La migrazione delle lettere slave nella Rus' di Kiev (Una lettura cronotopica di PVL, anno 898)

Abstract

The ancient Tale of the Bygone Years or Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let – PVL) is one of the main sources on the ancient history of the Slavic tribes and the origin of Kievan Rus’. A variety of structural and thematic motifs, frequently going back to even earlier sources, can be isolated in the narrative. Among them, noteworthy is that of migration in a broad sense: e.g., the migration of Slavic tribes from the Danube river towards the East; the expansion and strenghtening of political power and authority (with consequent broadening of state borders); the spread of christian faith and writing; etc. The article examines in particular the well-known excerpt on the introduction of Slavic writing in Great Moravia at the time of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission (862-865) and its subsequent transplantation in the Eastern Slavic lands. The investigation attempts to clarify why this episode is mentioned in the PVL under the year 898, i.e. more than 30 years after the new glagolitic alphabet was actually introduced among the Western Slavs (together with some translations of the Holy Scriptures into Old Church Slavonic). As a solution to the problem, for which a satisfactory interpretation is still lacking (despite some recent hypotheses due to the Russian historian V. Petrukhin), it is proposed to explain the anachronism in the light of the literary chronotope, according to the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. Like other episodes registered in the PVL, even the entry about the invention and further propagation of the letters among the Slavs may be considered to be subordinated to the inner organization of the narrative structure and thus can be interpreted as a basic element in the tale about the expansion of authority and the struggle for the unification of Kievan Rus’ under prince Oleg (882-912). In other words, in his account the annalist is guided by the subject itself as well as by the rules of the literary (annalistic) genre, which in a sense compel him to place the episode of Slavonic letters and books at the very end of a long historical process, described in the perspective of what has been called the “chronotope of the Russian land”.