Textual criticism of the Primary Chronicle

Textual criticism or textology of the Primary Chronicle or Tale of Bygone Years (Old East Slavic: Повѣсть времѧньныхъ лѣтъ, romanized: Pověstĭ vremęnĭnyxŭ lětŭ,[a] commonly transcribed Povest' vremennykh let[1][2][3][4] and abbreviated PVL[b]) aims to reconstruct the original text by comparing extant witnesses.

[5] This has included the search for reliable textual witnesses (such as extant manuscripts and quotations of lost manuscripts); the collation and publication of such witnesses; the study of identified textual variants (including developing a critical apparatus); discussion, development and application of methods according to which the most reliable readings are identified and favoured of others; and the ongoing publication of critical editions in pursuit of a paradosis ("a proposed best reading"[6]).

'The history of writing of the chronicles is a problem for students of Old Russian literature because the extant manuscripts, which are from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries or later, are copies of the earlier ones.

It is often extremely difficult to discover what parts of a chronicle were written at what time, that is, whether a given section (or even phrase or word) is from an early manuscript or from a later insertion or "correction".'

[9] Neither of them described which principles they applied for altering readings, neither was reliable in reporting textual variants, and neither divided their text between PVL and non-PVL parts.

[9] Lev Isaevich Leibovich (1876) and Aleksey Shakhmatov (1916) would further develop the PVL-only approach, attempting to reconstruct a composite version of the PVL based on the earliest extant textual witnesses.

[10] Russian scholar Aleksey Shakhmatov (1864–1920) was a pioneer in textual criticism of the PVL, doing much ground-breaking work,[c] although his reconstruction has been repeatedly criticised for its subjectivity.

[12] Ukrainian scholar Serhii Buhoslavskyi (1941)[13] advanced a more systematic approach, but his work was lost during World War II and only rediscovered decades later.

Interest in textual criticism declined in the second half of the 20th century, but was given a new impulse at the beginning of the 21st century[5][19] by the publication of a new modern German translation by Ludolf Müller in 2001,[5] an interlinear collation of the six main copies and a paradosis by Ostrowski et al. in 2003,[5][20] and various early 2000s publications by Oleksiy Tolochko and Tetyana Vilkul from the Centre of Kievan Rus' Studies (Ukrainian: Сектор досліджень історії Київської Русі) in Kyiv.

[30] Similarly, Iakov Lur'e (1976) rebuked uncritical readers for not understanding the differences in probability as expressed by Priselkov in the two font sizes, and treating it as if it were a 'text'.

[32] He also argued that, although her chronology was widely accepted by Soviet and Western scholars alike, Marina A. Salmina's 1960s–1970s textual analysis of the Trinity Chronicle should equally be considered invalidated by the fact that Priselkov's reconstruction was far from the reliability required to make such bold claims.

[49] The mid-2000s polemic between Ostrowski and Vilkul revolved around assessing the most likely genetic relationships and contaminations between the various textual witnesses;[50] according to Gippius (2014), 'Vilkul's approach seems the most promising at present.