Istorija: dar i dolg. Jubilejnyj sbornik v čest’ Aleksandra Vasil’eviča Nazarenko. Otv. red. N. N. Lisovoj. Moskva: Abyško, 2010. 351 S. ISBN: 978-5-903525-46-1

Istorija: dar i dolg. Jubilejnyj sbornik v čest’ Aleksandra Vasil’eviča Nazarenko. Otv. red. N. N. Lisovoj. Moskva: Abyško, 2010. 351 S. ISBN: 978-5-903525-46-1.

This collection of studies in honour of the eminent Russian historian A. V. Nazarenko includes a bibliography listing 246 of the honorand’s works (including reviews) published between 1978 and 2009. This list sets on record, alongside his original compositions, the valuable ancillary services he has rendered to scholarship by, for example, editing a reprint of Metropolitan Makarii’s Istoriia Russkoi tserkvi and translating into Russian a revised edition of G. Podskalsky’s Christentum und theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’ (988–1237). Paying tribute to these labours, the Festschrift offers twenty-three studies by twenty-two authors. Reflecting Professor Nazarenko’s wide range of interests, they cover two main subject-areas: firstly, the history of pre-Mongol Rus, its relations with the societies to its north and west as well as with Byzantium, and the cultures of those societies, with some regard for Byzantium’s classical Roman antecedents; secondly, various texts relating to the Russian orthodox church in the Muscovite and late imperial eras and, more generally, the literary and religious culture of Russian orthodoxy from imperial times up to the present day. Rather than summarising every single study, we shall try to give a sense of the volume’s contents by surveying a cross-section.

The first subject-area registers the balance the honorand has struck in his writings. Professor Nazarenko’s most profound contribution to scholarship has been his demonstration of the vitality and value of Rus’ socio-economic contacts with the west from the ninth century onwards. Yet he fully recognises Rus’ persistent special relationship with Byzantium, the metronome of its worship, church discipline and doctrine. The number of contributions falling within this subject-area far exceeds that falling within the other one and, overall, does justice to the diversity of early Rus’ constituent parts and connections. V. V. Petrukhin collates the Povest’ Vremennykh Let’s entry on the missionary activities of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius with archaeological finds suggestive of contacts between the Upper Dnieper region and Moravia in the ninth century. For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, A. A. Beliaev points out Romanesque features such as rectangular central apses and lengthy naves in churches in western Rus at, for example, Grodno and Polotsk. He infers that craftsmen from eastern Poland were at work there, probably inspiring imitations on the part of local masters. The pervasiveness of traders, operating in and circulating between the towns of pre-Mongol Rus, is the theme of a substantive study by V. B. Perkhavko. Novgorod’s birch-bark letters offer uniquely full information about this and, judging from Novgorodian charters, by the fourteenth century organisations of privileged merchants were electing two of their number to represent them in the city’s formal transactions. However, they had to contend with rich and powerful noble families entrenched in their ‘estates’ (usad’by), and Novgorod’s traders scarcely constituted a self-sustaining urban patriciate of the type found in some West European cities. Similar caveats are sounded by P. V. Lukin in his disquisition on the mestiche Roustsii i Nemtse mentioned in the Galich-Volynian Chronicle’s account of an event that occurred in Vladimir-Volynsk in, probably, 1288. He polemicizes with those scholars who have seen in them signs of Rus as well as ethnic German burghers enjoying the protection of the Magdeburg Law. He argues that the term mestiche, although apparently borrowed from Polish, merely meant ‘citizens’, without connotations of a particular legal status. The mutability of trading patterns between Rus and the outside world receives lucid exposition from E. A. Mel’nikova. Exhaustive examination of evidence for the so-called “Gothic hall” in Novgorod leads her to conclude that Gotlanders played little part in the early commerce between Rus and the Baltic. Gotlanders only assumed a leading role in the second half of the eleventh century, with an extensive and formally instituted commercial “hall” (dvor) bearing their name in Novgorod from c. 1100 onwards. Another facet of Rus’ links with Scandinavia is illuminated by T. N. Jackson. Her analysis of skaldic verses incorporated into a saga about St Olaf leaves little room for doubt either as to their composition by Olaf himself or as to their indication that authority over the region of Staraia Ladoga was handed over by Prince Iaroslav Vladimirovich to his Swedish-born bride, Ingigerd. The presence of Khazars on the Crimea and at Tmutarakan’ long after Prince Sviatoslav’s destruction of their polity on the Lower Volga emerges from I. G. Konovalova’s study of the sources available to al-Idrisi and subsequent Arabic geographers. The far-reaching contacts of another neighbour of Rus are expounded by P. V. Kuzenkov, in the form of a translation of three chapters of Constantine VII’s Book of Ceremonies and a brief commentary. Kuzenkov perceives the weight Byzantine diplomacy attached to the Baghdad caliph, the amir of Egypt, and also to peoples in the Caucasian region, but his observations would themselves have been the weightier for use of, for example, the contributions by B. Martin-Hisard, C. Zuckerman and others to Byzance et ses voisins. Etudes sur certains passages du Livre des cérémonies, II, 15 et 46–48, a “Dossier” published in Travaux et Mémoires, 13 (2000), pp. 353–672.

