[1] In most manuscript copies, its full title is Tale about the Life of the Brave, Blessed, and Great Prince Alexander Nevskii.
He is presented as having defended the northwestern borders of Rus against a Swedish invasion in the legendary Battle of the Neva (July 1240, for which he was nicknamed "Nevsky" in the 15th century, long after the Life was written), defeated the Livonian Order at the Battle of Lake Peipus in 1242 and paid a few visits to Batu Khan to protect the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality from the Khazar[clarification needed] raids.
[6] Yurii Begunov (1965), basing himself on thirteen stand-alone manuscripts,[9] dated the first redaction of the Life of Alexander Nevsky to the 1280s, hypothesising that it had been composed in the Rozhdestvensky (Nativity) monastery in Vladimir-on-Kliazma.
[10] Begunov reasoned that during this recension, a passage was added mentioning that metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev declared that "the sun has set in the Suzdalian Land" at Nevsky's funeral.
[11][c] While this view soon became dominant amongst scholars (including Begunov, Günther Stökl, Norman Ingham, S. A. Zenkovsky, John Fennell, and O. V. Tvogorov) for decades, Mari Isoaho (2006) and Ostrowski (2008) firmly rejected Kirill's authorship, pointing out numerous flaws in Likhachev's reasoning,[d][e] and internal and external evidence to the contrary.