity (p. 421). While today it seems "inconceivable" that he

"could simply have forgotten [Keenan's italics], fifteen years after the fact, that he threw to- gether some imitative fragments during lighthearted moments in Russia",

but that conclusion cannot be ruled out entirely because of his mental illness and medica- tions (p. 421, n. 58). Dobrovsky did not "forge" the Igor* Tale, he merely wrote "a few harmless passages in imitation of the Zadonshchina" in the "spirit of the age," in a time when "forgeries, imitations, staged discoveries of antiquities of all types were common- place" (p. 424).

It is "improbable but not impossible" that Dobrovsky simply did not recognize his own work, as Keenan claims he himself has done, but it is more likely Dobrovsky was "con- ducting a charade for reasons of his own" (p. 428).

Keenan more than once also transports himself into the mind of Roman Jakobson, argu- ing that subconsciously Jakobson interpreted the Igor* Tale on the basis of Jakobson' s ex- tensive knowledge of Czech literature (for example, pp. 264, n. 451; p. 337, n. 873; p. 349, n. 934; p. 384, n. 1107). Keenan quotes at length Jakobson's observation that maybe the Hanka forgeries helped stimulate Czech literature (pp. 433-434), and goes on to ask whether Jakobson "consciously or unconsciously" also had the Igor* Tale in mind when he wrote that judgment. How Jakobson, in Keenan's view, could have employed Czech in under- standing what he almost religiously considered a twelfth-century Rus' text or equated it with a forgery when he fiercely defended its authenticity is most peculiar.

Returning to Dobrovsky, Keenan then acknowledges the great role the Igor* Tale played in the development of Russian letters. He calls the text "an original and inspired work of pan-Slavic Ossianism," and ends his monograph with the following sentence: 'That this brilliantly mystifying concoction was created by the greatest Slavist of his age is but a minor inconvenience - and at least he had the decency to keep it to himself." (p. 434).

We begin commentary with Keenan's inexplicable logical contradiction:47 passages in the latter part of the book that Dobrovsky had only written a few "harmless passages" seem to reflect what Keenan has already labeled his discarded "earlier" view that the text was a short-term "diversion" instead of a more "serious" and time-consuming creative project, only begun in Russia and continued in Prague. Perhaps Keenan thinks Dobrovsky viewed the Igor* Tale both ways, the same way Keenan allows for the possibility that Dobrovsky wrote the text when sane or insane, or forgot it because he was insane or quite sane but "disingenuous." In any event, Keenan leaves huge gaps in the chain of events as to how he thinks the Igor* Tale evolved for which he can find no evidence or solution; in short, Keenan's conception is woefully incomplete.

Next we note that Keenan's previously low aesthetic judgment of this "puzzle" undergoes a metamorphosis into a "brilliantly mystifying concoction". Keenan ascribes a cavalier, not to say blasé, attitude on the part of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literati to- ward what only cynical modern scholars would call "forgery". This contradicts his own evidence that Dobrovsky rejected the "Old Czech" forgeries of his students, and that in Russia the Bardin forgery was unmasked. Yes, there were a great many attempts at forgery, but genuine scholars, although sometimes fooled, did not take kindly to them. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Dobrovsky would have violated his own standards of integrity

Strakhov A New Book on the Origins of the Igor Tale p. 205, n. 6, in general finds Keenan's pres- entation of his thesis contradictory, including two contradictory derivations of the same term (ibidem p. 205). See previous note.

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570 Charles I. Halperin

had he let a "fake" text of his own creation be accepted as genuine, let alone actively and vigorously defended its authenticity in public. In oral presentations both Matejka and Thompson vigorously rejected any such blot on Dobrovsky' s escutcheon, despite the fact Matejka agrees with Keenan that the Igor* Tale is not authentic.48 The ultimate exercise in counter-intuitive logic is Keenan' s gratuitous and patronizing praise of Dobrovsky for hav- ing the "decency" to conceal his useful fraud, since the absence of evidence that Dobrovsky admitted he wrote the Igor* Tale becomes evidence of exactly the opposite.

