From commentaries to the texts of previously published birch bark letters

The article contains a number of corrections, clarifications, and other commentaries on several dozen birch bark letters from Veliky Novgorod, Smolensk, Staraya Russa, and Tver, as well as on an inscription on a bone pommel found in Novgorod in 2024. A brief methodological introduction discusses the admissibility of readings that assume slips of the pen in the text of the letter, the advisability of returning to some interpretations proposed in the 1950s–1970s by the discoverer of the letters, A. V. Artsikhovsky, and the importance of independent readings of difficult passages by several researchers. The article shows, in particular, that fragments of letters No. 109, 1047, and 717, devoted to the search for someone important to the author, reveal exactly the same communicative structure; a new interpretation of the famous word form зоронами from letter No. 157 is discussed (not ‘millstones’, as proposed by A. A. Gippius, but ‘grains’). For letter No. 950, we reconstruct the situation of an “indirect request” – the request addressed not to the addressee (probably the mother), but through the addressee to a third party (possibly the father); the final part of letter No. 354 has a similar structure. Certain issues of the structure of address formulas that have previously not attracted the attention of researchers are specially considered: the available material gives grounds to assert that addressing by the first name and patronymic is characteristic almost exclusively of petitions, while naming the addressee by both kinship and name (к бабѣ · к марѣмьꙗнѣ) became widespread only from the mid-14th century, with the kinship term always preceding the name