TWO OBSCURE PASSAGES IN THE TALE OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN: ZARYA SVĚTЪ ZAPALA AND SPALA KNYAZ’U UMЪ POKHOTI

The article presents arguments in favor of the old interpretation of the phrase zarya světъ zapala from the Tale of Igor’s Campaign. The form zapala is interpreted as the perfect tense of the verb zapasti ‘to be obscured by something, to hide, to disappear’, ‘to go down (about luminaries)’, ‘to cover’. The difficulties associated with this interpretation stem from the fact that the verb zapasti is usually intransitive. However, as modern dialect dictionaries show, in northern and northwestern Russian dialects, as well as in the West Slavic languages, it behaves as a transitive verb meaning ‘to cover, to enclose’. The article suggests that in the phrase zarya světъ zapala the verb zapasti appears in the transitive diathesis, and the noun světъ ‘light’ is its direct object. The alternative interpretation of světъ as an appositive to the subject zarya ‘glow of sunset or dawn’ seems less convincing, as a different word order would be expected. By analogy with zapasti the form spala in the phrase spala knyaz’u umъ pokhoti from the Tale of Igor’s Campaign could be understood as the perfect tense of the transitive verb sъpasti ‘to fall on something’, ‘to seize, to grasp’, but this verb is not recorded in the transitive diathesis.