“Tatishchev Information” About Alexander Nevsky in Russian Historiography
The article deals with “Tatishchev Information” about the life and politics of Prince Alexander Nevsky.The purpose of the study is to study the annalistic and other texts on which V.N. Tatishchev based while working on the chapters of the Russian History dedicated to Prince Alexander Nevsky; to determine the methods of Tatishchev's work with chronicle texts.Material and methods. V.N. Tatishchev described in great detail what “manuscripts” he relied on when writing the “History”. However, there is a whole class of information available in the work of V.N. Tatishchev, but missing in the chronicles he used. The current scientific question is what are the sources of this information? To resolve this issue, it is necessary to subject not only the History itself to analytical textological verification, but also the entire reading circle of the historian, which included not only those chronicles, but also a wider range of historical literature available to him.Findings and their discussion. The article highlights three pieces of “Tatishchev information” related to Alexander Nevsky:Date of his birth. 2. The name of his bride - a Polotsk princess. 3. Complaint of Prince Alexander to Khan Sartak against his brother - Prince Andrei. The author comes to the conclusion that the listed information can be considered as the result of the analytical work ofV.N. Tatishchev as a historian. They are nor the result of attracting unknown sources, or a hoax or a manifestation of ideological bias. Conclusion. An analysis of “Tatishchev Information” regarding the life and politics of Alexander Nevsky does not give grounds to assume that the historian has any unknown sources of information, or the desire to distort it. In this case, the explanatory constructions were simple and were not part of the ideological doctrine. It is clear that V.N. Tatishchev had social and political convictions, which sometimes influenced his approach to the interpretation and presentation of some historical facts. However, in this case, we are not dealing with systemic ideological tendentiousness, but with inferences and narrative constructions of the simplest, elementary level. This also applies to the date of birth of Alexander, calculated by Tatishchev in the simplest way, and the version about the complaint of Prince Alexander against his brother Andrei, and the name of the Polotsk princess, in which we can only suspect an accidental erroneous contamination.