The Role of the Debate on the Authenticity of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign in the Emergence of a Revolutionary Direction in the Humanities

Among the sceptics who have considered The Tale of Igor’s Campaign an 18th-century forgery, three scholars provided the most scientifically grounded hypotheses. The first was the French Slavist André Mazon, whose arguments were thoroughly refuted by Roman Jakobson in 1948. According to another prominent twentieth-century linguist, Andrei Zalizniak, Jakobson had ‘scientifically demolished’ Mazon’s claims. Zalizniak himself primarily targeted the American historian Edward Keenan in his seminal linguistic study (2004), which convincingly demonstrated the authenticity of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Zalizniak also discussed the hypothesis of the third sceptic, whose active period came between Mazon and Keenan—the Soviet medieval historian Aleksandr Zimin. While Zalizniak expressed unconcealed irritation towards Keenan’s hypotheses (although refuting them scientifically rather than dismissively), each time he approached Zimin’s arguments, he felt obliged to make a reservation: although Zimin’s linguistic arguments were amateurish, his courageous attempt to challenge ‘the official orthodoxy and the sacred cow status assigned in the USSR to The Tale of Igor’s Campaign’ deserves respect. Importantly, Zimin and his theory had both an opponent and proponent in a single scholar—Juri Lotman. Lotman opposed the persuasiveness of Zimin’s hypothesis yet supported him in the context of numerous sociological issues in Soviet academia during the 1960s. This article reconstructs the relationship between Lotman and Zimin based on their correspondence (1963–1971), preserved in their archives and virtually unknown to the wider scholarly community. In conclusion, the article offers an explanation as to why Lotman—who in the early 1960s sought solutions to methodological crises through interdisciplinary collaborations—ultimately chose a circle of young Moscow linguists over the historian Zimin. This decision resulted in the establishment of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics.