“The Book of Veles” and Slavic neo-pagans

“The Book of Veles”, publishing group “Gran-Fair”, 2023
At all times and eras, people have had an irresistible desire to fake or “correct” this or that historical document. Some did this because of the banal desire for profit. Others acted for ideological reasons - they wanted to “tweak” and “ennoble” the history of their country, to make it more heroic or “ancient.” Thus, in the 18th century, Europe fell under the spell of the “Works of Ossian, son of Fingal,” the authorship of which was attributed to the hero of the Celtic sagas, Oisin, who allegedly lived in Ireland in the 3rd century. n. e. Goethe, through Werther, said:
Napoleon carried a book with these verses with him everywhere; US President Thomas Jefferson called Ossian “the greatest poet that ever lived on earth" In Russia, the “poems of Ossian” were translated by Zhukovsky and Karamzin. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was proven that the Works of Ossian, with the exception of a few fragments borrowed from Gaelic folklore, are a stylization written by their “discoverer”, James Macpherson.
In Russia, many documents were falsified by retired warrant officer of the Preobrazhensky Regiment Alexander Sulakadzev.

Presumable portrait of Sulakadzev, made by his colleague V.F. Lazarev-Stanishchev, 1826
Sulakadzev’s most famous falsifications were the “Hymn of Boyan” and the famous report about the clerk Kryakutny and his balloon flight in 1731:
As a result, skepticism appeared in society towards all newly discovered documents, and some doubted (and still doubt) the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, although Pushkin drew attention to the fact that in Russia at the time of the appearance of this poem there simply was no a person capable of creating a work of this level:
Since Pushkin was not only an excellent poet, but also the author of a completely serious historical work, “The History of the Pugachev Rebellion,” his opinion in this case can be considered an expert.
And today we will talk a little about the so-called “Book of Veles” - texts allegedly written on 35 birch tablets - of course, lost. On them, on behalf of the Novgorod Magi, the history of the ancestors of the Slavs is outlined. The “Veles Book” begins with the story that the ancient Slavic tribes left Semirechye, and ends with a message about the arrival of the Varangians. That is, events are covered from approximately the middle of the XNUMXth century. BC e. until the XNUMXth century n. e. - no more, no less!
Serious experts immediately recognized the “Veles Book” as a falsification; it was not even published in the USSR until the troubled times of Gorbachev’s Perestroika. For the first time, the full text of this “Book” was published in our country in 1990, and since then the “Veles Book” has been intensively promoted by all kinds of adherents of “alternative history”.
"Nakhodka" "Veles Book"
Soviet and Russian historian I. N. Danilevsky, head of the Department of History of Ideas and Methodology of Historical Science at the Faculty of History of the Higher School of Economics, drew attention to the fact that the story of the “Veles Book” is very similar to the story of the discovery of Mayan knotted writing, which is contained in Jack London’s story “Hearts of Three”. The tablets were “discovered” in August 1919, when they were allegedly discovered in the dilapidated estate of Veliky Burluk (an estate of the Zadonsky nobles 14 km from the city of Volochansk in the Kursk province) by Colonel of the White Army Theodore Arturovich Izenbek (Ali Izenbek), a grandson of the Kokand bek, a graduate of the Naval Corps, commander artillery division of General Markov's regiment and an amateur artist.

Isenbek in a self-portrait
Isenbek put the planks in a duffel bag and did not tell anyone about them for a long time.
This is where things start to get weird. It is surprising that such valuable “artifacts” were in the estate of not very noble and famous nobles - and for some reason none of the members of this family wanted to become famous and go down in history as the second Musin-Pushkin by showing specialists at least one of these tablets. And Isenbek himself later did not strive to become famous and get rich by selling the treasure he received to some museum or rich collector. But he was not at all rich and, having settled in Brussels in 1922, made a living by drawing sketches for the Tapi carpet factory. He showed the tablets brought from Russia only to another emigrant - Yu. A. Mirolyubov, a native of Bakhmut, who had a medical education, but was engaged in journalism, wrote poetry and prose works and was very interested in the pagan beliefs of the Slavs.

