Decorative Sunday
This Sunday we have some fabulous decorative elements from a 1985 edition of Slovo o polku Igoreve, or, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, published by Aurora Art Publishers of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The text of the tale is presented three times, first in imitation of the Old Russian unicial manuscript hand, then in Old Russian with a modern Cyrillic typeface, and finally an English translation by scholar of Russian and Slavonic studies and philologist, Dennis Ward. The Old Russian unicials are the work of the illustrator, Ivan Golikov, one of the founders of the Russian icon-painting style known as Palekh. Golikov spent an entire year between 1932 and 1933 working on the illustrations, the text, and ornamental tailpieces, and the decorated initials, originally for inclusion in a 1934 publication of the tale for the Soviet Academia publishing house.
The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Old East Slavic: Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ) is an epic poem attributed to the late twelfth century recounting the defeat of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich the Brave of the Rurik Dynasty at the River Kayala at the hands of the Cumans. While there is some scholarly debate over the legitimacy of it’s medieval origins, the current consensus supports its authenticity, and it is considered the most celebrated epic of the Kievan Rus’ period. Only one manuscript of the tale, purportedly dated to the fifteenth century, has ever been located. It was found in a cathedral library in 1795 and sold to statesman, historian, and noted collector Aleksei Musin-Pushkin. It is assumed to have been lost with the rest of Musin-Pushkin’s extensive library during the Great Moscow Fire of 1812. Luckily, Aleksei had prepared a transcription from the Old East Slavic into modern Russian for Catherine the Great shortly after acquiring the manuscript, and the paleographers who helped him prepare the work had kept their own copies of passages from the original manuscript. These surviving texts form the basis for contemporary scholarship on the epic.
Our copy of Slovo o polku Igoreve is a gift of Michael J. Mikoś, professor of foreign languages and literature at UW-Milwaukee, specializing in Polish language, literature, and culture.
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-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern
