Dove Book
medieval Russian religious ballad
The Verse About the Book of the Dove or Dove Book (Russian: Голубиная книга, romanized: Golubinaya Kniga) is a medieval Russian spiritual verse. At least 20 versions are known. They vary in length from 30 to over 900 lines. The poem is generally thought to have been written c. 1500 in the Novgorod region, though Russian nationalists postulate its great antiquity. The earliest extant manuscript is dated to the 17th century.
The main part of the Dove Book is a long sequence of riddles. In a series of answers to those riddles, King David explains the origin of light, sun, moon, and social classes. He also mentions a mysterious stone "clept the Alatyr". Isabel Florence Hapgood describes the content of one version in the following terms:
"The Dove Book" falls from Alatyr, the "burning white stone on the Island of Buyan", the heathen paradise, which lies far towards sunrise, in the "Ocean Sea". The heathen significance of the stone is not known, but it is cleverly explained in "The Dove Book" as the stone whereon Christ stood when he preached to his disciples.
The public source identifies “Dove Book” as medieval Russian religious ballad. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dove, Book and medieval.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4142373. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1500.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dove Book” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.