The Place of the Warsaw Miscellany among the Copies of the Novgorod Fifth and Pskov First Chronicles

Abstract

The article examines the question of whether the Warsaw Miscellany, containing the text of the Novgorod Fifth and Pskov First Chronicles, was the original of the hypothetical Chronicle of 1547 or not. In 1547 in Pskov, there was created a chronicle which for the first time combined the text of the Novgorod Fifth and Pskov First Chronicles. In Warsaw Miscellany, the text of Novgorod Fifth Chronicle begins in 1169 and ends in 1446, the text of Pskov First Chronicle begins in 1447 and ends in 1547. In historiography, there was no certainty as to whether the Warsaw Miscellany was a Chronicle of 1547 or a copy from it. The article proves that the Warsaw Miscellany is an early copy of the hypothetical Chronicle of 1547. With the help of textual analysis, I try to show the presence of secondary readings in the Warsaw Miscellany. The article also provides evidence that other copies of this Chronicle, Obolensky’s and Pogodinsky, have a common protograph that goes back to the Chronicle of 1547, bypassing Warsaw Miscellany. The article allows a new look at the relationship between the chronicles containing the text of the Novgorod Fifth and Pskov First Chronicles.