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Perhaps the richest—and certainly the most extensively mined—vein in the literature of Kievan Russia is its historiography. Not only do the Russian chronicles still yield the most ample material to historians of politics and society, but they and other forms of historical compilation can also be of immense value to historians of culture. The surface looks unpromising: a rambling sprawl of manuscripts which date from the fourteenth century and later. But on closer inspection one finds a beautifully intricate substructure of interlinked texts from which scholars over the years have been able to reconstruct, at least in part, an image of life and letters in the Kievan period. 1 For the virtue of these manuscripts, and of their hypothetical Kievan predecessors, is that they contain not ‘works’ but compilations (indeed, often compilations of compilations), whose various layers and components may, by comparison one with another, be extrapolated and explored to their Kievan origins and beyond. And since almost any form of literature could be included or cited in historical compilations, from dry diplomatic record to rhetorical showpiece, from oral anecdote to elaborately wrought narrative, the study of historiography leads naturally to the study of Kievan writing and reading in general.
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