Aleksej V. Sirenov: Stepennaja kniga. Istorija teksta. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskich kul’tur, 2007. 540 S., Tab., Graph., Abb. ISBN: 5-9551-0212-4.Aleksej V. Sirenov: Stepennaja kniga i russkaja istoričeskaja mysl’ XVI–XVIII vv. Moskva, S.-Peterburg: Al’jans-Archeo, 2010. 547 S., Abb. ISBN: 978-5-98874-051-3.Andrej S. Usačev: Stepennaja kniga i drevnerusskaja knižnost’ vremeni mitropolita Makarija. Moskva, S.-Peterburg: Al’jans-Archeo, 2009. 754 S. ISBN: 978-5-98874-039-1

Current Research on the Stepennaja kniga: Consensus, Controversies, Questions

Aleksej V. Sirenov: Stepennaja kniga. Istorija teksta. Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskich kul’tur, 2007. 540 S., Tab., Graph., Abb. ISBN: 5-9551-0212-4.

Aleksej V. Sirenov: Stepennaja kniga i russkaja istoričeskaja mysl’ XVI–XVIII vv. Moskva, S.-Peterburg: Al’jans-Archeo, 2010. 547 S., Abb. ISBN: 978-5-98874-051-3.

Andrej S. Usačev: Stepennaja kniga i drevnerusskaja knižnost’ vremeni mitropolita Makarija. Moskva, S.-Peterburg: Al’jans-Archeo, 2009. 754 S. ISBN: 978-5-98874-039-1.

Three books on the Stepennaja kniga offer a closer look at the extensive archival research that went into the recent academic editions of this Muscovite history.1 Each scholar propounds theories of the Stepennaja kniga’s provenance that follow the foundational studies of P. G. Vasenko (1904) and N. N. Pokrovskij (2001),2 but greatly expand the paleographical data base for drawing conclusions about the manuscript corpus. This review will first assess their achievements and then briefly discuss outstanding questions.

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A. V. Sirenov’s 2007 monograph aims to provide an exhaustive textual history. Chapter 1 surveys the Russian historiography. Chapter 2 lists the manuscripts and offers a typology for their classification. Chapter 3 describes a codex which Sirenov identifies as the archetype of the Stepennaja kniga. Chapters 4–7 cover the manuscript groups and subgroups of four primary redactions. Chapter 8 reconstructs the compositional stages of the Stepennaja kniga. Chapter 9 surveys the uses and circulation of the Stepennaja kniga from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Detailed tables, within the chapters and in seven appendices, list minute similarities and differences in individual manuscript groups, most involving graphemes, lexicon and minor syntactic variants (word-order, etc.) that are not determinate features of any redaction, but could be useful to specialists who wish to study an individual manuscript more closely.

Sirenov’s most radical theory, and the centerpiece of the book, concerns the status of the Volkov codex,3 classified by Vasenko as a defective copy of the “usual” first redaction (1904, pp. 85–86). Sirenov identifies seven sixteenth-century fragments of this codex that contain watermarks dating around the same time as the watermarks in the Čudov codex, used as the base for SKDS, vols. 1 and 2. The fragments include a partial table of contents, most of the introductory life of Princess Ol’ga and most of the first six “steps” covering the reigns of selected princes of the Moscow dynastic line from Vladimir I (d. 1015) to Vsevolod Jurevič “Bol’šoe Gnezdo” (d. 1212). Sirenov associates six of eleven scribal hands with distinctive editorial operations. The first scribe copied most of a hypothetical protograph. A second scribe added titles to steps and subchapters of steps (on the margins of the manuscript), dates, and introductory and closing paragraphs to each of the extant steps. A third scribe copied the life of Princess Ol’ga, which precedes Step I. A fourth scribe copied the life of St. Evfrosinija of Polock, which concludes Step V. A fifth scribe wrote out a table of contents. Another scribe edited the corrected manuscript. Many marginal and supra-lineal corrections in the Volkov copy are incorporated in the basic text of the two fair copies, the Tomsk and Čudov codices. Based on this cumulative evidence, Sirenov concludes that the Volkov codex is the “archetype” for the Tomsk and Čudov codices.

