DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER: PART TWO PRAGMAPHILOLOGICAL NOTES ON BIRCHBARK LETTERS NOS. 497 AND 771 FROM NOVGOROD AND NO. 2 FROM ZVENYHOROD

This paper deals with the pragmatics of three birchbark letters from medieval Rus’. I argue that all three letters are ‘communicatively heterogeneous’ (Gippius 2004; see also Dekker 2014 in this volume): they consist of different sections that have different authors or are aimed at different addressees. This pragmatic feature has already been established for the first letter to be presented, no. 497 from Novgorod (see Schaeken 2011a), but I will return briefly to this extraordinary text and offer a parallel from another historical corpus of personal letters, which displays exactly the same communicative scenario as proposed for no. 497. In the case of the other two letters, I propose that there is a change of addressee in the second part of no. 771 from Novgorod and a change of author in the second part of no. 2 from Zvenyhorod. In both instances, the messenger is involved: he is directly addressed in the second part of no. 771 and probably takes over the role of author during the course of the letter from Zvenyhorod.