Zadonshchina - Zadonshchina and The Tale of Igor's Campaign

Zadonshchina and The Tale of Igor's Campaign

Some scholars believe that the author of Zadonshchina borrowed a lot of poetic material from The Tale of Igor's Campaign, which can be explained by the similar ideological orientation of both works. The author tried to depict the endless struggle for the unification of the Russian principalities in the face of an external enemy. Russian literary historians also believe that the author not merely imitated, but attempted to pick out and creatively re-interpret the events and poetic images in The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The major proponents of this idea are Dmitry Likhachev and his followers.

A French Slavist André Mazon and later a Soviet/Russian historian A. A. Zimin proposed that, on the contrary, The Tale of Igor's Campaign was written based on poetic images and ideas from Zadonshchina. They proposed that The Tale of Igor's Campaign was not an Old Russian text, but an 18th-century forgery. Indeed, the view of the Igor' Tale as a late forgery certainly implies that it is imitation of Zadonshchina, as the two texts are undoubtedly related. This approach is criticized by linguists, notably Roman Jakobson and Andrey Zaliznyak who show that the language of the Igor's Tale is far more archaic, and that the passages in Zadonshchina allegedly borrowed from the Tale differ from the rest of the work by linguistic criteria (whereas in the Tale no such distinction can be drawn).