Izbornik of Sviatoslav (1076)

Izbornik of Sviatoslav (1076). A manuscript of 176 two-column quarto sheets compiled by an unknown monk named Ioan of Kyiv from ‘many princely books’ during the reign of Prince Sviatoslav II Yaroslavych. It contains general moral instructions, aphorisms, and interpretations of the Holy Scripture. Some scholars (A. Popov, I. Budovnits) assert that some of the material was compiled in Kyiv. The language of the collection contains phonetic, morphological, and lexical Ukrainianisms. V. Shimanovsky published the manuscript in K istorii drevnerusskikh govorov (On the History of Ancient Rus’ Dialects, 1887) and separately in 1894. Corrections to the text were pointed out by Stepan Kulbakin in Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 1898, no. 2, and by V. Bobrov in Russkii filologicheskii vestnik, vols 47–8 (1902). A new edition of the collection came out in 1965. The work is also called the Shcherbatov Izbornik after the Russian historian M. Shcherbatov, who in the 18th century owned the manuscript, and the Hermitage Izbornik after the imperial public library (now the Saint Petersburg Public Library) where it was deposited after Shcherbatov's death. (See also Izbornik of Sviatoslav (1073).)

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1989).]