Forgiving Forgery

Forgiving Forgery
Author(s): Donald Rayfield

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 107, No. 4 (October 2012), pp. xxv-xli
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Forgiving Forgery
DO NA L D R A Y F I E LD
e Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association
read at Carlton House Terrace, London, on May
My rst contact with literary forgery came in , when I bought a house,
and the previous owner explained that he had earned enough to purchase the
property by writing in I was Hitlers Maid, a slightly scurrilous memoir
allegedly by a Pauline Kohler. (Of all the catalogue entries for this work, only
that of the Imperial War Museum notes that it was actually written by two
British Intelligence ocers; otherwise, the forgery has gone unnoticed.)
Literary forgery cannot be condemned or condoned out of hand: the scale
runs from the innocuous device of presenting a lyric composition as a folk
poem to a moneymaking imposition, such as Hitlers or Berias diaries,
which might three hundred years ago have had the forger hanged. Even recently there have been literary hoaxes, such as the non-existent Australian
modernist poet Ern Malley, which have revitalized a whole literature. We shall
talk of Macphersons Ossian and possibly infer that this massively successful
misrepresentation of Gaelic oral poetry, which altered the course of literature from England to Russia, was a contribution to literature comparable to
Shakespeare or Molire. Time also forces us to accept another scale of relativity. While we can laugh at late medieval allegations that virtually all classical
literature was a forgery by heretical monks, or eighteenth-century claims that
most medieval manuscripts were concoctions by nationalistic antiquarians,
the fact is that historians of many medieval literatures take in their stride,
without undue indignation, eleventh-century manuscripts purporting to be
sixth-century eyewitness accounts, or hagiographies whose authors openly admit reconstructing the life of a saint not from records of events but from their
certainty of their subjects virtues. Some medieval literary histories are themselves fabrications to which modern national self-awareness clings: even today,
despite proofs provided by linguistic and chemical testing, some Czechs regard
doubt about the ninth-century provenance of the Krlovdvorov manuscript
as treasonable, and in Georgia foreign scholars who ask why the sixth-century
eyewitness account of the martyrdom of St Shushanik in quotes biblical
texts of the tenth century nd themselves frozen out of discussion.
When we discuss forgery and falsication, therefore, the reception by the
reader is as important a factor as the motives and the skill of the forger. For
glaring examples of both aspects, we can begin in eighteenth-century England,
with the phenomenon of George Psalmanazar in and the publication of
Modern Language Review, (), xxvxli
Modern Humanities Research Association
xxvi
Forgiving Forgery
his ludicrously implausible Description of Formosa two years later. Psalmanazar recanted his forgery, wrote his memoirs, became a useful literary hack,
much admired in his old age by Samuel Johnson, but he never revealed his
real name or place of birth. He turned up as a mercenary serving in a Scottish
regiment in the Netherlands and claimed to be a pagan from Formosa who had
been abducted by Jesuits and had escaped their seminary. To test his story he
was asked to translate a passage of Cicero into Formosan, was told that his test
sample had been lost, and a second sample proved to be so dierent from the
rst that it was clear (apart from his blue eyes, red hair, and fair complexion)
that his Formosan story was a fantasy. But the anti-Jesuit aspect to his story
made him useful. He was immediately baptized and then foisted on Christ
Church, Oxford, as a teacher of the Formosan language.
His Description of Formosa, translated from Latin into English and then into
French, was immediately denounced by the few persons qualied to do so: Jesuit missionaries, Dutch traders, astronomers who found Psalmanazar unable
to give any indication of the suns position in Formosa. But if Psalmanazars accounts of Formosawhere the people worshipped heavenly bodies, guided by
a prophet coincidentally named Psalmanazar, where the executioners sold human meat to the public, and people lived on oating villages, or were conveyed
in carriages drawn by elephantswere chiey sources for better fantasies, such
as Jonathan Swis Gullivers Travels, his samples of the Formosan language did
convince some scholars that this was a viable language. Apart from a few terms
in his Description, Psalmanazar produced an alphabet and three texts: the
Lords Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and the Ten Commandments. He insisted
that Formosan was a conservative dialect of Japanese, and that Japan itself
was about to abandon Chinese characters in favour of this alphabet. Christ
Churchs dons should have been suspicious that this alphabet is remarkably
like Hebrew: written right to le, some lettersMem, Kaphhaving Hebrew
names, others being simple reversals of Hebrew or Greek written forms (see
Figure ). Formosan is vaguely oriental in that, with few exceptions, all syllables are open and it has no case endings. But inconsistencies creep in: there
are no articles in the Lords Prayer or the Creed, but they creep into the Ten
Commandments, where not only does the article ois seem to have a plural and
even a feminine form, but a genitive and accusative too, and these become
more and more Romance in form: oios, oion, los, while the possessive adjectives and pronouns sometimes recall Romance: we have mios for my, but jerh,
jenr for I, me. Otherwise, an -i sux makes for a feminine: pornio father,
porniin mother; bot son, boti daughter. Word order follows French at rst,
e illustrations may be seen in greater detail, and in colour, in the online version of this
article, available at www.jstor.org. For permission to publish Figure I am indebted to Lambeth
Palace Archive (MS , item ). Copyright to Figure is held by Nrodn muzeum, Prague.
Figure has been placed in the public domain: see <http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com>.
xxvii
F . . George Psalmanazars manuscript table of the Formosan alphabet (Lambeth Palace MS )
xxviii
Forgiving Forgery
but in the Ten Commandments becomes verb nal. e verb to be has a present
tense: vie, viey, vie, [. . .] vien, and a past tense jorh. Other verbs seem to have a
rst person in -ou and third-person plural in -an; the past tense and participle
are formed by the sux -en, the future, apparently, with -er. Of the numerals,
we have char- three, kior- four, dekie six, meino- seven. ere is a little
Greekkai means and, Koriakia the Lordsand possibly Basque, for in a
manuscript version of the Lords Prayer, the word for bread is arto (Basque
for maize-bread). Contemporaries conjectures that Psalmanazar was a native
speaker of French, but with a Gascon dialect, and his own story of an aborted
seminary education with a sprinkling of Greek and Hebrew, seem conrmed
by the slip-ups in his invented language. Had Psalmanazar taught any pupils at
Christ Church, he might have preceded Zamenhof and Schleyer (the inventors
of Esperanto and Volapk) as a language constructor. But while Psalmanazar
had a motive for inventing Formosanto get out of army service into Oxford Universityclearly he had no motivation for the eort of sustaining and
expanding Formosan. Faced with increasing denunciations and mockery, he
recanted everything: his last will and testament, printed in Lloyds Evening Post
posthumously in , runs:
I was in some measure unavoidably led into the base and shameful imposture of
passing upon the world for a native of Formosa, and a convert to Christianity, and
backing it with a ctitious account of that island, and of my own travels, conversion
etc., all or most of it hatched in my own brain, without regard to truth or honesty
[. . .] a scandalous imposition on the public [. . .] that I am [. . .] heartily sorry for and
ashamed of.
Ironically, before he died Psalmanazar contributed a less mendacious account

