Tradition and Translation : Maciej Stryjkowski's Polish Chronicle in Seventeenth-Century Russian Manuscripts

Abstract: The object of this study is a translation from Polish to Russian of the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski’s Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmódzka i wszystkiej Rusi, made at the Diplomatic Chancellery in Moscow in 1673–79. The original of the chronicle, which relates the origin and early history of the Slavs, was published in 1582. This Russian translation, as well as the other East Slavic translations that are also discussed here, is preserved only in manuscripts, and only small excerpts have previously been published.In the thesis, the twelve extant manuscripts of the 1673–79 translation are described and divided into three groups based on variant readings. It also includes an edition of three chapters of the translation, based on a manuscript kept in Uppsala University Library.There was no standardized written language in 17th-century Russia. Instead, there were several co-existing norms, and the choice depended on the text genre. This study shows that the language of the edited chapters contains both originally Church Slavonic and East Slavic linguistic features, distributed in a way that is typical of the so-called hybrid register. Furthermore, some features vary greatly between manuscripts and between scribes within the manuscripts, which shows that the hybrid register allowed a certain degree of variation.The translation was probably the joint work of several translators. Some minor changes were made in the text during the translation work, syntactic structures not found in the Polish original were occasionally used to emphasize the bookish character of the text, and measurements, names etc. were adapted to Russian norms. Nevertheless, influence from the Polish original can sometimes be noticed on the lexical and syntactic levels. All in all, this thesis is a comprehensive study of the language of the translated chronicle, which is a representative 17th-century text.