Griffith Mann (Baltimore: Palace Editions, 2005), 15-23; Keenan, "The Long-Awaited Book and the
Bykovskii Hypothesis," Kritika 8, 4 (2007): 817-30; Keenan, "Remembering Andre Mazon," Revue des etudes slaves 82, 1 (2011): 115-21.
At that meeting, Zimin first presented his hypothesis: contrary to the long-standing and generally accepted view that the Slovo was produced by an unknown bard in the "Kievan" period, it in fact appeared late in the 18th century and was largely the work of a Ruthenian cleric, Ivan (in religion Ioil') Bykovskii (1726-98).
Quite abruptly at this point in his extended forensic discourse, Zimin turns to Ioil' Bykovskii (304).
Zimin's juxtaposition of some phrases of the Slovo with some of Bykovskii's sermons (330), however, seems forced and probably demonstrates only that echoes of biblical rhetoric were present in both.
Karamzin, and Ivan Bykovskii knew [byl znakom s] the manuscript of the Slovo" (338).
In this section as elsewhere Zimin seems to wish to have things both ways: Bykovskii is a highly educated churchman but also a man of the (unspecified) people; in a collection of songs that may have belonged to Bykovskii, Zimin claims to find "overtones of genuine sympathy for the peasant" (notki iskrennego sochuvstviia k krest'ianam [336]).
He then spends several pages (344 ff.) speculating upon which texts might also have been found in Iaroslavl', where he places Bykovskii, although there is no proof that Bykovskii was either there or in St.
Then, however, he quite surprisingly jumps to the conclusion that a convolute obtained by Musin-Pushkin from Ioil' Bykovskii (containing a khronograf from the library of the Iaroslavl' Monastery of the Savior) must also have contained the original text of the Slovo.
(One cannot, however, fully agree with his method, which relies on some rather speculative historical and metrical analysis--or with his speculation that the relevant portion was added by Musin-Pushkin to the basic text provided by Bykovskii [346-55]);
For an informative analysis of the departure of leading anarchists (Ol'ga Taratuta, Andrei Andreev, and others) from the All-Union Society of Former Political Prisoners between 1921 and 1935, see Sergei
Bykovskii, "Anarkhisty--chleny Vsesoiuznogo obshchestva politkatorzhan i ssyl'noposelentsev," Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo politkatorzhan i ssyl'noposelentsev: Obrazovanie, razvitie, likvidatsiia, 1921-1935.