“Ornatus difficilis” style in “The tale of Igor's campaign”

The opinions of scientists about the extent to which the text of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was comprehensible to its contemporaries are divided. Some believed that “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was a folk work in the deepest sense of the word; its artistic essence was widely accessible to everyone. Others insisted that the refined and figurative style of the work required cultured readers, which made it a work for a select few. D. I. Chizhevsky, R. O. Yakobson and other scientists compared the style of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” with the “ornatus difficilis” style of Western European poetry of the 12th-13th centuries. According to R. O. Jacobson, it was characterized by riddle techniques, a concise hint instead of a detailed narrative, a deliberate heterogeneity of linguistic means, the use of neologisms, a complex game of tropes and figures, a deliberate combination of unrelated genres and sources, and a combination of pagan and Christian elements. According to the V. V. Kolesov’s reasonable remark, this overly broad characteristic of the style of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” still requires argumentation. In order to confirm the hypothesis that “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is a work in the “ornatus difficilis” style, this article examines some still partially unresolved readings of the monument, the understanding of which is complicated by stylistic techniques associated with the use of vocabulary and phraseology: individually authored or rare words, dialectisms, polysemous words and phrases that generate ambiguity (amphibolism) in the text, as well as phraseological occasionalisms.