Mirolyubov later claimed that he saw 35 tablets (38 cm long, 22 cm wide and 6-10 cm thick), drilled in two places and fastened with a cord, and on each of them there were inscriptions (on both sides), apparently, pressed into the wood with a sharp stylus. Paint was rubbed into the indentation areas, and the top was coated with varnish.
And, again, Mirolyubov did not tell anyone about the sensational discovery, the significance of which he, of course, immediately understood, since, according to him, he spent either 14 or 15 years of his life rewriting the text (and copied approximately 75% ) – although it was much easier to just photograph them. But only one photograph was taken, and in 1959 L.P. Zhukovskaya (an employee of the Institute of Russian Language of the USSR Academy of Sciences) proved that this only photograph presented to the public had traces of folds. That is, it is just a photograph of a drawing on paper.
On August 13, 1941, Isenbek died, bequeathing his property to Mirolyubov, but the tablets mysteriously disappeared and were never found.
Mirolyubov reported about the discovery of the “Veles Book” only in November 1953 - through a certain A. Kur (another amateur historian - emigrant, participant in the White Guard movement A. Kurenkov): in the small American magazine "Firebird" he published a report about "ancient wooden"tablets of the 5th century with the most valuable historical writings on them».

“Photograph of Isenbeck Tablet No. 16,” Firebird Magazine, San Francisco, 1955.
The publication of the text of the “tablets” in this magazine was then carried out until 1959. This message attracted the attention of S. Ya. Paramonov, an entomologist who settled in Australia and specialized in the study of... flies. In the USSR, Paramonov served as director of the Kyiv Zoological Museum, during the occupation of Ukraine by Hitler’s troops he collaborated with the Germans, in 1943 he accompanied exhibits stolen by the Nazis to Poznan, in 1945 he ended up in Paris, in 1947 in Australia, where, taking the pseudonym S Lesnoy, began to write articles on ancient Russian history. It was he who called the text of the “tablets” the “Book of Veles” and became one of its main popularizers. Later, other foreign emigrant authors also worked with the texts of the “Book” - B. Rebinder (in France), V. Shtepa (in Sweden), V. Kachur (in the USA), P. Sokolov (in Australia) and some others. And in 1972, the Soviet poet I. Kobzev, in his article “Vityazi,” informed readers that the oldest chronicle had been found in Australia, which contained the story “about the life of the ancient Russians for a period removed by one and a half thousand years from Askold and Dir”(as they say, “I heard a ringing, but did not understand where it was”).
As already mentioned, in the post-Soviet space, a surge of interest in the “Veles Book” was noted in the 1990s: then, for example, the Russian Doctor of Philosophy Yu. Begunov (Moscow), the Ukrainian philologist B. I. Yatsenko, as well as the Serbs Radivoj Pesic - professor at the Universities of Milan and Belgrade, Doctor of Philology Radomil Miroevich. In 1992, at the International Symposium “Destruction and Renaissance of Slavic Civilization” in London, “Veles’ Book” was even recognized as “an important link in pan-Slavic values" The above-mentioned Yatsenko and Pesic translated the text into Ukrainian and Serbian, respectively. N. Slatin, A. Asov and G. Karpukhin made their own translations into Russian. The most famous translation is by Asov, a graduate of the physics department of Moscow State University in the department of physics of sea and land waters, who became the author of many works in the folk history genre, and in 2005-2007. for some reason he held the post of editor of the history of the Slavs in the journal Science and Religion.