of Formosa to an encyclopedia, and devised an improvement in the method
of learning Hebrew, not to mention oering Samuel Richardson an additional
chapter for Pamela.
Nothing like Psalmanazars Formosan has been presented to the public
since (unless we except a small transcript of a similarly vaguely Semitic alphabet, Reformed Egyptian, from which Joseph Smith Jr allegedly translated e
Book of Mormon in , before returning the original to the angel Moroni).
Aer Psalmanazar a less gullible public, better acquainted with geography
and linguistics, required more skilled, or more ambiguous, forgery. It was
in that Fragments of Gaelic Poetry, followed quickly by Fingal, Temora,
and the Poems of Ossian were published by James Macpherson, a native
speaker of Gaelic who, however (it soon emerged), had diculty reading
the language when it was archaic, in dialect, or idiosyncratically spelt. e
reaction was threefold: outright disbelief, even indignation at the imposture;
ecstatic acceptance of Oisein-Ossian as a native British Homer, allegedly of
the third century; and thirdly, especially among Gaelic speakers, a mixture
xxix
of annoyance at the lack of accuracy and traceability, if not authenticity, in

Macphersons versions, with pleasure at the recognition forced on the English
of the priority of Gaelic over English as a literary language. For the wider
public, as well as many writers, abroad and at home, the sheer novelty and
power of Macphersons atmospheric and discontinuous bardic style made the
question of authenticity irrelevant. is explains why over the next y years
there were forty-ve English editions of the Poems of Ossian, and translations (oen via the French or German) into almost every European literary
language. e problem for scholars, however, was, rst, that no Gaelic manuscripts older than the twelh century were known, and precious few before
the sixteenth, while Scottish Gaelic (a dialect of Irish) did not exist until the
Goidelic invasions of the sixth century, and, second, that Macpherson did not
produce his promised Gaelic manuscripts. Testimony from fellow Scots does
show, however, that Macpherson had toured the Highlands collecting manuscripts and transcribing, as best he could, bardic recitals. When Macpherson
rst produced a sample Gaelic text, in his edition of the poem Temora, Gaelic
speakers were dismayed by the English syntax and grammatical mistakes.
e furore of English sceptics was fuelled partly by their conviction that oral
poetry could not be taken as an authentic source for lost epic compositions, by
the anachronistic post-Viking references in Macphersons reconstituted epic
(the King of Norway invades Ireland), and by Macphersons foolish insistence
in his rst publications that his was a literal translation.
Dr Johnson, aer making enquiries during his Tour of the Highlands in
, aggressively denounced the unrepentant Macpherson as an impostor
in contrast to his reverence for the repentant Psalmanazar. Macpherson was
thus induced to make a second, much more dicult forgery, which was published only aer his death in : a Gaelic version of his Poems of Ossian.
Fortunately he did not live to witness a more thorough unmasking by a committee of Gaelic-speakers, who found that Macphersons Gaelic could not be
understood without reference to the English and bore little resemblance to
known manuscript heroic folk poetry.
Over the years, however, Macpherson has been partly rehabilitated: partly
because the boundary between recording and inventing folk poetry has been
recognized as fuzzy, and because translation theory now accommodates exercises in re-creation where, in Borgess words, the original can instead be
accused of being unfaithful to the translation. Derick S. omson compares
Gaelic folk poetry transcribed before Macpherson and nds about thirty
coincidences of phrases, images, and themes in Macphersons Ossian: if we
consider Macphersons oral sources, it may well be true that some ten per
xxx
Forgiving Forgery
cent of Ossian is genuine. Here are two examples of near-translation, rather

