What Was the Language of Kievan Rus'?

What was the language of Kievan Rus'? is a question frequently asked, although it might be phrased more properly, What were the languages of Kievan Rus'? Since the territory covered by Kievan Rus' today encompasses the linguistic spheres of Bclarusan, Russian, and Ukrainian, it is often assumed that the answer must be an older form of one or of all three of those languages.

As in most medieval and even some contemporary societies, there were in Kievan Rus' at least two types of language, the spoken and the written. More­over, within each of these categories there were several variants. The spoken language had different dialects. The written language had various forms, depending on whether it was being used for commercial, administrative, reli­gious, familial, or other purposes.

Of the spoken language, modern scholarship has little direct evidence, since the written sources derive from the tenth century at the earliest and arc in a literary medium (Old Slavonic) that was imported into Kievan Rus' and was not based on the local speech. Faced with this source problem, scholars have turned to indirect evidence and have proposed several, often conflicting, theories. The controversy concerns two questions: (i) at what time, or during what transitional period, was an existing common Slavic spoken language replaced by the earliest stages of Ukrainian, Bclarusan, and Russian?, and (2) was the transition direct, or was it preceded by a period during which there existed a common East Slavic or Rus' language, from which, in turn, Ukrain­ian, Belarusan, and Russian subsequently developed?

Advocates of a transition from a common East Slavic or Rus' language to Ukrainian, Belarusan, and Russian are not in agreement as to the date of the transitional period.

With regard to written language, the existence of texts allows for less arbi­trary opinion, although here too there is debate as to how the texts should be classified. One thing is certain: the written language of Kievan Rus' was not based on any of the spoken languages or dialects of the inhabitants. In other words, it had no basis in any of the East Slavic dialects, nor did it stem from some supposed older form of Ukrainian, Belarusan, or Russian. Rather, it was a literary language, known as Old Slavonic, originally based on the Slavic dia­lects of Macedonia, which were those best known to its creators, Constantine/ Cyril and Methodius, in thc'sccond half of the ninth century.

Following the conversion of Kievan Rus' to Christianity in the 980s, Old Slavonic gradually began to be used in religious and secular writings. Then, in 1037, as part of laroslav the Wise’s efforts to enhance the cultural prestige of his realm, Old Slavonic was made the official language of the Rus' church. As a sacred language used in church liturgies, Old Slavonic initially retained its Old Bulgarian form in Kievan Rus'. By about 1100, however, several local East Slavic elements had entered this imported literary language. The result was the evolution of a distinct Rus', or East Slavic, variant (recension) of the lan­guage, known as Church Slavonic or, simply, Slavonic.

In a manner somewhat analogous to that of Latin in the medieval West, Church Slavonic was also used as a spoken language, especially by the clerical elite of Kievan Rus' society. Whereas by the end of the Kievan period spoken Church Slavonic was limited to clerical circles, as a literary language it was to be used in some form by all the East Slavs - Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Rus­sians - until well into the eighteenth century. Only in modern times, in partic­ular in the nineteenth century, were the spoken languages of the East Slavs, whether Russian, Ukrainian, or Bclarusan, gradually raised to a status that made them suitable for use as literary languages capable of replacing the Church Slavonic that had been the language of most writings since Kievan times.

Hence, to the question, What were the languages of Kievan Rus'?, several kinds of answer are possible. With regard to the spoken language, informed hypotheses suggest that Slavic linguistic unity among the inhabitants of Kievan Rus' began to break down at perhaps the time of the era of political disintegration during the mid-twelfth century, and that out of this differentia­tion Ukrainian, Belarusan, and Russian began to take shape in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Finally, the simultaneous existence of at least two distinct languages, liter­ary and spoken, that was characteristic of Kievan Rus' society, set a pattern on Ukrainian lands for many centuries to come. Indeed, much of subsequent Ukrainian cultural development to the twentieth century is the story of the struggle between those leaders who favored the maintenance of a literary ‘high language’ (Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Polish, or Russian) and those who preferred to raise the spoken Ukrainian vernacular to a level appropriate for intellectual and literary’ communication.

the linguistic medium of the educated elite, and, most important, it was accepted as a liturgical language by the new church in Kiev, and thereby gained the pres­tige of a sacred language worthy to be used alongside the other cultured medium, Greek.

