“The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness – “Stepennaja kniga carskogo rodoslovija” i genesis russkogo istoričeskogo soznanija. Ed. by Gail Lenhoff and Ann Kleimola – Pod redakciej Gejl Lenchoff i Ėnn Klejmoly. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2011. XV, 348 S. = UCLA Slavic Studies. New Series, 7. ISBN: 978-0-89357-377-5

Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

Im Auftrag des Instituts für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien Regensburg
herausgegeben von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz

Ausgabe: 61 (2013), 3, S. 444-446

Verfasst von: Valerie A. Kivelson

Papers of a Conference Complementing the New Edition of „Stepennaia kniga“

“The Book of Royal Degrees” and the Genesis of Russian Historical Consciousness – “Stepennaja kniga carskogo rodoslovija” i genesis russkogo istoričeskogo soznanija. Ed. by Gail Lenhoff and Ann Kleimola – Pod redakciej Gejl Lenchoff i Ėnn Klejmoly. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2011. XV, 348 S. = UCLA Slavic Studies. New Series, 7. ISBN: 978-0-89357-377-5.

Thanks to the efforts of energetic teams of scholars, two great historical compendia produced during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Litsevoi letopisnyi svod XVI veka or Illustrated Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century and the Stepennaia kniga or Royal Book of Degrees, have been published in fine critical editions (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod. 24 vols. Moskva: Akteon, 2009–2011; Stepennaia kniga tsarskogo rodosloviia po drevneishim spiskam. Teksty i kommentarii v trekh tomakh. ed. N. N. Pokrovskii and G. D. Lenhoff. Moskva: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2007–2012). The publication of each of these massive compilations has generated tremendous interest within Muscovite studies, and they have inspired flurries of articles, panels and even entire conferences dedicated to them. In their co-edited volume, Gail Lenhoff and Ann Kleimola present twenty-two essays in English and Russian, the product of an international conference held at UCLA in 2009 dedicated to the first of these two enormous sixteenth-century works. The Stepennaia kniga, a sustained celebration of the Rurikid dynasty and its harmonious relationship with the Orthodox Church, reworked the traditional Rus’ chronicle by jettisoning the annalistic sequence in favor of a generational organization. Dividing the rule of the Rurikids into seventeen generations or “steps”, the book traced the history of the dynasty from its glorious inception with St. Vladimir to its triumphant zenith with Ivan IV. The essays explore this unique work from multiple angles: philological, literary, linguistic, historical, and most, though not all, of the essays hew closely to the topic at hand.

The collection retains both the vitality and the messiness of a lively conference. The essays are interesting individually, but are somewhat discordant as a whole. The first section offers a variety of compelling but incompatible arguments for various dates of composition. Nikolai N. Pokrovskii, Andrei S. Usachev, Ol’ga D. Zhuravel’, Sergei N. Bogatyrev, and Edward L. Keenan each offers a different take on the composition and completion of the work and of the sequence of surviving manuscripts. Most authors attribute the work to the prelacy of Metropolitan Makarii in the mid-1550s or early 1560s, or Metropolitan Afanasii in the mid-1560s. Bogatyrev suggests that it did not take stable form until the time of Metropolitan Filipp (1566–1568), and Keenan endorses an even later date during the regency of Boris Godunov. Each of these articles sets out clear and convincing evidence, and the editors leave the pieces to spar among themselves. The dispute over timing wends through the rest of the volume, with adherents to one or another scenario building further arguments based on their own presumptions about dating. A slight majority seems to endorse the position that Metropolitan Afanasii should receive credit as the inspiration and overseer of the project, although Makarii wins supporters as well. Charles Halperin’s contribution stands a bit apart from the others in this first section. His essay questions how to properly categorize the Stepennaia kniga, often airily described as an “official source”. Halperin proffers a clear-headed taxonomy of types of documents produced in Muscovy and criteria for identifying them. He concludes that: “The ‘Stepennaia kniga’ was unquestionably a church source, but at least until its authorship and evolution have been clarified it would be premature to describe it as official”. (p. 93)

Clustered in Part II are essays on “Models, Function, Language”. David Prestel finds a systematic twist in the Stepennaia kniga’s creative repurposing of passages taken from the Kievan Caves Patericon. The sixteenth-century compilers played down themes of monastic independence and dynastic feuding, and omitted the abbatial rebukes that such discord provoked, and instead recast such moments to emphasize redemptive outcomes. From Prestel’s close reading of the fate of particular passages, we move to A. V. Sirenov’s sweeping vision of a broadly encompassing Orthodox ecumene, including Serbia, Moldova, and Greece, from which the authors of the Stepennaia kniga drew their models and inspiration. Sirenov contends that the novel form and message of the Stepennaia kniga drew on models from this wider Orthodox world, largely funneled through Hilandar Monastery. He identifies a wide variety of visual, architectural, and textual transfers and influences from the Orthodox abroad. This ambitious essay is followed immediately by an equally convincing piece by Wolf-Heinrich Schmidt which contests (while claiming not to refute) one of the central planks of Sirenov’s argument, the role of the Serbian Danilov zbornik as a model for the Stepennaia kniga. Schmidt’s piece contains a valuable overview of the historiographic approaches to the Stepennaia kniga and concludes on an open note, stressing the multiple functions and uses and the variety of readings which the work itself invited. This section concludes with Viktor Zhivov’s examination of “The Language of the Book of Degrees”. A satisfying anchor to the rather mind-spinning set of contradictory and open-ended essays before it, this one offers an entertaining and entirely compelling assessment of the linguistic changes introduced by the authors of the Stepennaia kniga as they reworked their source material. Zhivov finds a consistent predilection for “bookish syntactic constructions” used “as stylistic devices to mark particularly solemn passages”, and for arcane forms piled on top of each other “irrespective of grammatical correctness”. (p. 141) Intriguingly, he suggests that the compilers developed a “distinctive linguistic strategy intended for a new kind of historical narration”. (p. 153)