than fabrication, from Fingal. Firstly, Macpherson:
Rise said the youth, Cuchullin, rise: I see the ships of Swaran, Cuchullin, many are
the foe, many the heroes of the dark-rolling seas.[. . .] Perhaps it is the king of the
lonely hills coming to aid me.
en, the Gaelic cited by Maclagan, translated by omson:

Arise, hound of Tara, I see an untold number of ships, the undulating seas full of the
ships of strangers.[. . .] that is but the eet of Muadh coming to bring help to us.
Secondly, Macpherson:
ere every blow, like the hundred hammers of the furnace! Terrible is the battle of the
kings, and horrid the look of their eyes. eir dark-brown shields are cle in twain;
and their steel ies, broken, from their helmets. ey ing their weapons down. Each
rushes to his heros grasp. eir sinewy arms bend round each other.
A Gaelic ballad translates:

Like to the collision of hammers was the bloody battle of the two kingsvenomous
was the sting of their swords. [. . .] [W]hen the shields of the red warriors were broken
and when their wrath and fury had arisen, they threw their weapons to the ground,
and took to heroes wrestling.
e construction of an epic out of lyrical and heroic fragments becomes

forgivable, if not to be condoned by modern criteria, especially when a translator is frustrated by his own limitations, by the loss or obscurity of existing
sources, and needs to argue the case for the existence of an original preChristian heroic epic. Macphersons achievement, or imposture, caused a
urry of emulation among Celts: it provoked in Evan Evanss genuinely
manuscript-based edition of Welsh poetry, and by Charles Wilsons
equally scholarly, though less poetic, bilingual Irish collection. A John Smith
produced more Macphersonian versions, apparently with just as little regard to actual extant Gaelic poetry, so successfully that in translation they
were oen amalgamated with Macphersons Ossian. In the nineteenth century
Gaelic poets rewrote, imitated, or searched for sources for Ossian. William
Livingston in the s took Macphersons English and his false Gaelic Ossian and recast them into idiomatic Gaelic verse, sometimes with reference to
actual Gaelic folk poetry. Macpherson can thus be credited with reanimating
Celtic poetry and, in the case of Scottish Gaelic, saving it from likely death.
e Gaelic Sources of Macphersons Ossian (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, ).

For full, sympathetic studies see Ossian Revisited, ed. by Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), and e Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. by Howard Gaskill
(London: oemmes, ).
xxxi
In Europe, however, Macphersons Ossian had a far more fundamental effect. Goethe was moved to struggle with a Gaelic grammar and dictionary and
attempt to translate a sample of Macphersons original from Temora. Ossian
reverberates in Italian poetry (aer the ne versication by Cesarotti from a
crib provided by an English banker in Venice), and in Russian poetry from
Pushkin to Mandelstam. On the one hand, Ossian genuinely opened poets
minds to a new northern type of Romanticism; on the other, it was a positive
example of the usefulness of forgery.
e most important Macphersonian forgery, one that still reverberates with
controversy to this day, was in the Czech lands: in a twenty-six-year-old
(literary forgery is a crime of young postgraduates), Vclav Hanka announced
he had found in a church crypt in the small town of Dvr Krlov a manuscript of Czech lyrics antedating anything previously known. Hanka was the
favourite pupil of the abb Josef Dobrovsk, a genius who knew more Slavonic
languages and understood more of their history and relationship than anyone
on earth, but who was also the father of the Czech renaissance and (despite
being a native speaker of German) sought proof of the antiquity of Czech
culture as part of the struggle to help Czech culture overcome two hundred years of Habsburg repression. Hanka was trusted to edit and promote
Dobrovsks collection of Old Czech writing, and had already added, without
arousing suspicion, his own cuckoos egg, his rst Old Czech confections, a
Song of Vyehrad and a Legend of St Prokop. Hanka had a malleable junior
colleague, Josef Linda, a prodigious Romantic peasant poet with, like Hanka,
remarkable calligraphic gis. Lastly, Prague Castle had a large stock of reusable old parchment, from which Habsburg censors had scraped all Hussite
writings. eir motivation was an overriding conviction that all means to
revive the prestige of Czech over German culture were justied by this noble
end. ey made sure of patrons, by seeing that their forgeries mentioned
the ancestors of old aristocratic families, such as the ternberks; they had
genuine old Bohemian manuscripts, written in Latin, as models for script,
and a knowledge of Russian and of Serbian, from recent collections of Serbian
folk songs, to add an antique common-Slavonic aura to their articial Old
Czech. Linda, it seems, confessed privately and, had he not died of TB, would
have confessed openly, but the forgeries became so much a symbol of Czech
resurgence that his confessions would have been denounced as insanity.
Forgery in the Czech lands was an established tradition: there are examples
of a monastery foundation charter of cleverly backdated to , and
A more subtle judgement of Macphersons work is made by Jack Lynch: Even Macphersons
rst venture into Ossianic poetry, the Fragments, was no great sin [. . .]. But when [fragments]
aspire to the condition of epics [. . .] they [. . .] deserve exceptionally harsh punishment (Deception
and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, ), p. ).
xxxii
Forgiving Forgery
a document written in dated and attributed to King Pemysl I,