A very interesting and unusual biography of another “adept” of the “Veles Book” - V. Skurlatov, who together with N. Nikolaev in 1976 in the newspaper “Nedelya” published the first article in the USSR about the “Veles Book”. Just like Asov, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University, began a good career in the Komsomol, and in 1964 became the organizer of the University of Young Marxists (UMM) under the Central Committee of the Komsomol. At the end of 1965, at the plenum of the Komsomol Central Committee on issues of military-patriotic education of youth, he presented the “Charter of Morals,” which proposed, for example, the introduction of public corporal punishment for immoral acts and sterilization of women who had extramarital sex. Skurlatov’s charter seemed so odious to everyone that the author was removed from the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol, expelled from the CPSU, and the UMM organized by him was liquidated. Already in 1968, Skurlatov was reinstated in the CPSU, in 1983-1985. he taught a special course “Criticism of the Ideology of Zionism” at the Peoples' Friendship University. Patrice Lumumba (in 1984, the program for this special course was published in 2000 copies). He became one of the leaders of the “neopagan trend” in science fiction literature, actively collaborated with the publishing house “Young Guard”, his works were published in the popular almanacs “Secrets of Ages” and “Roads of Millennia”. One of his like-minded people, by the way, was the famous artist Ilya Glazunov. He spoke out in support of the State Emergency Committee and was among the participants in the storming of Ostankino and the defenders of the White House in 1993. In the early 2000s. became chairman of the Orthodox Brotherhood of St. Apostle Andrew the First-Called.
Another ardent propagandist of the “Veles Book” was Yu. Petukhov, who called himself an ethnologist and historian, but in fact was an engineer. He is often called a "pseudo-historical writer." However, over time, he began to agree that the authenticity of this source had not yet been established, but insisted on the need for its scientific study.
But what is this notorious “Veles Book”?
The language of the Book of Veles
The style of writing, according to the “discoverer” Mirolyubov, corresponded to the Cyrillic letter of Rus' at the end of the 1950th – beginning of the 25th centuries. Alphabet of the text, which S. Paramonov in the 2s. called “Vlesovitsa”, according to him, has 1960 letters and three diphthongs. The letter with which a word ends is the same as the letter with which the next one begins, and the language has some similarities with Polish, Russian and Czech. The above-mentioned article by L. Zhukovskaya (magazine “Questions of Linguistics” No. 1500, XNUMX) said that the language of the “Veles Book” is absolutely impossible for the XNUMXth century. A number of researchers (V. Buganov, A. Mongait, F. Filin, O. Tvorogov) suggested that there was a forgery, also carried out by the above-mentioned A.I. Sulakadzev. “Velesovitsa” turned out to be a slightly modified Cyrillic alphabet, and a rather late version of it, and the way of designating dates (“XNUMX years before...”) is absolutely uncharacteristic of chronicles. The same words in different places are written in the text in different versions (Bulgarian, Czech, Ukrainian), some are built on the model and rules of the Polish and Serbian languages, there are also primitive false Church Slavonicisms, obtained mainly by replacing “zh” with “ railway", as well as false Serbisms. Pronouns are used incorrectly, for example, “yakiy” or “yakvy” instead of the ancient “izhe”. In the text of the Book of Veles, it was not possible to identify any consistently observed grammatical rules; phonetics, morphology and syntax do not correlate with data on the state of the Slavic languages in the XNUMXth century. The style of presentation differs sharply from all other ancient Russian sources, there are practically no details, and few characters. By the way, in the text itself this “source” is called “Vlesknigo”, but, according to the rules of the Old Russian language, it should be called “Veleshe knigi” (in the plural). Some researchers have stated that the text of the “Book of Veles” is simply a set of never-existing (invented) words, among which there are distorted Czech, Polish, Serbian, Ukrainian, a number of Old Church Slavonic, as well as those that are found only in the “Tale of the Regiment” Igor".
