ЕAST IS EAST? TRANSLATED AND ORIGINAL LETTERS IN THE EMBASSY BOOKS OF IVAN III

 This paper discusses the embassy books of Ivan III as key sources for the sociolinguistic situation in Middle Russian of the 15th century. The embassy books of Ivan III are a non-homogeneous collection of texts, since original texts written in the idiom of the Grand Duchy of Moscow have been supplemented by the original documents written in other Late East Slavic idioms as well as by translated documents. I argue that the newly added documents written in other Russian dialects and East Slavic idioms were normally not converted into the idiom of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The original diplomas from the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were based on closely related and mutually intelligible idioms. The microparametric variation in these two idioms can be described on the basis of the same set of parameters for word order, dialectal isoglosses and distribution of the diagnostic constructions, such as the so-called vernacular pluperfect with byl. Intralinguistic variation is occasionally displayed in translated diplomas created by bilingual scribes proficient in the Tatar language. Such scribes tended to focus on the speech of the younger generation during a time of ongoing syntactic change in the Moscow dialect, whereas the authors of the original diplomas were more conservative. A linguistic analysis verifies the statement made in the embassy books that it was possible for Alagioz, the envoy of the Kefe Sultan, to deliver two letters written in ‘Russian letters’ in 1501: these two letters had indeed been written in Kefe by a scribe speaking a variety of Old Ukrainian. A clear marker of the North-Eastern dialect has been found in a translated document sent to Moscow from Ivangorod (Jaanilinn) in June 1505. The interpreter, a certain Dmitry Shsherbaty, can be identified with the Russian author Dmitry Gerasimov, who was of Novgorodian origin. Keywords