Applying Keenan' s own methodological standards to Dobrovsky' s authorship is not con- ducive to his conclusions: - There is no manuscript of the Igor* Tale or any segment of it such as the Malinovskii

Fragments in Dobrovsky' s handwriting until after its publication. - Dobrovsky never mentioned the text nor cited a single unique phrase from it in public or

private before its publication. - Therefore, Dobrovsky was unaware of the Igor* Tale until its publication. Keenan relies upon conspiracies and duplicity to explain the absence of direct evidence of

Dobrovsky' s authorship, for which he compensates by speculation. In his research on the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence Keenan proposed that prince

Semen Shakhovskoi wrote Kurbskii's First Epistle to Ivan, although Keenan subsequently changed his explanation of the circumstances of its composition from a genuine epistle from Shakhovskoi to tsar' Mikhail later masked as an apocrypha, to direct artistic creation, just as he has shifted his theory of how and why Dobrovsky composed the Igor* Tale from short- term diversion to long-term fabrication. But in the first case Keenan was attributing author-

ship only to the first work in a series, the remainder of which were, in his estimation, written

by others. Shakhovskoi' s authorship, regardless of his motives, was not crucial to Keenan' s case against the authenticity of the Correspondence, which depended on textual and convoy analysis. In the current case Keenan is dealing only with a single text, so authorship is far more significant. Keenan listed Shakhovskoi only as the most probable of several possible authors of Kurbskii's First Epistle to Ivan, he was not the sole contender. According to Keenan, however, Dobrovsky is the only person in the late eighteenth century who could have composed the Igor* Tale (p. 125), since all other candidates from Russia and other Czechs lacked the linguistic expertise (p. 60) and manuscript access to the Zadonshchina

(p. 62). If Dobrovsky did not write the Igor* Tale, then Keenan is up the proverbial creek without a paddle, because he has no backup author. If Dobrovsky did not write the text, then

by Keenan's own admission no one in the late eighteenth century could have written it, and the text, as some of Keenan's critics have noticed, must be authentic, not the conclusion Keenan intended. Authorship is thus not only much more important now than regarding the

Correspondence, it is crucial. The significance of Keenan's designation of Dobrovsky as author goes still farther. If

Dobrovsky is excluded as author - because such authorship cannot be demonstrated by direct evidence and because it contradicts Dobrovsky's scholarly integrity - then there is no motivation whatsoever to look for Bohemisms in the Igor* Tale. No East Slavic author -

Russian, Belarusian, or Ukrainian - in the Russian Empire is likely to have written a text with Bohemisms. If Dobrovsky is eliminated as author, then, bluntly, there was no purpose

48 Hugh L. Agnew Josef Dobrovsky. Enlightened Hyper-Critic or Pre-Romantic Forger?, in: Kritika 6 (Fall 2005) 4, pp. 845-855, accepts all of Keenan's arguments, including on Dobrovsk?. Agnew is a specialist in modern Czech history.

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"Authentic? Not authentic? Not authentic, again!" 571

in Keenan's writing most of "Josef Dobrovsky and the Origins of the Igor' Tale", whose

primary argument is from Bohemisms. Keenan observed in 1998 that he had hoped by 1985, or even 1990, that the debate over

Apocrypha would have been over, one way or the other.49 Here Keenan pontificates that it might take a generation to remove the "consequences" of belief in the authenticity of the Igor* Tale from "academic literature" (p. 433). If Keenan thinks this monograph will initiate that process, then his confidence still vastly exceeds his perspicacity in predicting the recep- tion of his research.50

Summary

In his new monograph Edward L. Keenan ascribes the authorship of the "Tale of the Host of Igor'" to the eighteenth-century Czech Slavicist Josef Dobrovsky. Keenan employs some of the same meth- odologies and concepts to impugn the authenticity of the Igor' Tale as he did over thirty years ago in questioning the authenticity of the Ivan IV-Prince Andrei Kurbskii Correspondence. However in the case of the Igor' Tale he places most of his emphasis on linguistic evidence of Bohemisms and anach- ronisms in the Tale. His monograph has generated a lively debate, in which his critics have raised serious objections to his arguments and attribution.

49 Edward L. Keenan Response to Halperin, "Edward Keenan and the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspon- dence in Hindsight", in: JBfGOE 46 (1998) p. 404.

For an indication of what Keenan is up against, note that Strakhov A New Book on the Origin of the Igor Tale p. 238, considers Dobrovsky more successful as fiction than scholarship. Zalizniak refers to Keenan's "fantasies" and concludes that Keenan's erudition and energy have not produced reliable re- sults. Keenan's book reads like an "advertisement," a one-sided presentation of the author's thesis which dismisses his opponents as "fanatics" whose ideas need not be refuted (Zalizniak Noveishii kandidat na avtorstvo "Slova o polku Igoreve" pp. 281, 310, 273-274).

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