Almost immediately after the publication of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in 1800, some people began to express opinions that this work was not created at the end of the 12th century, but was a recent forgery of antiquity. Disputes about this have flared up more than once since then, and not only professional scientists, but also inspired amateurs, who energetically defended the antiquity of the “Word” and others its counterfeitness, became participants in the debate. Maxim Russo checked how serious the arguments of both sides are.

Although in the academic world there are now few supporters of the version of the late origin of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” it is still popular among the general public. Just look at any online publication dedicated to “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” where user comments are allowed, and among commentators there will definitely be supporter of the fake version. In 2014, a book by Alexander Kostin was published “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is a forgery of the millennium”. German writer Peter Köhler in the book “Fake. The funniest falsifications in art, science, literature and history" (2015, Russian translation - 2017) lists “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign” on a par with “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Hitler’s diaries, although he admits that the falsification has not been proven.

It should be noted that there are many circumstances that contribute to a skeptical view of the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.”

The story was preserved in a single copy as part of a collection discovered by the collector of ancient Russian books, Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin. No other manuscript with it could be found.
The Musin-Pushkin library was destroyed in the fire of Moscow in 1812, so the text of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is now available only thanks to the first printed edition, a handwritten copy made for Catherine II, as well as extracts from historians Alexei Malinovsky and Nikolai Karamzin.
Musin-Pushkin was reluctant to provide information about the circumstances of the discovery of the collection.
“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was published at the height of the Romantic era, when in many European countries interest in national roots and ancient literature intensified, which often contributed to the emergence of falsifications. At the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century, such famous fakes appeared as poems of Ossian (1760s), Kraledvor manuscript (1817), Zelenogorsk manuscript (1818).
In Soviet times, doubting the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was regarded as ideological sabotage, and those who doubted it risked incurring the wrath of the authorities. An open discussion about the authenticity of the Lay was impossible. The ideological dictate caused natural opposition, so the version of the fakeness of the “Word” became psychologically attractive to many people.

If the Musin-Pushkin collection had not perished in the fire, the answer to the question would have been received, if not in the 19th, then certainly in the 20th century. A forger in the 1790s would clearly not have the necessary technology and knowledge paleography, in order to produce a fake ancient manuscript that would not be exposed by later specialists. But the collection has not reached us, so both skeptics and supporters of the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” are forced to look for arguments in the existing text and accompanying circumstances.

It must be said that the arguments on both sides were often unconvincing. Skeptics say Peter Kalaidovich, “they could not convince themselves that this poem belongs to the 12th century, when they compared the barbarism and ignorance of that time with those lofty thoughts, with those sublime feelings and eloquent expressions that distinguish it from Russian chronicles, simple and uncolored.” Supporters of authenticity considered the same “eloquent expressions,” that is, the high literary merits of the Lay, as an argument in their favor. The same thing happened with other arguments. Some considered the parallels between the Lay and folklore texts to be evidence of authenticity, while others said that the forger simply used quotes from folklore. Skeptics pointed to dark passages in the text as evidence that the 18th-century author had failed to master the Old Russian language, but they were told that a real hoaxer would never have made such mistakes.

A serious argument in favor of the authenticity of the Lay was the discovery "Zadonshchiny" - works of the 14th century dedicated to the victory in the Battle of Kulikovo (the first publication of one of the lists of “Zadonshchina” was 1852). The text of “Zadonshchina” contains many quotes and borrowed images from “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” But skeptics did not give up and suggested that it was not in “Zadonshchina” that the “Word” was quoted, but “Zadonshchina” served as a source for the falsifier, who took quotes from it for his work. The most authoritative scientists from the skeptic camp insisted on the primacy of “Zadonshchina”: Louis Leger, Andre Mazon and Alexander Zimin.

Linguistic arguments have always played a significant role in the debate over the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign. However, a key role in this issue was played by the book of the famous expert on the Old Russian language, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak ""The Tale of Igor's Campaign": a linguist's view"(2004). If previously it was usually discussed whether a particular word, grammatical form or linguistic construction corresponds to the language of the 12th century, then Zaliznyak set the task not only of assessing the presence or absence of errors in the text of the Lay, but also the amount of knowledge that a potential falsifier required in order to compose a text that did not contain such errors.

