In 2003 the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) published a new critical edition of the Rus′ Primary Chronicle (Povest vremennykh let, or PVL). This 3-volume, 2368-page edition provides full transcriptions of the five principle manuscript witnesses, as well as selected readings from five other manuscripts, the full text of three previous reconstructions, and a new reconstruction, or paradosis, developed according to stemmatic principles of textual criticism. This edition was compiled and edited by Donald Ostrowski (Harvard University), with David J. Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh) serving as Associate Editor and Horace G. Lunt (Harvard University) as Senior Consultant.
Birnbaum and Ostrowski are now preparing a freely-accessible Internet-based electronic version of this edition, which we have called the e-PVL. While there are other editions of selected PVL materials available on the Internet, they are based on earlier publications, and therefore are not able to take advantage of the rich text-critical information available in the 2003 edition. Additionally, while the e-PVL includes all of the text present in the 2003 print edition, it also takes advantage of cutting-edge developments in electronic text technology to provide a much richer and much more flexible interface for studying the PVL than could ever be delivered on paper.
At the PVL Preconference to the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference I will present the e-PVL, describing its form, structure, and use as a research tool.