The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest vremennykh let), Laurentian Text

The Russian Primary Chronicle is a medieval compilation of early East Slavic history, preserved in the Laurentian manuscript tradition, and this is the standard English scholarly translation by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz Wetzor, published through the Mediaeval Academy of America. Its strength is exactly that standing: it remains the translation most English language scholarship on early Kievan Rus cites and works from. Its limit is layered composition, the Chronicle as it survives is a twelfth century compilation of older material rather than a single author's contemporary record, and the 1953 date given here is that of this translation, not of the underlying text's composition. It is also cited here for the Hypatian manuscript's interpolated gloss on Malalas, a separate textual layer worth checking against the base Chronicle text.