Important testimony to a very different kind of Byzantine interest in affairs in the Muslim world is provided by K. A. Maksimovich. He publishes an extract from the Little Book of Nikon of the Black Mountain concerning the descent of the “Holy Fire” on the church of the Holy Sepulchre every Easter, and the dread among Jerusalem’s Christians lest failure of the “Holy Fire” to appear prompted a massacre at the hands of the “the people ruling there”, the Seljuk Turks at the time of writing (1087–1088). This betokens closer interest on the part of Byzantine churchmen in goings-on at Jerusalem than modern Byzantinists generally acknowledge. Additional nuggets of historical data, mined from brief notices in manuscripts of liturgical menologia, are brought to light by O. V. Loseva. For example, a menologion now in St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai commemorates various “holy martyrs” slain in an otherwise unrecorded episode of the 809–815 Byzantino-Bulgarian war. Slavic texts and translations from Greek are the subject of other contributions to this Festschrift. M. V. Rozhdestvenskaia amplifies her earlier position on the similarity between imagery and themes in the apocryphal Slovo na voskresenie Lazaria and in the Lay of Igor. The former text is, she concludes, datable to the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, roughly the composition date of the Lay of Igor; and it draws on “the same apocryphal sources […] and the same stock of scriptural quotations” as Kirill of Turov does in his writings (p. 256). Kirill and the town of Turov both loom large in another study of O. V. Loseva devoted to the interrelationship of the First and the Second Redactions of the Prologue. While noting that, for his own compositions, Kirill drew on a version of the Second Redaction incorporating an “instructive section”, she stresses that other book-men contributed historical data about Turov to this “section”, seemingly in or by the mid-1160s; Turov need not, however, have been the sole or principal place where the “instructive section” was compiled, given the attention its contents pay to north-east Rus, then under the dominion of Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii.

The second of the fore-mentioned subject-areas includes M. I. Chernysheva’s exploration of the many layers of meaning in the full title of a fourteenth-century collection of normative texts, Merilo Pravednoe (The Righteous Measure): just rulership is the texts’ common concern, and the words constituting the title play upon the diverse ethical, pastoral, regulatory and even mystical facets of the Christian leader’s authority. E. V. Beliakova reviews a series of texts composed for the purpose of justifying an autocephalous church in Russia; the earliest known, found in manuscripts from the 1460s on, is the Tale of the Serb and Bulgarian Patriarchates. The Tale recounts their origins and describes the papal see as “apostolic” and “supreme” while criticising the Greeks’ craftiness and simony, albeit without making any explicit claim for Muscovite autonomy. Once Moscow had acquired its own patriarch, this text provided a basis for justifications of the new institution, written in the seventeenth century: they retain its positive epithets for the Roman papacy, while glossing over the breach with the Constantinopolitan patriarchate that had occurred in 1461. Relations between the eastern and western churches also feature in S. G. Iakovenko’s account of events leading up to the Union of Brest: he contrasts the readiness of eastern-rite bishops to subscribe with the resistance put up by the orthodox brotherhoods in towns, and by the peasants and the Cossacks. The place of the city of Constantinople in the spiritual life of late imperial Russia is illuminated by two studies. On the practical level, N. I. Sukhova considers how far the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople succeeded in fostering cooperation between theologians, archaeologists and Byzantinists. She concludes that, for all its intellectual vitality, the Institute fell short of its original aims, which had envisaged collaboration with Russian religious academies, the involvement of theologians and regular teaching programmes. In the literary sphere, the preoccupations of the mid-nineteenth-century Slavophile, F. I. Tiutchev, receive illumination from N. N. Lisovoi. He shows that the theme of three “covenanted capitals” (zavetnye stolitsy) in the poem Russian geography permeates Tiutchev’s other writings, too. Lisovoi lists thirty-three further instances of such musings upon Rome, Constantinople and Moscow as the preordained centres of true “Empire”. Lisovoi’s own attitude towards these ideas emerges clearly from his editorial introduction, as when he proposes to define “Empire” as “a form of politico-religious service of God” (p. 9).

The abundance of substantive studies about early Rus and the cultures impinging upon it attests the enterprise and scholarly scrupulousness of the honorand. At the same time, this Festschrift contains noteworthy documentation of the meaning of past glories and hopes of future glory to some writers in Russia in the early twenty-first century.

Jonathan Shepard, Oxford