but these were for commercial or political reasons, not in the service of a
Romantic national myth.
F . . A page from the Zelenohorsk manuscript
Heavily inuenced by Old Testament Czech, and by a German translation

of Ossian, published in Vienna, Hanka and Linda wrote bardic poems and
then antiqued them. An art restorer helped them with inks and decorative
initials. Dobrovsk the teacher and ternberk the patron greeted the nd
of unknown thirteenth-century fragments and lyrics with joy (the earliest
authenticated Czech verse, the Alexandreida, dates from around ). By
the Academies of both Vienna and St Petersburg recognized them as
authentic. Hankas next forgery, the Zelenohorsk (Green Mountain) manuscript (see Figure ), was more ambitious: it claimed to be from the ninth
century. e linguistic fabrication was much more dicult, and Hanka relied
too much on his knowledge of Old Church Slavonic, Old Bulgarian of the
tenth century, although it was Hankas unconvincing story of the manuscripts
provenance that rst aroused Dobrovsks suspicions. But Josef Dobrovsk
was known to be suering from severe mental illness, and his disavowal (even
Fig. ., between pages and , in Mojmir Otruba, Rukopisy krlovdvorsk a zelenohorsk:
dnen stav poznn (Prague: Academia, ).
xxxiii
though he stood by the rst forgery) was taken to be a symptom of mania:

