The Tale of Igor's Campaign
The story describes a failed raid made in year 1185 by Kniaz Igor Svyatoslavich, Prince of Novgorod-Seversk, on the Polovtsians living along the lower Don.
Other Rus' historical figures are mentioned, including skald Boyan (The Bard), the princes Vseslav of Polotsk, Yaroslav Osmomysl of Halych, and Vsevolod the Big Nest of Suzdal.
[5] Monastery superior Joel (Bykovsky) sold the manuscript to a local landowner, Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, as a part of a collection of ten texts.
The original manuscript was claimed to have burned in the great Moscow fire of 1812 (during the Napoleonic occupation), together with Musin-Pushkin's entire library.
One of the crucial points of the authenticity controversy is the relationship between The Tale of Igor's Campaign and Zadonschina, an unquestionably authentic poem, which was created around the end of the 1300s or the beginning of the 1400s to glorify Dmitri Donskoi's victory over Mongol-Tatar troops of the ruler in the Golden Horde Mamai in the Battle of Kulikovo and is preserved in six medieval copies.
Recently, Roman Jakobson's and Andrey Zaliznyak's analyses show that the passages of Zadonschina with counterparts in Slovo differ from the rest of the text by several linguistic parameters, whereas this is not so for Igor's Tale.
Proponents of the forgery thesis give sometimes contradictory arguments: some authors (Mazon) see numerous Gallicisms in the text; while others (Trost, Haendler) see Germanisms, yet others (Keenan) Bohemisms.
Any attempts to question the authenticity of Slovo (for example, by the French Slavist André Mazon or by the Russian historian Alexander Zimin[citation needed]) were condemned.
also repressed and condemned[citation needed] non-standard interpretations based on Turkic lexis, such as was proposed by Olzhas Suleimenov (who considered Igor's Tale to be an authentic text).
[7][8] Mainstream Slavists, including Dmitri Likhachev,[9] and Turkologists[10] criticized Az i Ya, characterizing Suleimenov's etymological and paleography conjectures as amateurish.
While some historians and philologists continue to question the text's authenticity for various reasons (for example, believing that it has an uncharacteristically modern nationalistic sentiment) (Omeljan Pritsak[citation needed] inter alios), linguists are not so skeptical.
He did not believe that Dobrovský could have accomplished this, as his views on Slavic grammar (as expressed in his magnum opus, Institutiones) were strikingly different from the system written in Igor's Tale.
[15] Juri Lotman supports the text's authenticity, based on the absence of a number of semiotic elements in the Russian Classicist literary tradition before the publication of the Tale.
Mann points to evidence suggesting that the Tale first circulated as an oral epic song for several decades before being written down, most likely in the early 13th century.
Mann has found numerous new parallels to the text of the Tale in wedding songs, magical incantations, byliny and other Old Russian sources.
He was the first researcher to point out unique textual parallels in a rare version of the Tale of the Battle against Mamai (Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche), published by N.G.
Mann believes that this early conversion cycle left its imprint on several passages of the Tale, including the motif sequence in which the pagan Div warns the Tmutorokan idol that Igor's army is approaching.