Book production first became relatively widespread during the reign of laro- slav the Wise. He encouraged copyists to translate Greek works, especially histori­cal and hagiographic writings, into Slavonic, and he set up a kind of research and copying center as well as library at the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev. Clearly, the vast majority of the literary production in Kievan Rus' was religion-oriented - whether sermons, monastic statutes, or lives of the saints. Lives of the saints, known as chetyi minei, were particularly popular and appeared in the form of trans­lations from the Greek {Nicholas the Wonderworker, John Chrysostom, Andrew the Sim­ple) or of original accounts of Rus' figures. By far the earliest and most popular subjects were Volodymyr the Great’s martyred sons, Borys and Hlib, about whom several hagiographical works were written that stressed the need for younger princes to obey their seniors and condemned quarrels between rulers.

While religious tracts dominated Kievan literature, there were some works that had a wholly, or at least partially, secular purpose. Among the more important of these are the chronicles, which are still our primary source of knowledge about the period. The best-known chronicle, the Povest vremennykh let (Tale of Bygone Years), generally referred to as the Primary Chronicle, owes its origin to the desire of laroslav the Wise to provide a historical foundation for his policy of unifying and centralizing Kievan Rus'. Begun at the grand prince’s court in the mid-

eleventh century, it was copied and expanded several times at court and in monas­teries during the second half of the eleventh century. A thorough revision was completed in 1113 at Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves by the monk Nestor and later twice reworked by his monastic colleagues (ca. 1118 and 1123). It i^s these last two versions that have come down to us, although only in copies from the late four­teenth century (the Laurentian edition, based on the 1123 version) and the mid­fifteenth century (the Hypatian edition, based on the 1118 version).

Although the Primary Chronicle is the most famous, it was only one of many in its genre. Each of the major cities and principalities, including Kiev, Chernihiv, Vol- hynia, Galicia, and Pereiaslav in Ukraine, had its own chronicle. Some were rather dry compilations of unadorned historical facts, others, like the thirteenth-century Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, were interpretive histories (in this case showing the ‘thievery of the dishonorable boyars’) and stylized works of literature. It is inter­esting to note that the authors of each of the regional chronicles began by repro­ducing the text of the Primary Chronicle.

Undoubtedly, the best literary work to be produced in Kievan times and an incomparable witness to the high level that Rus' culture had already reached in the medieval period is the Slovo 0 polku Ihorevi, or Lay of Ihor’s Campaign. Its literary qualities are so highly advanced that several scholars since its publication have sus­pected that it could not possibly have been written at so early a time. They have argued that the manuscript (found only in the late eighteenth century and first published in Moscow in 1800) was a forgery by an eighteenth-century patriot try­ing to show that ancient Kievan Rus' had attained a level of culture higher than that of contemporary western Europe. Those who have accepted the authenticity of the Lay of Ihor’s Campaign have argued that it was composed soon after the events recounted in the tale took place, and some have suggested that its unknown author was probably a native of Galicia.

The story concerns the real-life exploits of Prince Ihor of Chernihiv, who set out in 1185 from his stronghold of Novhorod-Sivers'kyi, on the Desna River north­east of Kiev, to confront the Polovtsians. Ihor is captured by the Polovtsian khan Konchak, who tries to persuade him to be his ally in controlling all of Rus'. But Ihor refuses to accept a political alliance with the heathen Polovtsian enemy, vowing instead to die defending his Christian Rus' homeland. In addition to the obvious attempts of the author to invoke a sense of Rus' patriotism, the work is memorable for its aesthetically impressive poetic descriptions of the steppe and its portrayal of the emotional state of Ihor’s wife, who, waiting at home not knowing what has happened to her husband, is psychologically distraught.

The Lay of Ihor’s Campaign not only shows the high degree to which the civiliza­tion of Kievan Rus' had developed, but also - together with other artistic forms, whether architecture, painting, or literature - makes it clear that common goals and cultural aspirations prevailed throughout the medieval Rus' realm. The cul­tural products, along with the common social structure and economic base of the realm, make it possible to speak of a unified Rus' civilization that began to take shape in the eleventh century and that lasted for another 300 years, whether radi­ating from its center in Kiev or, as later, evolving within the various principalities of the realm.