Zhivov’s observation on historical narrative moves the book smoothly to the third part, titled “Narratives and Counternarratives”, which opens with Gail Lenhoff’s study of “Politics and Form”. Accepting the Makarian date for the composition, Lenhoff situates the work in the context of Ivan’s conquest of Kazan. The Stepennaia kniga, she says, shows the fulfillment of a divine plan for Russia, by representing the conquest and putative “reconquest” of territories under the scepter of the Orthodox princes. Lenhoff argues that the work was structured “to project the triumph of Ivan’s eastern policy onto Russia’s past and to interpret that past as a new Triumph of Orthodoxy”. (p. 174) Andreas Ebbinghaus’s essay on the Tale of the Meeting of the Wonder-Working Icon of the Vladimir Mother of God also highlights the importance of the theme of Orthodoxy’s triumph over anti-Christian foes in the east. Janet Martin picks up a similar thread, showing how the Stepennaia kniga flattens the figure of Shah Ali, last khan of Kazan, in order to celebrate the prophesied reign of the son of Vasilii III in Kazan. This piece is another in Martin’s series of gems on Muscovite-Tatar relations. Hopefully she will publish a collection someday soon. Part III closes with Ann Kleimola’s moving reexamination of the role of the Staritskii family, especially of the much-maligned Efrosin’ia, in the politics of Ivan’s court and as cultural patrons. Full of surprises, the article shows the way the Stepennaia kniga itself employed “ellipsis and elision” (p. 247) to suppress the story of Staritskii treachery.

Tucked in and among the rest are several essays that have little or no obvious connection with the Stepennaia kniga, but are valuable in their own right. Among these is A. A. Gorskii’s fascinating and original take on “territorial-political changes in Rus’ in the XIV–XV centuries”. In the short space of fifteen pages, Gorskii upends most entrenched beliefs about the transition from the Golden Age of Kiev Rus’ to the “period of feudal fragmentation”, arguing that we have misconstrued both.

Part IV shifts to examinations of “Culture of Commemoration and Patronage” both within and beyond the Stepennaia kniga, starting with Pierre Gonneau’s study of the text’s layered representation of St. Sergius. Appearing repeatedly in Steps 14–17, St. Sergius grows in stature and changes in function from friend and mentor to princes to protector of the land, link to the Theotokos, and miraculous provider of a princely son and heir. David Miller’s essay on the culture of commemoration at the Trinity Monastery explores the general preoccupation with genealogy among Orthodox Muscovites, a preoccupation expressed clearly in the Stepennaia kniga. Daniel Kaiser’s quantitative study of the appearance of various icons in the wills of Muscovite testators also connects only tangentially with the topic but contains important information on the saints who actually enjoyed popular veneration.

A catchall final section, vaguely entitled “Religion and Governance”, opens with Robert Romanchuk’s erudite investigation of the question “how did an Orthodox ruler read history”. (p. 305) The answer seems to be that he did so through Pauline typology and the Platonizing teachings of Dionysius the Areopagite. In the following piece, David Goldfrank discovers legacies of the hesychastic ideas of Iosif Volotskii and Nil Sorskii as they took shape in the Stepennaia kniga. Somewhat adrift in this collection, the two closing essays take the story, such as it is, into the eighteenth century and beyond. Assuming the Stepennaia kniga was meant to offer moral guidance to the ruler (a premise which a number of the essays dispute), Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter presents the teachings of Father Platon (Levshin) as a continuation, in Enlightenment garb, of traditional clerical models of religious-moral guidance and commitment to Christian rulership. Nancy Shields Kollmann follows Wirschafter’s lead by surveying the large body of historical research on the importance of advice and moral instruction in Muscovite political ideology, but, she points out, we have no firm basis for assuming that the Stepennaia kniga served such a function. She further reminds us of the dearth of evidence on the ways that texts were actually read or used. “The greatest challenge facing those of us who care about such fascinating sources as the Stepennaia kniga”, she writes, “would be to explore how they were used”. (p. 347) Kollmann’s note of caution puts an appropriate question-mark at the end of this argument-rich, informative, and somewhat unruly volume on a major monument of Muscovite literary production.

Valerie A. Kivelson, Ann Arbor, MI