It has already become customary to imagine this Old Rus scribe from Mark Antokolsky’s well- known sculpture Chronicler Nestor . But we should be precise. They never wrote on a table in twelfth century Rus. They wrote the way we often read even now with the book on their laps. And they very seldom took a bound book, as is the case with Antokolsky’s sculpture. The book was “adorned” later, after the pages had been written. And they started with rectangular parchment folded four times for an octavo or twice in case for a quarto.
A small low table stood next to the chronicler with an inkwell, a quill, and a small penknife. The latter was also used to scrape off mistakes or stains from the parchment. The scribe thought over what he was going to write well in advance, comparing it with earlier texts. A clean sheet was readied, and the chronicler, after mulling over the phrase again, began his narration. He worked without haste, in large alphabetic characters, and in one continuous line, without spaces between the words. Parchment is a durable material. Hundreds of years have passed, but its sheets that are kept in our archives and book repositories still remain bright and flexible, the brown ink has not bleached, and the illuminations have not lost their colors.
Chronicles... Hand-written in one copy, they were repeatedly rewritten, abridged or complemented with new materials, evidence, stories, and tales. They included parts of documents or other previous chronicles; they were reshuffled, bound in files, changed in style, and updated “ideologically.” This was done because the chronicler could not set forth the events only according to his personal impressions and observations for the simple reason that he tried to date the chronicle back to “the very beginning” (to the creation of the world, formation of a certain state, etc.), thus accordingly, the scribe had to turn to already extant sources or stories about more remote times.
In addition, the chronicler could not possibly continue the work of his predecessor. Firstly, because every chronicler usually followed a certain political orientation and reworked the original text in line with it, not only leaving out facts less important from his ideological viewpoint but also adding his own materials and observations, thus creating a version very different from the previously chronicled material. Secondly, to prevent his work from being too large due to the combination of many facts and sources, the chronicler had to give something up and leave some facts he considered less important out. Thus, researchers will never trace the original author’s text, for a particular piece was still written over even after the author had put his last period. A chronicle is a unique collective work; chroniclers did not usually put their names, as this seemed unimportant and thus unneeded.
Our history has a figure that embodies all our ideas of the personality and qualities of a medieval scribe: Nestor, a learned monk at the Kyiv Pechersk monastery, who wrote The Tale of Bygone Years (also known as The Primary Chronicle). History has preserved no ample evidence about the time and place of birth of the chronicler, his parents, or the date of his death. Yet, some researchers, particularly renowned Ukrainian scholar Mykhailo Braichevsky, identify rather exactly the lifetime of the Old Rus scribe: 1056-1113. He is known to have come to the Kyiv Pechersk monastery well after Theodosius Pechersky (1074). The successor of the latter, hegumen Stefan, had Nestor take monastic vows and raised him to the rank of deacon.
Nestor was the scribe of broad historical outlook and great literary talent. Well before working on Tales of Bygone Years, he wrote The Life of Borys and Hlib and The Life of Theodosius Pechersky. But, no doubt, the learned monk’s lifetime achievement were Tales of Bygone Years written about 1113. Although the name of the “black-cassocked Nestor” is mentioned in the so-called Khlebnikov copy of The Tales, i.e., in the later collection in the merchant Klebnikov’s library, some scholars are dubious of his authorship, for his name is missing from other copies of this chronicle. However, as long ago as the thirteenth century, it is Nestor who was considered in Rus to be the author of this invaluable monument of Rus culture.
For a long time, scholarly and quasi-political literature has called Nestor the oldest Rus chronicler. But historical and philological studies have allowed making a conclusion that a series of chronicles was compiled in 1037-1039 at Yaroslav the Wise’s court, as well as the Novgorod series up to the year 1050, and two Kyiv series (1073 and 1095). Nestor set himself the following task in
Tales of Bygone Years: not only to complement the previous chronicles, first of all, the Kyiv series of 1095, with the description of events at the turn of the twelfth century to which he was a contemporary and an eyewitness, but also to radically change the narration about a more ancient history of the Rus land.
Nestor put the history of Ancient Rus within the framework of world history. He begins his chronicle with telling the biblical story about the distribution of land between Noah’s sons. Listing the peoples of the world, the learned monk also adds the Slavs. The chronicler tells in detail about the ancient Slavs and the territory occupied by various Slavic tribes, and he scrutinizes especially minutely the tribes that had lived in what would become Rus, in particular, the Poliany, on whose land Kyiv was founded. The chronicle specifies and explains many facts from the history of the Kyivan state’s political and cultural life; the text also includes a long range of ethnic historical tales and folklore materials.
Even a brief list of what Nestor did proves that it is he to whom The Tales of Bygone Years owe their broad historical outlook and the inclusion of items from world history against the background of which unfolds the history of Slavs and then of Rus. It is Nestor who established and developed his version of the origin of the Rus’s princely dynasty, and openly supported the ideal of the land’s state system proclaimed by Yaroslav the Wise: all princes are brothers, so they must obey the most senior in their clan and the one who occupies the Grand Prince’s throne in Kyiv.
Thanks to Nestor’s patriotic interpretation of history and contemporaneity , a broad outlook and literary talent, Tales of Bygone Years became, as Academician Dmitry Likhachov pointed out, not only a collection of facts of Rus history and not simply a historical and publicist work but also an integral and highly literary historical narration of medieval Rus.
Nestor’s civic attitude embodied in Tales of Bygone Years, Mr. Braichevsky notes, told on this work’s further destiny. Volodymyr Monomakh, who ascended the Kyiv throne in 1113, kept Nestor’s series in very high esteem but, at the same time, was dissatisfied with his concept and so he ordered the text to be edited by Sylvester, a Vydubetsky monastery monk. This resulted in the second edition of this work (1116) but it did not please the prince, either. This is why a third edition was put out in 1118, which has been preserved.
In the mid-eighteenth century, a German historian and philologist August Schletzer worked in the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences for some years. An alumnus of two German universities, he studied the history of Ancient Rus chronicles, above all, of course, Tales of Bygone Years. Schletzer’s main 3-volume opus is devoted to Nestor. The German scholar expressed very concisely the result of studying The Tales from honest Nestor. Two and a half centuries have passed since then, but the German historian’s work has long been obsolete, but Schletzer’s appraisal still remains in historiography. We can also repeat after him: Honest Nestor.