While the data that Sirenov culls from this manuscript provides an interesting record of scribal corrections, it is not sufficient to demonstrate his hypothesis that the Volkov codex is the archetype (usually defined as the “lowest common ancestor of the known manuscripts”4 but here treated as a synonym of černovik, or “rough draft”) of the Tomsk and Čudov codices. The proofs of priority cut both ways. The very same paleographical facts cited to prove that the Volkov codex was the basis for the two fair copies also prove the reverse process: that the Tomsk and/or Čudov codices were used to correct the inadvertent errors, omissions and repetitions of the previously copied text in the Volkov codex. Examination of variant readings in the new edition confirms that all three codices differ only in minor respects and constitute a single redaction. Theories on the compositional stages of the Stepennaja kniga (i. e. that the first version was a vita of Vladimir I [pp. 386–387]) and its alleged models (e. g. the Serbian Danilov zbornik [pp. 374–376]), which develop ideas proposed respectively by P. G. Vasenko (1904, pp. 218–248) and K. N. Bestužev-Rjumin (1872)5, have no textual basis.6

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Sirenov’s 2010 monograph reprises the theories of the manuscript relationships, models and compositional stages of the Stepennaja kniga described above, then presents a more detailed history of its reception and use from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Much of this book is synthetic and repetitive, covering material presented in the 2007 monograph. In addition to prolixity and disorganization, Sirenov’s book suffers from a tendency toward circular reasoning, unfounded or erroneous generalizations and odd non sequiturs. The treatment of hagiographical writings (chapters 6 and 9) is particularly unreliable. It has long been known that the twelve-volume menaion prepared by the priest Ioann Miljutin and his sons between 1646 and 1654 incorporated vitae and icon legends from the Stepennaja kniga. Sirenov argues that Miljutin and his sons copied these vitae directly from the archetype (i. e. the Volkov codex). He supports this claim by pointing to parallel readings and mistakes in the two manuscripts. These include individual words, subtitles (“Prayer”, “Tonsure”, “Death”, “Miracle of”) and similar (but not identical) misspellings (pp. 226–228). Since the Volkov codex is incomplete, Sirenov must draw added evidence for parallel mistakes and variants in Steps VII–XVII from a later codex. His comparison of Prince Fedor Rostislavič’s vita in the Stepennaja kniga (chapters 18–21, Step IX) with Fedor’s vita in the first (September) volume of the Miljutin Menaion shows the quality of his argumentation. One sentence in the Miljutin Menaion vita, reporting Fedor Rostislavič’s marriage to a Jaroslavl’ princess, corresponds to a sentence in the Čudov and Tomsk copies of the Stepennaja kniga (that hypothetically! originated in the Volkov codex). On this basis, Sirenov asserts that the Volkov codex was most probably the primary source for the Miljutin version, but that there are sufficient differences to call the Miljutin vita of Fedor Rostislavič a special redaction heretofore not known to scholars (p. 230). In fact, the version of Fedor Rostislavič’s vita in the Miljutin Menaion is neither new nor derived from the Stepennaja kniga, but has been identified in the scholarship as a lightly edited copy of the version in Metropolitan Makarij’s Velikie Minei Čet’i,7 The sentence in question (on Fedor’s marriage) was copied from the Nikonovskaja Chronicle compilation, prepared in the 1520s. Other Muscovite anthologies that may have borrowed from the Stepennaja kniga (for example, the Čudov and Tulupov menaions) are not examined. Foundational research which could have provided important correctives to misperceptions about hagiographical production in this period and the anthologies in question was not consulted.8