Skeptics sometimes claim that cultured people of the 18th century, for example the same Alexei Musin-Pushkin, knew the Church Slavonic language from childhood and could use it in the production of a fake ancient manuscript. But in fact, the differences between the Old Russian language of the 12th century and the Church Slavonic language are quite large, and a forgery written in Church Slavonic would have been exposed soon after publication.

If the Lay is a forgery, then its author must have had the deepest knowledge of the Old Russian language. He correctly used four different past tenses and mastered the dual number. A number of words found in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” changed their meanings by the 18th century, but in the text they are unmistakably used in the meanings that they had in the Old Russian language: “regiment" (“hike”), “greedy" (“thirsty”), “cruel" (“strong”, “strong” - about the body), “life" (“property”, “wealth”), “fat" (“wealth”, “abundance”), “lust" (“desire, desire”), “to court" ("to death") skinny (“empty”), etc.

In some cases, it turns out that the potential falsifier must have been two hundred years or more ahead of science. In the Old Russian language there were many enclitics - small words that did not have independent stress. Among them were particles (“same", "whether", "bo"), pronouns in the dative or accusative case (“mi", "tee", "si", "me", "you", "Xia"), forms of the auxiliary verb (“am", "if you"). The placement of enclitics within a phrase and the order in which they appear one after another is determined by strict rules. For example, in Old Russian you can say: “You retreated from that village" (“I gave up that village in your favor”), but it’s impossible to say: “You have retreated from that village" or "I retreated from that village". The rules for the order of enclitics were strict; violating them can be compared to violating the order of morphemes within a word, as if instead of “go-e-m-te" said "go-yo-te-m". But native speakers of the Old Russian language, even literate ones, did not realize these rules; they simply automatically put the enclitic in the right place. The authors of grammatical descriptions did not pay much attention to enclitics, a complete description of the rules of production of which was given by A. A. Zaliznyak in the monograph “Russian Enclitics” (2008). But a possible falsifier of the word must have done the work of Zaliznyak at the end of the 18th century, since in his text the enclitics are in the right places.

In the Old Russian language, at the end of verbs in the imperfect (one of the past tenses), sometimes “-т” appeared, and sometimes it did not: “write" or "write" (“he wrote”), “pisakhu" or "piss" (“they wrote”), “like" or "walk" (“he walked”), “hozhahu" or "hozhahut" (“they walked”) In Church Slavonic, unlike Old Russian, there were no forms of imperfect with “-т” (only “write", "pisakhu", "you want", "hozhdahu"). By what principle did this “-th” appear and disappear in the Old Russian language?», remained unclear for a long time. “In the 3rd person singular. and many more part of the ancient Russian scribes added the imperfect “-т” to the ending,” - that’s all one of the best reported on this textbooks on historical grammar, first published in 1981. Determine the rules for using forms like “write" And "write" Slavist Alain Timberlake from the University of California at Berkeley was able to (in Russian his article published in 1997 in “Questions of Linguistics”). As it turns out, the appearance of “-т” at the end of a verb depends on certain enclitics that come immediately after it. Timberlake worked on the material of the Laurentian Chronicle, but the use of “-т” in the imperfect in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, as it turned out, corresponds to the patterns he formulated.

If “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” had really been written by someone in the 18th century, then this person must have previously made a huge number of linguistic discoveries in the field of the Old Russian language, but what is most striking is that he left no mention anywhere of his discoveries, which clearly must have required him many years of hard work. Having outlined the entire volume of knowledge that the 18th century forger must have had in order to write the text of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and avoid exposure, Zaliznyak comes to the conclusion: “Those who want to believe that somewhere in the deepest secret there exist scientific geniuses, an unimaginable number of times superior in talent to the people known to us, who were ahead of the rest of humanity in their scientific discoveries by a century or two and at the same time wished for eternal absolute obscurity for themselves and for all their discoveries, they can continue to believe in their romantic idea. It is impossible to refute this idea with mathematical certainty: the probability that it is true is not strictly zero, it is just vanishingly small.”

