"Word about Igor"s regiment". In search of the author

“The word about Igor’s regiment” and his contemporaries ”, and followed by“ Russian chroniclers and the author of “Words about Igor’s Regiment” ”, Boris Aleksandrovich Rybakov published his fundamental studies in the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, he first expressed the version that his author was the Kyiv boyar of the second half of the 12th century Peter Borislavich. Rybakov considered him the author of the annals, the original of which was lost, and the arrangements were preserved as part of the Ipatiev annals and in the History of the Russian Vasily Tatishchev. Having reconstructed the literary style and political ideology of the hypothetical chronicle, Rybakov came to the conclusion that the “word” belongs to the pen of the same author. And then there were, and now there are very great doubts about the authenticity of the “Tatishchev news” (those information from his work that cannot be double -checked through the surviving reliably ancient sources) In 1994, the historian Leonid Milov, one of the pioneers of computerization of historical science, undertook to check this hypothesis. This analysis did not allow confirming or unambiguously refuted the fact that the same author wrote these texts. The question remained open. But the very methodology of the source research, which uses the author of the “Word” as a unique historical witness, remains relevant for a modern researcher. The interpretation of the “Word” as a treatise devoted to the grounds for the formation of Russian statehood, the underwater stones of this process, anxiety for the fate of the country emanating from the “Word of Igor’s Regiment”, from its nameless creator, allows you to look at the problem of using a historical source in a new way.
The Rybakov Portrait Gallery of the Participants of the Word convincingly proves: only the insightful contemporary, a living participant in those events could so accurately know the insidificant all of their characters, their relationship to each other, their not always clear intentions, their weak strings, their Advantages and not yet shown opportunities. Such impeccable knowledge, according to the scientist, is inaccessible to the imitator from any subsequent era.
For historians, philologists, political scientists and students of other humanitarian specialties