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Andrej Usačev’s magisterial 2009 book refines the conclusions of his predecessors and occasionally challenges them. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the historiography. Chapters 2 and 4 deal respectively with the dating and the Uspenskij sobor priest Andrej (later Metropolitan Afanasij), the compiler of the Stepennaja kniga. Chapter 3 looks at the provenance of selected sources. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the book’s ideological themes. Usačev agrees with A. A. Zimin (1958)9 and David Miller (1979)10 that the Stepennaja kniga expresses the political views of Metropolitan Makarij and Ivan IV. But he places particular emphasis on N. N. Pokrovskij’s interpretation of the Stepennaja kniga as a book offering moral guidance to Ivan IV in order to counter the escalating terror (p. 687).11

The most impressive addition made by this monograph to our understanding of the Stepennaja kniga’s first redaction is a rigorous comparative analysis of watermarks and paper on the three earliest known manuscripts, which provides the fullest and most convincing theory of their relationships. Usačev shows that the Tomsk codex, unknown to Vasenko, is written on paper produced and used in Moscow in the mid- to late 1550s, and that its watermarks predate the watermarks on the paper of the Čudov and Volkov codices, which correspond to books produced in 1560 or later (pp. 125–157). Although Usačev does not reject the hypothesis that the Volkov codex was prepared before the two fair copies, the pattern of transmission indicated by his study of the paper provides additional evidence that questions Sirenov’s theory of its status. Usačev also located a number of unpublished sources for Step I, including a passage from the Jerusalem patericon and a homily on Vladimir. His many contributions to the academic edition are acknowledged by the editors.

Usačev approaches the corpus as an aggregate of potentially identifiable sources rather than as an original work. His basic premise is that the Stepennaja kniga’s erudite compiler selected passages from a wide spectrum of manuscripts and oral legends that represent the most significant writings (knižnost’) of Metropolitan Makarij’s prelacy (p. 360) rather than from the twelve-volume Velikie Minei Čet’i donated to the Uspenskij sobor c. 1547, which would detract from its representation of Makarij’s full tenure. For this purpose, he classifies five groups: hagiography, chronicles, miscellaneous “other” works, hypothetical written texts and hypothetical oral sources. These groupings overlook or underplay genres arguably central to Orthodox consciousness in Makarij’s time, and well represented in the Stepennaja kniga. Liturgical sources (citations from hymns, offices, theological themes) and iconographical sources (the frescoes and etchings in the metropolitans’ Uspenskij sobor, the tree of Jesse) documented in the scholarship are left out altogether. Homiletic sources (for example, the eulogies of Boris and Gleb in Step I and the panegyric sermons on the deaths of princes included in almost every step) are placed in the miscellaneous group, which also includes legal charters, monastic rules, a treatise on the alphabet and icon legends (normally considered hagiography) (pp. 282–316). No explanation is supplied for the judgment that a source belongs in the hypothetical (by definition potentially knowable) written or oral group.

It is not Usačev’s intent to discuss the historical themes or literary features of the Stepennaja kniga’s sources, but to identify the exact redactions and, where possible, the original manuscripts used by its compiler. Accordingly, he relies on paleographic data supported by internal evidence. In-depth comparative studies of hagiographical, homiletic and theological sources are footnoted, but not directly referenced in the argumentation and almost no textual evidence is supplied for the claims. An example of the approach may be seen in the analysis of Metropolitan Iona’s vita, entitled “Skazanie otčasti žitia … Iony, mitropolita vseja Rusii” (chapter 19, Step XIV, SKDS, vol. 2, pp. 190–216). Three textually interdependent redactions of Iona’s vita were composed during the prelacy of Metropolitan Makarij. The first version, a eulogistic vita, was written for Makarij’s Velikie Minei Čet’i in connection with Iona’s glorification in 1547 as one of the Muscovite wonder-working saints. This first version, in the view of most scholars, was revised for the Stepennaja kniga vita. Textual comparison shows that the writer added excerpts from chronicles and other tendentious sources in order to reference central themes of Step XIV and the Stepennaja kniga’s portrayal of Iona and other holy metropolitans (Petr, Aleksij) as divine protectors of the Tsardom.12 Usačev rejects these findings. He offers three proofs that the Stepennaja kniga vita is a shortened version of a third anonymous redaction (“Povest’ imat skazanie sobrano otčasti žitia […] Iony mitropolita vseja Rusii”13). These include watermarks on the earliest copy of the third redaction, indicating that its paper was produced in the late 1550s or early 1560s; an internal textual reference to the year 1556, allegedly supplying a clue that it must have been completed by this year; and the title phrase “otčasti žitia”, which he interprets literally as “only a part of” a longer text. All of these features could apply to the reverse theory, that the anonymous redaction is derived from the Stepennaja redaction. Here and elsewhere, by focusing on indeterminate minor details, Usačev too often arrives at trivial or questionable conclusions.14

