Primary Chronicle - Two Manuscripts

Two Manuscripts

Because the original of the chronicle as well as the earliest known copies are lost, it is difficult to establish the original content of the chronicle. The two main sources for the chronicle's text as it is known presently are the Laurentian codex and the Hypatian codex.

The Laurentian codex was compiled in what are today Russian lands by the Nizhegorod monk Laurentius for the Prince Dmitry Konstantinovich in 1377. The original text he used was a lost codex compiled for the Grand Duke Mikhail of Tver in 1305. The account continues until 1305, but the years 898–922, 1263–83 and 1288–94 are missing for reasons unknown. The manuscript was acquired by the famous Count Musin-Pushkin in 1792 and subsequently presented to the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg.

The Hypatian Codex dates to the 15th century. It was written in what are today Ukrainian lands and incorporates much information from the lost 12th-century Kievan and 13th-century Halychian chronicles. The language of this work is the East Slavic version of Church Slavonic language with many additional irregular east-slavisms (like other east-Slavic codices of the time).Whereas the Laurention (Muscovite) text traces the Kievan legacy through to the Muscovite princes, the Hypation text traces the Kievan legacy through the rulers of the Halych principality.The Hypatian codex was re-discovered in Kiev in the 1620s and copy was made for Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozhsky. A copy was found in Russia in the 18th century at the Ipatiev Monastery of Kostroma by the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin.

Numerous monographs and published versions of the chronicle have been made, the earliest known being in 1767. Aleksey Shakhmatov published a pioneering textological analysis of the narrative in 1908. Dmitry Likhachev and other Soviet scholars partly revisited his findings. Their versions attempted to reconstruct the pre-Nestorian chronicle, compiled at the court of Yaroslav the Wise in the mid-11th century.