in vain, Dobrovsk printed in Vienna a well-argued proof of the fakefor
instance, its literal borrowings from sixteenth-century Czech chronicles and
from the Russian Lay of Igors Host (a puzzling text we shall have something
to say of). Josef Jungmann, another father of the Czech renaissance, had the
Zelenohorsk manuscript printed in Warsaw and then translated into Russian.
Hanka was then caught adding Czech words to a tenth-century Latin manuscript, and at least one authority denounced him to Dobrovsk as the forger
of the Krlovdvorsk manuscript, too. But in Dobrovsk was dead,
and in so was the Czech Chatterton Linda, so that until his death in
Hanka could remain, his reputation unsullied, librarian of the National
Museum and Professor of Slavonic Languages, honoured by the Austrian emperor and Russian tsar. By then the Czechs major historian, Palack, together
with the philologist Pavel Josef afak, had authenticated both manuscripts,
although one reason Palack gave was that Hanka was too stupid to be able to
produce such a masterly forgery, and they were included in lteste Denkmler
of Czech literature.
Not until were the forgeries publicly denounced. Jan Gebauer, the
pioneer of Old Czech grammar, had at rst used them as examples of Old
Czech phonology, but began to smell a rat. He and the future president
of Czechoslovakia, the philosopher Tom Masaryk, published reasoned articles in the Athenaeum, pointing out een major linguistic contradictions
between known Old Czech and Hankas and Lindas manuscripts. In response
Josef P, head of the National Museum, took the manuscripts on a tour of
Europe, seeking positive opinions from a variety of scholars. Chemical tests
on the manuscripts only succeeded in seriously damaging the ink and parchment. Two decades of rows between nationalists and rationalists ended in
with an inconclusive public debate, aer which P went home and shot
himself. When Masaryk became president of Czechoslovakia, asserting the
authenticity of the manuscripts became a right-wing political act, or a jibe at
the humanities faculty of the university. A Society of Defenders had regular
meetings and bulletins: to their amazement, the Nazi occupation dissolved
the society. In , Czechoslovakias brief interlude between Nazi and Soviet
tyranny, restored the rationalists views, but under the pro-Russian Communist regime the matter again became a moot point. Only with the Prague
Spring was a substantial volume published in which the arguments for forgery
appear incontrovertible. More chemical tests were ordered, this time under a
colonel and major of the Ministry of Interior. By then, the Prague Spring was
over, and the conclusions from the tests were not published until , aer
See Otruba. Despite its sceptical bias, this remains the most wide-ranging discussion, with
illustratons, of the manuscripts in question. See also F. M. Barto, Rukopisy krlovdvorsk a
zelenohorsk (Prague: Prce, ).
xxxiv
Forgiving Forgery
the Velvet Revolution. e evidence of forgery was overwhelming: the manuscripts proved under ultra-violet light and X-rays to be a palimpsest over a
fourteenth-century psalter, whose original coloured initials were ingeniously
incorporated into Hankas text. Even so, in An Almanac of Manuscript
Defence was published, and asserting the authenticity of the two notorious
manuscripts is still the mark of a good Czech nationalist.
e linguistic discrepancies are oen ascribed to copyists mistakes at any
point between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. What cannot be explained so easily are the reections of a Russian version by Evgeni Kostrov
of , Ossian Son of Fingal, A Bard of the ird Century: Gaelic Poems,
which Hanka and Linda evidently knew well. e Czech Krlovdvorsk and
Zelenohorsk manuscripts have as much of MacphersonKostrovs Ossian as
Macpherson has of attested Gaelic ballads. For instance, their patrons ancestor Jaroslav ze ternberka ies like an eagle, fury dances from his blazing
gaze, just as in KostrovMacphersons Fingal Cuchullin equals an eagle in
strength, his furious eyes shine under black brows. Together with other
sources not available to a genuine ninth- or thirteenth-century Czech writer,
Ossian ought to damn the Krlovdvorsk and Zelenohorsk manuscripts,
but the myth lives on, especially on the Internet.
Before we return to Dobrovsk and an unsolved, possibly insoluble, suspected forgery, we can note how widely the eighteenth-century renaissance of
small nations demanded the fabrication, where restoration was no longer possible, of lost medieval glories. e penultimate King of Kartli and Kakhetia
(Central and Eastern Georgia), Erekle II, saw in y years of statebuilding destroyed when a Persian warlord laid Tbilisi waste and his Russian
protectors failed to intervene: the kings library with all his manuscripts was
burnt to the ground. is fate had befallen Georgian literature several times:
Jalal-ad-Din in the s razed Tbilisi to the ground, and Timur Lang in his
penultimate invasion took the crowns manuscript library on three hundred
camels to Samarkand, aer which it vanished. As a result, apart from e Man
in the Panthers Skin, one prose romance, and a number of translations from
Persian, most of the great literature of Queen Tamars reign () has
been lost. In King Erekle II asked his librarian Petre Laradze, tutor to
his son Crown Prince Teimuraz and a ne calligrapher, to reconstruct the lost
poem e Story of King Dilar by Sergo of Tmogvi, c. , of whom only the
name survives. Laradze eventually composed stanzas, which are extant in
See Miroslav Ivanov and others, Protokoly o zkoumn rukopis krlovdvorskho a zelenohorskho [. . .] v Praze () (Prague: Nrodn muzeum, ).
Karel Urban and Julius Enders, Almanach rukopisn obrany (Prague: Neklan, ).
See Julius Dolansk, Zhada Ossiana v Rukopisech krlovdvorskm a zelenohorskm (Prague:
Academia, ).
xxxv
several manuscripts but have never been printed, or even properly studied.
Aer a period in exile in Iran, Laradze and his pupil Prince Teimuraz came to
St Petersburg in , where the poem was submitted to Crown Prince Ioane,
a grandson of King Erekle. Ioane was notorious as a purloiner of manuscripts:
those he disliked he destroyed, those he liked he purloined. It is suspected
that his masterpiece, Almsgathering, a cross between Tristram Shandy and an
encyclopedia of Georgia, was in fact written by a monk who is turned into one
of the main characters. Ioane lost Laradzes manuscript, as a result of which
a second version was prepared. As academic life recovers in Georgia, perhaps
the Dilariani will be printed or put on the Net, and we will be able to judge
the degree to which Laradze reconstructed or forged a lost manuscript that he
may have read and catalogued. As in the Czech lands, so in Georgia, there was
a long history of imitation and continuation of medieval Persian-style poetry,
so that Laradzes eort, like Hankas, may be seen as the last of a tradition.
Europe is full of Macphersonian creations: for some reason, Prosper
Mrime received barely a rap over the knuckles for his La Guzla, which
purported to be a translation of over thirty Serbian folk songs, of which only
one was genuine. La Guzla was translated by Pushkin into Russian, in good
faith, as an example of the vitality of fellow Slavs. By far the most interesting
case, and one even today unproven, in the Scottish legal sense, is e Lay
of Igors Host. Apparently a unique Russian example of bardic heroic lament
from around , since it was rst discovered (in ) and published (in
), it has given rise to several hundred editions and critical studies. For
nearly two hundred years sceptics and believers have been equal in number
and prestige, with major scholars, both inside and outside Russia, on either
(in some cases both) sides of the fence. Gradually, however, during the USSR
period and in post-Soviet Russia the believers have acquired exclusive rights
to respectable academic outlets. In late Soviet times, academician Dimitri
Likhachev used all his authority to prevent the publication of a substantial
sceptical thesis by the distinguished medieval historian Zimin. Since then
sceptics have been either British, French, or American, or young Russian
scholars publishing abroad in journals such as Acta Slavica Japonica.
e main objections to the authenticity of e Lay of Igors Host have
been (a) the dubious origins of the text we have; (b) the unlikely date and
place ascribed to its composition; (c) the many hapax legomena (words that
occur nowhere else), obscurities, and unexpected proper nouns in the text
itself; (d) its phonological, morphological, and lexical inconsistencies and its
anachronisms. As for (a), the rst evidence of the text is a copy prepared
for Catherine the Great around . ere is no manuscript: the antiquary
See Izolda Cakadze, petre laradzis shemokmedebidan, in mravalperqvavilovani shesuli
istoriuli poema (Tbilisi: literaturuli dziebani), (), .
xxxvi
Forgiving Forgery
and collector Count Aleksei Musin-Pushkin claimed to have collected and