A. Zaliznyak separately examines the relationship between “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and “Zadonshchina”. He found that if we compare parts of the text of “Zadonshchina” that coincide and do not coincide with the text of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, it turns out that in several linguistic characteristics (the use of short and long forms of adjectives, the position of the pronoun “sya”, the proportion of non-union sentences) they differ significantly. At the same time, the characteristics of texts common to the “Word” coincide with the characteristics of the entire text of the “Word”. If we assume that the falsifier copied pieces of text from “Zadonshchina,” then we will have to admit that he selected them not by content, but by, for example, the proportion of non-union complex sentences.

In 2014, another mystery of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which attracted the attention of skeptics, was resolved - Musin-Pushkin’s evasive answers regarding the origin of the manuscript. To employee of the Institute of Russian Literature Alexander Bobrov managed to trace history of the manuscript according to documents and prove that Musin-Pushkin took advantage of his official position to illegally add a rare manuscript to his collection. Let us recall that, according to Musin-Pushkin, he acquired a handwritten collection containing “Chronograph”, the First Novgorod Chronicle, “The Tale of the Indian Kingdom”, “The Tale of Akira the Wise”, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and “The Deed of Devgenie”, from the former archimandrite of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in Yaroslavl, Joel (Bykovsky). “In recent years, he [Joel] was in short supply; on this occasion, my commission agent bought all the Russian books from him, including one, called “Chronograph,” at the end of which was found “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” wrote Musin-Pushkin. For a long time, this version was recognized by modern scientists. The inventory of the monastery library in Yaroslavl even mentioned the “Chronograph in Ten,” which in 1788 was destroyed “due to dilapidation and decay” (it was assumed that this was how Joel officially explained the disappearance of the manuscript he sold to a collector). But in 1992, this same allegedly destroyed or sold “Chronograph in Ten” was discovered in the monastery library. It, of course, did not contain “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.”

Alexander Bobrov established that the manuscript of “The Lay of Igor’s Host” came to Musin-Pushkin in the winter of 1791–1792 (the earliest mention of the “Lay” in the historian’s comments helped establish the date Ivan Elagin in the margins of his own manuscript “The Experience of Narrative about Russia”). The year 1791 is very important, because this year Musin-Pushkin becomes chief prosecutor of the Synod, and in August of the same year, Catherine II orders that ancient manuscripts “related to Russian history” stored in monastery libraries be delivered to the Synod. The manuscripts sent to the Synod fell into the hands of Musin-Pushkin. Among the books sent from the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery was the “Chronograph”, which is mentioned in two registers compiled during the transfer of books from the monastery to the Novgorod archbishop and from the archbishop to the Synod (“Granograph (Chronograph). Church history of the Old and New Testaments and civil history, with frequent addition of fabulous stories”). When Musin-Pushkin resigned from the post of Chief Prosecutor of the Synod in 1797, an official investigation was launched against him regarding some manuscripts that “were taken by the former synodal master Count Musin-Pushkin, but were not returned to the Holy Synod.” Eleven such books were counted, two were soon discovered, and regarding the remaining nine, Musin-Pushkin replied that he allegedly handed over these manuscripts personally to Catherine II. At the time of the trial, Catherine had already died, and the manuscripts were never found. Among the missing manuscripts was the “Chronograph” sent from the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery with the addition of “fabulous” (that is, mythological) stories. The collector's passion forced the count to appropriate several books, including the collection that contained The Lay. After the publication of A. Bobrov’s research, not only did the fog clear over the history of the discovery of the “Word,” but also the versions of some skeptics who called Archimandrite Joel the author of the “Word” turned out to be completely impossible.

In general, after the publication of Zaliznyak’s work, there is no doubt among linguists and specialists in ancient Russian literature that “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is a work of the 12th century. Reasoning about its fakeness remained a destiny representatives of pseudoscientific theories like the new chronology.