I always heard it pronounced "vremennYkh".

Speaking of Billington, have you read his Russia in Search of Itself?

The word 'Russian' is not correct in this context. Chronicles were written in Church Slavonic in old Kiev. As you know Kiev is the capital of Ukraine. It is common mistake that Old Kievan texts are often named as 'Russian', but modern word 'Russia' has absolutely different geographical and political meaning.

The new edition of "The Pověst' vremennykh lět. An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis. Complied and edited by Donald Ostrowski, Associate editor David J. Birnbaum, Senior Consultant Horace G. Lant."
was published as old ukrainian text in Harvard library of old ukrainian literature.

The commonly accepted stress in on the last syllable. It is assumed that Sylvester was not the original author but compiled his work from earlier sources (Nestor, Nikon, Novgorod chronicles) and made use of translations of Greek chronicles into Slavic languages. I think that Likhachev says somewhere that "vremennykh" is found in a Slavonic translation of Georgios Amartolos' chronicles in the sense of "past."

On a technical matter, unless the creator of the PDF has disabled it, you can normally copy text from one by clicking on the "T" icon on the toolbar, selecting the text to copy, and then clicking Edit -> Copy.

Tatyana, Alexei: Thanks for the information; I am reprocessing my accentual habits accordingly.

Aidan: Good lord, I did not know that! Thanks, you've made my life easier. (I tried it on the Ostrowski introduction just now, and it works.)

Your "History of Russian food" book:
the index convey strange impression. As if it was written
1) by request of some vegetarian society
2) and an odd Armenian nationalist: Armenia recieved unexplained and exclusive preference among other 14 former Soviet republics (assuming the intent was to show historical connection between pre-revolutionary Russian and Soviet period' food; I can't think of any other reason)

Tatyana: It's a collection of papers delivered at a conference, so of course it's an odd assortment -- scholars chose whatever they wanted to talk about, I presume. The introduction says:

"Food as a symbol of the relation between the Russian center and the national provinces is addressed by Joyce Toomre in 'Food and National Identity in Soviet Armenia.' Toomre presents an overview of traditional Armenian foodways as a prelude to questioning the subsequent Soviet influence on their development. The focus of this chapter is on the small Caucasian republic of Armenia SSR, although it could just as well be Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Estonia, or Moldova. How to ensure the survival of food habits of smaller units within a larger political entity is an issue for any regional cuisine."

I don't think Toomre is an "Armenian nationalist" (Toomre doesn't sound like an Armenian name to me), but she had to pick one republic to write about, and she picked Armenia.

Ah, now this explains the weirdness. Sorry I get to the intro.

I can't get the yats to show up in my browser. Does anyone know if this is a font issue, or a browser issue, or what? The fonts I have installed have the yat in their character sets, but all I get online is the error block.

Wimbrel, try installing Firefox and loading the page from it. Internet Explorer, if that's the browser you're using, won't automatically substitute a character from another font if the font specified for the text in question doesn't contain a given character, whereas Firefox will. http://www.getfirefox.com/ should point you to the install.

Sorry, it didn't even occur to me that would be a problem -- I only use Firefox, so it all seems easy as pie.