copied it, but implied that the original perished with other manuscripts
when his house was burnt down in the Great Fire that destroyed Moscow in
yet it appears from Musin-Pushkins family correspondence that his
collection of paintings and silver survived the re, and only the testimony
of a mentally unstable archivist Kalaidovich suggests that an original Lay of
Igors Host existed. (b) is like the arguments used to dispute the authorship of
William Shakespeare: how could a bard in a war-torn, provincial backwater
like Chernigov in have produced such an unprecedented complex poem
with so many reminiscences of Josephus, so much exotic reference? (c) is
an objection which can be mitigated only by two factors: rstly, that there
are so few texts of the period that many hapax legomena can be expected;
secondly, dictionaries of West Russian dialects and the Novgorod birch-bark
letters still being dug out of the peat bogs have expanded our vocabulary of
medieval Russian and thus reduced the hapax legomena to a plausible number. (d) is more substantial, and can be explained only by dialect features of
Chernigov and by mistakes and corrections introduced by whatever copyists
transcribed the manuscript which Musin-Pushkin collected; even the absence
of initial conjunctions, typical of the eighteenth, not the twelh, century, can
be attributed to copyists.
Supporters of the authenticity of e Lay of Igors Host have fought on
a number of fronts. One has been the veriably authentic eenth-century
poem of similar content and language, the Zadonshchina, at least two of
whose many variants echo e Lay of Igors Host. While sceptics claim that
this proves the forger used the several manuscript versions of Zadonshchina
as source material, believers use Occams razor to support the simpler explanation that e Lay was the primary text. But the best argument for the
authenticity of e Lay is that nobody in the eighteenth century is a plausible
candidate for a forgery of such quality: who knew Old Russian grammar well
enough to distinguish the forms of lost tenses, aorist and imperfect, from
each other, and yet at the same time was such a ne poet?for, like Ossian,
regardless of provenance, e Lay has to be credited with genius.
Other arguments cut both ways: a genuinely transcribed manuscript, apparently, shows an increasing number of scribal errors towards the end. But
do not forgers also tire (as Psalmanazars careless introduction of Romance
denite articles into his Formosan shows)?
A former believer, the American scholar Edward L. Keenan found an ingenious explanation for scepticism: our friend abb Josef Dobrovsk arrived
in St Petersburg in , just when Catherine the Great had impounded all
the monastic manuscripts and collected them there; Dobrovsk studied some
manuscripts in eighteen weeks, when he was already the foremost ex-
xxxvii
pert on Slavonic languages and also knew the West Russian language of the
Skaryna and Ostrog bible texts. Many of the semantic and lexical oddities
of e Lay can be explained if we assume that a native Czech was concocting
old Russian; so can the uncanny accuracy, which should defeat a Russian
forger, of the placing of enclitics (short forms of personal pronouns that must
come second aer the rst stressed word in a clause), a rule observed in
modern Czech as strictly as it was in Old Russian. To his arguments for an
eighteenth-century origin, Keenan adds the Ossianic phrasing and tone of
much of e Lay. e problems with Keenans argument are that Dobrovsk
copied phrases from e Lay for his notebooks, but never published these
over the next twenty-ve years. And while Dobrovsk periodically suered
from insanity so severe that he had to be detained, he was highly moral. Could
he be a forger in , if in he was prepared to denounce a forgery by his
favourite pupil Hanka, yet praise a translation of e Lay from Russian into
Czech?
A year aer Keenan, the distinguished Russian A. A. Zalizniak published
his Linguists View, in which, very respectfully, he dismantles Keenans arguments on the basis of recently found Old Russian texts which show that West
Russian was in so close to western Slavonic, i.e. Czech, that the hypothesis of a Czech forger is undermined. But the killing arguments are that
in Dobrovsks own later magisterial Institutiones, a grammar of the Slavonic
languages, he fails to distinguish Old Russian usage, e.g. the third-person
plural of imperfect and aorist, whereas whoever wrote e Lay understood
the dierences perfectly. Moreover, it is impossible to explain the chain of
conspiracy necessary for Dobrovsks forgery to be foisted on Musin-Pushkin
and his assistants, whose surviving manuscripts are not suspect.
Recent doubters have sought other suspects, such as the monk Efrosim Beloozerskii, a eenth-century copyist and anthologist who may have known
the necessary texts (the Turkic words used in e Lay imply a pre-Mongol
conquest source): this would explain e Lays eenth-century features.
Somehow, a eenth-century falsication of an allegedly twelh-century text
seems a mere misdemeanour compared with the audacity of an eighteenthcentury forger, so that Bobrovs hypothesis will arouse less indignation than
Keenans.
Literary forgery in the twentieth century is taken much more seriously, and
in academic eyes is equated with plagiarismalthough unlike plagiarism it
Edward L. Keenan, Josef Dobrovsk and the Origins of the Igor Tale (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for
Russian and Eurasian Studies, ).
A. A. Zalizniak, Slovo o polku Igoreve: vzgliad lingvista (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kultury,
).
Aleksandr Bobrov, e Problem of Authenticity, Acta Slavica Japonica, (), .
xxxviii
Forgiving Forgery
is not a criminal oence, except when an antiquarian bookseller or library