Contents of the "Veles Book"
It has long been pointed out that it is impossible to determine the genre of the “Book of Veles”: it is not a chronicle or chronicle, not a mythological or philosophical treatise, not a prayer book, not an “appeal”. Most of all, it looks like a collection of pagan sermons, and it turns out that the “Novgorod Magi” in the 9th century were very familiar with the Bible - they freely use expressions “the stones cry out”, “the land flowing with milk and honey”, “now and ever and unto ages of ages”, “this great mystery is” and so on.
The arguments of supporters of the authenticity of the “Veles Book” can be judged by the quote from A. I. Asov:
However, Asov did not disdain obvious fraud, so in 1997 he named as his like-minded person I. Levochkin, who was critical of the “Veles Book”, the chief researcher of the book sector of the Scientific Research Institute of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library (died in 2013). D. Loginov tried to declare the most authoritative archaeologist A. V. Artsikhovsky (discoverer of birch bark letters) as another supporter of the authenticity of this work.
The text of the Book of Veles contains six chapters, which present information on the history of Rus', as well as on the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs. For example, three worlds are reported: Yav (real), Nav (otherworldly) and Rule (the world of laws that govern everything in the world. And the Slavs, it turns out, also worshiped the Indian god Indra, “who, together with Perun, starts all the fighting" and which "followed us, as he followed our fathers against the Romans in the land of Trojan", as well as Surya. Russians are called descendants of Dazhdbog, who gave birth to them "via Zemun cow" It is said that "the gods of the Rus do not take human or animal sacrifices", and the form of government is called the veche.
In the first chapter, the ancestral home of the Slavs is called Semirechye (an area named after the seven rivers flowing into Lake Balkhash).

Semirechensk region on the map of 1900
From there, our ancestors allegedly went to Mesopotamia, and then entered the territory of modern Syria (second chapter), and lived for some time in Egypt. It turns out that the Rus were subjects of Nebuchadnezzar and were called Scythians (in fact, the Scythians are an Iranian-speaking people). Then the Slavs ended up in the Carpathians, where they lived for about 500 years, then moved to the banks of the Dnieper, fought for 200 years with "pagans" and "bone-sided", and 100 years before Germanaric (that is, about 350) "went to the Poles».
The third chapter talks about the origin of the Slavic tribes and the appearance of their traditional names:
The fourth and fifth chapters of the Book of Veles report on the wars of the Slavs with the Greeks, Romans, Goths and Huns. And the sixth chapter tells about the time when the Slavs were under the rule of the Khazar Khaganate, as well as how the Varangians became princes in Russian cities. About Askold, for example, it is reported that he:
It is alleged that at that time Ognebog turned his face away from the Rus, because they “had a prince baptized by the Greeks" This refers specifically to Askold, who was allegedly baptized by Patriarch Photius during the reign of Emperor Michael III. It is further stated that this Askold (who, we recall, led the first campaign of the Rus against Constantinople) was a convinced Grecophile:
Here the compiler of the “Book of Veles” already calls the Slavs relatives of the Germans Cimbri, forgetting that they were previously represented by the Iranian-speaking Scythians.
By the way, religious tradition connects the campaign of Askold and Dir with the so-called miracle of the immersion of the Holy Virgin's veil into the sea - supposedly after this a storm arose that sank the enemy's vessel. fleet. However, contemporaries know nothing about this miracle - everyone is sure of the defeat of the Byzantines. Pope Nicholas I reproached Emperor Michael III for the fact that the aliens left unavenged, and Patriarch Photius, who was in Constantinople during the military actions, claimed that "the city was not taken by their (Russian) mercy" He spoke about the Russians in his sermon:
(“Two conversations of His Holiness Patriarch Photius of Constantinople on the occasion of the Russian invasion”).
But we digress.
The famous Rurik in the “Book” is called a robber who
In general, based on the above, we can conclude that the “Veles Book” in no case can be recognized as a genuine document, but is a forgery, most likely made not even by the famous forger A. Sulakadzev, but by Yu. Mirolyubov in the middle XX century. However, it is still actively promoted by Slavic “neopagans” who use its data during their rituals.
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