Power of the Legend: the Tale of Sloven and Rus in Russian Chronicles of the 17th Century

The article examines the influence of the 1630s Novgorod literary tale about the descendants of Noah, the Scythian princes Sloven and Rus, the Great City of Slovensk, which later became Novgorod, the empire they founded and their descendant Gostomysl, for the broad circles of scholarly book lovers of the 17th – early 18th centuries. The author tries to explain why this tale became extremely popular among highly educated chroniclers and was included into the largest chronicle and chronographic monuments, from the Code of 1652 to the Russian Chronograph, as well as into works of the annalistic scriptorium of Patriarch Joachim, the Novgorod Zabelinskaya Chronicle, Latukhin’s Book of Degrees, the Synopsis and the Detailed Chronicle from the Beginning of Russia to the Battle of Poltava. The tale remained stable in the writings of the overwhelming majority of authors, who were accustomed in other cases to seriously revise, shorten or supplement the text. The fact that the attempt remake the tale in a scholarly way and to integrate it into the chronographic text was unique and unsuccessful makes us think that ancient scribes and readers of their works, like M.V. Lomonosov later, were attracted by the literary merits of this poetic legend. We see the opposite picture in the history of the similarly conceived scholarly story about Mosokh existence, confirming this conclusion by constant alterations of its text.