has been deceived: no Trading Standards Ocer has yet prosecuted a literary
forger. It can also be lucrative: just as a forged Hans van Meegeren painting
can fetch sums comparable with the original, so the scandal of exposure, of
being deprived of a Pulitzer Prize, can be as protable for a fake writer as
any original work. In some cases it can be praiseworthy: the invention in
of the tragically short-lived modernist Australian poet Ern Malley by
two opponents of s and s modernism, James McAuley and Harold
Stewart, was a hoax which deliberately led to the folding of the Australian
modernist magazine Angry Penguins, but it had long-lasting consequences.
A number of critics have decided (and understandably) that McAuleys and
Stewarts concoction of pastiche, quotation, and random imagery was, despite
their intention, genuine poetry. Sidney Nolan was inspired to paint a portrait
of Ern Malley. Others take the view that Australians were saved from modernism by fear of further ridicule: as a result, you might think, Australian poets
have since stuck to the immediately intelligible, with Judith Wrights lines
For a tree that clumps in two great boots | Is a terrible thing to bandicoots.
Meanwhile justor as many asy per cent of students of poetry-writing
at Harvard, asked to distinguish a poem by Georey Hill from a poem by Ern
Malley, succeeded in doing so.
Two recent unpunished literary frauds, one failed and one highly successful,
have taken up my time and emotion recently. e rst was in (and is still
being touted): a Catherine Eisner, known as the author of Sister Morphine, a
novel about psychiatric medicine in Canada, and an occasional correspondent
who accuses Chekhov and Chekhov scholars of anti-Semitism, submitted to
Penguin Books some undiscovered Chekhov stories, fragments of a novel. Her
accompanying letter explains:
the tale that spoke to me across a century from the packet of papers I inherited from
my father, when I understood its provenance, was not so altogether surprising that
I missed a heartbeat. e packet was labelled e Fatal Debut (a provisional title, I
believe) in Chekhovs own hand on the wax paper wrapper containing his papers.
However, the handwriting of the enclosed manuscript was not wholly in Chekhovs
own distinctive penscript, but in other hands (his brothers Aleksandr, Nicholya [sic],
Misha and others). e work was translated and annotated by my father, from whose
manuscript [see Figure ] I have drawn for my own restoration of the novel.
His ownership of the original manuscript (deposited in my fathers bank) is accounted thus:
My father, a polyglot, born , [. . .] a naturalised Englishman serving in the
British Army, was an interpreter with SHAFE at the Nurnberg Trials.
According to a diary note of March , he interrogated a General Vadim Ignatyvich Kulikov, who, in his youth, had been a close friend of Chekhov [. . .] Aer
the series of interrogations conducted by my father, and following demands from the
Soviets for Kulikovs repatriation, he was returned to Russia later in , where aer
xxxix
F . . An allegedly unknown Chekhov story,

purportedly transcribed by one of his brothers
a show trial in Moscow he was executed for treason. In his private confession to my
father, Kulikov stated he had . . . exchanged half a carton of Chesterelds, two tins of
cocoa and one can of condensed milk for e Fatal Debut ms in possession of a fellow
prisoner, Vassily Gremoukhin, a collaborator, and migr son of the ciseleur, Anatoly
Gremoukhin, a distinguished former workmaster in the St. Petersburg House of Carl
Faberg. From extant notes and journal references uncovered by my father, it seems
Chekhov visited Gremoukhin in the month before his marriage to Olga Knipper
to lay preparations for the special commission of a wedding gi. [. . .] Chekhov was,
as so oen during his courtship, pressed for cash and Gremoukhin demanded security
against completion of the gi. [. . .] Chekhov writes: e manuscript was to hand (I
had only that day assembled the pages for archiving) and, reluctantly, the work was
placed in Gremoukhins safekeeping as my guarantee. e hastiness of the agreement
was prompted by the arrival of the matre, Faberg himself, who benignly greeted me
with the words: I must tell you at once, sir, the only doctor in whom I have ever put
my faith at all is the good Berncasteler Doktor! (He was referring to his favourite
dry white Moselle.) In the event, as Gremoukhins son related to my father, Chekhov
never redeemed his manuscript, on which I have presumed to confer the title: Dr
Tchkhov, Detektiv.
Penguin Books were ready to publish this sensational nd: as an expert, I

