The Tale of Igor's Campaign (Old East Slavic: Слово о плъку Игоревѣ, Slovo o pălku Igorevě; Modern Russian: Слово о полку Игореве, Slovo o polku Igoreve) is an anonymous masterpiece of East Slavic literature written in Old East Slavic language and tentatively dated by the end of 12th century. It is also occasionally translated as The Song of Igor's Campaign and The Lay of Igor's Campaign. The Ukrainian sources transliterate the name as Ihor.

Many things are still disputed about the work: its originality, whether it is an epic or a literary work, as well as interpretations of many phrases. Part of the problem is that the known texts of this work were copied by hand and not without mistakes. An older copy from Pskov perhaps dating to the 1400s, found by Aleksei Musin-Pushkin in 1792, served as a source for a later copy published in Moscow around 1800.

The only old copy was claimed to have been burned in 1812 during conflagration in Moscow, seized by Napoléon's troops. The lack of an original copy and comparisons with contemporary fabrications (for example, the "Songs of Ossian" were actually written by James Macpherson) created doubts in the work's authenticity. Some researchers still today propose Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, who found the manuscript, or the Russian manuscript forgers Anton Bardin and Alexander Sulakadzev as candidates for the falsification. (Bardin was publicly exposed as the forger of four other copies of 'Slovo'.) The famous Russian journalist and orientalist Ossip Senkovsky argued that 'Slovo' was a hoax of the beginning of the 18th century. Nonetheless, majority opinion accepts the authenticity of the text, based on its language.

The release of this historical work into scholarly circulation created quite a stir in Russian literary circles. The dominant historical linguistic ideology of the era recognized one East Slavic language: Russian. The recognition of the language of this newly uncovered antiquity as non-Russian raised puzzling questions. The fall-back assumption that Old Slavonic would have been used, did not fit the liguistic evidence in the text: there were some Old Slavonic elements, but not the organic Old Slavonic language. Scholars uncovered words from Polish, too. The document could not be made to fit the historical linguistic schema of scholars of the Imperial Russia.

As the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" spread into wider circles of scholarly philology, the problem lessened somewhat. Scholars in the Austrian Empire found, upon linguistic analysis, that the document contained transitional language between a) earlier fragments of the language of Rus' propria (the region of Chernihiv, eastward through Kyiv, and into Halych) and, b) later fragments from the Halych-Volynian era of this same region in the centuries immediately following the writing of the document. These historical fragments showed large linguistic differences with the fragments from the areas of Suzdal and Novgorod to the north during the same time period.

The plot of this classic work is based on a failed raid of Kniaz Igor Svyatoslavich of Novhorod-Siverskyy (of the Chernihiv principality of ancient Rus') against the Polovtsians or Cumans living in the southern part of the Don region in 1185. Other East Slavic historical figures are mentioned, including Yaroslav Osmomysl (the eight-tongued) of Halych, and Mstyslav of Tmutorokan .

The standard Soviet edition of 'Slovo' was prepared, with an extended commentary, by the academician Dmitry Likhachev . In the Soviet Union, any attempts to question authenticity of 'Slovo' (for example, those by French Slavist André Mazon , as well as by Alexander Zimin and Oljas Suleimenov ), were officially condemned. Vladimir Nabokov produced a translation into English in 1960.

In his article "Was Iaroslav of Halych really shooting sultans in 1185?" Edward Keenan, a well-known linguist from Harvard, states that Igor's Tale is a fake, written by Czech linguist Dabrowski. There are other linguists who question the authenticity of Igor's Tale.

See also

• Prince Igor
• Old East Slavic language

External links

• The original edition of 1800
• Nabokov's English translation
• Roman Jacobson's edition
• Text and ukrainian interpretations