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From the preceding review, it should be evident that our next task is to analyze the rich materials placed at our disposal. The annotated commentary in vol. 3 of SKDS identifies all but a few sources, noting whether they were copied verbatim or revised, referencing the scholarship and highlighting ideological revisions of primary historical documents. We now need to determine why the writers of the Stepennaja kniga decided to abandon the form of annalistic writing for an experimental step structure with cross-references, and whether some principles guided the extensive rewriting of most borrowed sources. Articles forthcoming in the proceedings of two recent conferences on the Licevoj letopisnyj svod (München, 2011) and “Writing and Rewriting Russian History” (Paris, 2012) question the views of Vasenko, Pokrovskij, Sirenov and Usačev on the Stepennaja kniga’s purpose, models and literary production. Cross-references between Step I and Step XVII and textual parallels to acts issued in the names of Metropolitan Makarij and Tsar Ivan IV indicate to me that the book was inspired not by the desire to avert further terror, but by the establishment of an eparchy in the conquered territory of Kazan’ (February, 1555), which served the interests of both Church and State. Eastern expansionism is portrayed as providential.15 Several studies present comparative evidence suggesting that multiple writers worked on the book and that the writers of some later steps made extensive revisions of passages in beginning steps. In one analyst’s opinion most revisions were merely reactive, i. e., ad hoc responses to the wording of the writer’s sources with a heavy reliance on rhetorical formulas and other “semantic ballast”.16 Another speaks of “a distinctive linguistic strategy” intended to “glorify ‘imperial’ power and demonstrate its religious justification”17.

In order to test these hypotheses, we will need to extrapolate and analyze patterns employed in the Stepennaja kniga to refashion its sources. These include systematic lexical and syntactic substitutions, characteristic grammatical constructions and regular deviations from earlier norms. For original composition, such as the preface, it will be important to identify sources alluded to in central conceptual metaphors and to map distinctive themes in the corpus and in the writings of the period. Such studies, it should be emphasized, add to a broader vision of Russian cultural development. They promise to illuminate dark places in the history of the literary language in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to provide new insights on evolving methods of literary production for this critical transitional work that bridges the medieval and imperial periods and exerts an undeniable fascination in the post-Soviet quest for national identity.

Gail Lenhoff, Los Angeles, CA

1Stepennaja kniga carskogo rodoslovija po drevnejšim spiskam. Red. N. N. Pokrovskij / G. D. Lenchoff. Vol. 1–3. Moskva 2007–2012 (hereafter: SKDS); Latuchinskaja Stepennaja kniga. 1676 god. Red. N. N. Pokrovskij / A. V. Sirenov. Moskva 2012; I. Ju. Jur’ev Izvestie o žitii i dejstvach deržavstvujuščich velikich knjazej rossijskich. Red. D. O. Serov. Moskva 2013.

2P. G. Vasenko “Kniga Stepennaja carskogo rodoslovija” i eja značenie v drevnerusskoj istoričeskoj pis’mennosti. (Pečataetsja po opreděleniju Istoriko-filologičeskogo fakul’teta Imperatorskago S.-Peterburgskago Universiteta 24-go janvarja 1904 goda). Sankt-Peterburg 1904; N. N. Pokrovskij Tomskij spisok Stepennoj knigi carskogo rodoslovija i nekotorye problemy rannej istorii pamjatnika, in: Obščestvennoe soznanie i literatura XVI–XX vv. Novosibirsk 2001, pp. 3–43.