pointed out that none of the events or persons named appeared in the Chronicle of Chekhovs Work and Life, which accounts for virtually every day of his
xl
Forgiving Forgery
adult existence, that he never bought his women friends presents (he hated
even receiving them), let alone Faberg jewels, and Dr Tchkhov, Detektiv
was weak, self-centred, and mysticaltotally un-Chekhovian. Furthermore,
all Russian nouns in the text were in the dative case, as if taken from a chapter
in a primer. To clinch things, Eisner could not produce the original Russian. Online today, Eisner has added two pages of Russian manuscript, barely
legible, but apparently in idiomatic Russian and dealing with life among the
wild Mari people of central Russia.
e author of Sister Morphine will probably never publish her Chekhoviana, but other pretenders are more successful. Two years ago, a Nikolai Lilin
allegedly from Transdniestria created a sensation when Einaudi published
his autobiography Educazione siberiana in Italy. Even professional Slavists
greeted it unanimously as an authentic portrayal of juvenile gangster life
and ethos: only a few Russians resident in Italy demurred. It was bought by
Canongate for the British market (Siberian Education is available in some
twenty-eight languages, excluding, understandably, Russian, Ukrainian, and
Romanian). When remonstrated with, Canongate reply that they rely on
Einaudi for fact-checking and are not responsible. (If Canongate imported,
say, Italian wine which turned out to be made of banana skins and antifreeze,
they would not enjoy such immunity.) e hero of Siberian Education says
he is an urka, which he claims to be a Siberian ethos of Christian bandits
with their own language, fenia (urka is the Russian acronym for criminals
sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, and fenia is Russian pedlars jargon).
Lilin claims Stalin deported these urkas to what was Romania in , and
that his grandfather survived an NKVD ring squad and was then freed.
Despite obvious impossibilities, Irvine Welsh (an expert on street gangsters),
Misha Glenny (an expert on East European crime), and Libby Purves (a Radio
broadcaster with an army of fact-checkers) all treated the travesty with
respect and admiration. I and Federico Varese of Oxford both published denunciatory reviews (in the Literary Review and the TLS): we had no eect on
sales: Canongate has published Lilins equally implausible second autobiographical work, and Einaudi is bringing out a third. e cynicism of publishers
today exceeds any of the roguery of the eighteenth century.
To understand what Lilin has done, imagine the following. A tattoo artist
called Nick Lillywhite from Jersey turns up in Moscow and writes (in Russian) an autobiography which he has translated into all languages, except (he
insists) English. His story Devon Education tells of the Dartmoor Old Lags,
an ancient Celtic people who live by the laws of the Plymouth Brethren and
of Dick Turpin. ey rob so many trains taking silver from Dartmoors mines
Eisner has recently provided an English translation and some very unconvincing annotation:
see <http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com> [accessed March ].
xli
to London that in the s Winston Churchill has them deported to Jersey.

(e authors grandfather is hanged in Dartmoor, but survives and is allowed
to go to Jersey, too.) ere the author joins a revered juvenile criminal gang
that knifes anyone who shows disrespect and machine-guns the islands paedophiles, while still observing the Plymouth Brethrens rites. Eventually the
author is called up into the French army to ght in Afghanistan, the subject
of his next book. Meanwhile, Devon Education is praised by the Russian equivalents of Irvine Welsh, Simon Sebag-Monteore, Libby Purves, and Misha
Glenny. Only those British readers who can read Devon Education in a foreign
language are killing themselves laughing.
So Russians who can read Lilins Siberian Education in Italian or English
are also helpless with laughter at the spectacle of publishers, reviewers, and
interviewers swallowing Lilins book and person hook, line, and sinker.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian economic crimes unit is investigating documents allegedly forged by Geir ve Kvalheim, a Norwegian scriptwriter and
actor, who tried to sell fragments of a previously unknown Ibsen play, e
Sun God . . .

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Forgiving Forgery

Author(s): Donald Rayfield

F . . George Psalmanazars manuscript table of the Formosan alphabet (Lambeth Palace MS )

Ironically, before he died Psalmanazar contributed a less mendacious account

of annoyance at the lack of accuracy and traceability, if not authenticity, in

cent of Ossian is genuine. Here are two examples of near-translation, rather

en, the Gaelic cited by Maclagan, translated by omson:

A Gaelic ballad translates:

e construction of an epic out of lyrical and heroic fragments becomes

e Gaelic Sources of Macphersons Ossian (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, ).

a document written in dated and attributed to King Pemysl I,

F . . A page from the Zelenohorsk manuscript

Heavily inuenced by Old Testament Czech, and by a German translation

though he stood by the rst forgery) was taken to be a symptom of mania:

and collector Count Aleksei Musin-Pushkin claimed to have collected and

is not a criminal oence, except when an antiquarian bookseller or library

F . . An allegedly unknown Chekhov story,

Penguin Books were ready to publish this sensational nd: as an expert, I

to London that in the s Winston Churchill has them deported to Jersey.

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