Moscow, Nauka Publishing House, 1969, 439 p. The print run is 2200. Price 1 rub. 60 kopecks. July 26, 1971 marks the twenty-first anniversary of the discovery of the first birch bark letter. The sensation of discovery has long been the property of popular science literature, but even now, when the number of documents that have become known on birch bark has reached 506 (488 of them in Novgorod), the discovery of each new text page 168 Interest in new finds of birch bark letters is increasing every year because the rapid expansion of their number increasingly demonstrates the breadth and depth of the possibilities of this historical source. The process of collecting this source, introducing newly found certificates to the scientific literature, reading and commenting on them, in themselves strengthen the idea of the infinity of the flow of new information, next to which what is known now (meaning traditional sources) will one day seem like a small stream. But if you look at the total number of birch bark letters known today, not from the point of view of the future, but from the point of view of today, you can see how much new they have already given in comparison with what historiography had some twenty years ago. The work of the famous Soviet researcher of the Russian Middle Ages, L. V. Cherepnin, allows us to comprehensively evaluate this new historical source. His book is the first attempt to classify birch bark texts published by 1965 (415 documents). Undoubtedly, any large group of sources can be organized in different ways, depending on the tasks facing the researcher. The purpose of the book by L. V. Cherepnin is to characterize the complex of birch bark letters as a source of new knowledge about the social system of Ancient Russia. And this goal is unmistakably set. After all, the vast majority of birch bark letters appear to us as a product of social relations, reflecting in concrete facts those patterns that are the main subject of historical research. Fro ... Read more