4Martin L. West Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique. Stuttgart 1973, p. 32.

5K. Bestužev-Rjumin Russkaja istorija. T. 1. Sankt-Peterburg 1872, p. 34, n. 59.

6Step I does not actually contain a vita; cf. SKDS, vol. 3, pp. 30–31. On the models, see W.-H. Schmidt The Serbian Danilov zbornik and the Stepennaia kniga: Toward a Comparative Analysis of their Genres and Functions, in: “The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness. Ed. by G. D. Lenhoff / A. M. Kleimola. Bloomington, IN 2011, pp. 125–139. (= UCLA Slavic Studies. New Series 7).

7For a detailed textual comparison, see G. Lenhoff Early Russian Hagiography. The Lives of Prince Fedor the Black. Wiesbaden 1997, pp. 170–172 (= Slavistische Veröffentlichungen. Fachbereich Neuere Fremdsprachliche Philologien der FU Berlin 82). See also the classification in B. M. Kloss Izbrannye trudy. Tom 2: Očerki po istorii russkoj agiografii XIV–XVI vekov. Moskva 2001, p. 308.

8Among the studies which could have provided context, see: D. Krasin Čet’i minei svjaščennika Ioanna Miljutina, in: Moskovskie universitetskie izvestija (1870), 8, pp. 762–777; (1871), 1, pp. 1–23; V. N. Alekseev Troickij knigopisec German Tulupov, in: Sibirskoe sobranie M. N. Tichomirova i problemy archeografii. Novosibirsk 1981, pp. 120–137; A. Ebbinghaus Die altrussischen Marienikonen-Legenden. Wiesbaden 1990 (=Veröffentlichungen der Abteilung für Slavische Sprachen und Literaturen des Osteuropa-Instituts (Slavisches Seminar) der FU Berlin 70).

9A. A. Zimin Peresvetov i ego sovremenniki. Očerki istorii russkoj obščestvenno-političeskoj mysli serediny XVI veka. Moskva 1958, pp. 86–90.

10David B. Miller The Velikie Minei Chetii and the Stepennaia kniga of Metropolitan Makarii and the Origins of Russian National Consciousness, in: Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte. Bd. 26. Berlin 1979, pp. 266–267, 314–317.

11Cf. N. N. Pokrovskij Istoričeskie koncepcii Stepennoj knigi carskogo rodoslovija, in: SKDS, vol. 1, pp. 89–119.

12For the scholarship and sources of individual passages, see SKDS, vol. 3, pp. 297–307.

13For the text, see: A. S. Usačev Žitie mitropolita Iony tret’ej redakcii, in: Vestnik cerkovnoj istorii 2 (2007), pp. 17–60.

14Comparable criticisms on the source analyses were expressed by S. N. Bogatyrev Datirovka Stepennoj knigi, in: Drevnaja Rus’. Voprosy medievistiki 50 (2012), 4, pp. 77–94. Cf. the response in A. S. Usačev: Vremja sozdanija Stepennoj knigi: v prodolženie diskussii, in: Drevnaja Rus’. Voprosy medievistiki 51 (2013), 1, pp. 116–124.

15G. Lenhoff Učreždenie Kazanskoj eparchii i proekt sozdanija Stepennoj knigi, in: Drevnaja Rus’. Voprosy medievistiki 50 (2012), 4, pp. 95–107.

16A. Ebbinghaus The Compilers of the Old Russian Book of Royal Degrees at Work: How the “Povest’ na sretenie chudotvornago obraza” Was Made, in: “The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness. Ed. by G. D. Lenhoff / A. M. Kleimola. Bloomington, IN 2011, pp. 175–200, p. 198. (= UCLA Slavic Studies. New Series 7).

17V. M. Zhivov On the Language of The Book of Degrees of the Royal Genealogy, in: “The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness, pp. 141–155, p. 153.