The study of the outstanding historian of Ancient Rus' A. A. Zimin contains an original, different from the generally accepted, concept of the origin and time of creation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” The book contains valuable material on the relationship between the text of “The Lay” and Russian chronicles, historical stories of the 15th–16th centuries, extraordinary solutions to a number of problems in “word studies,” as well as a detailed overview of assessments of the “Lay” in Russian and foreign science in the 19th–20th centuries. Having become fully familiar with the argumentation of A. A. Zimin, undoubtedly the most thorough of the “skeptics,” we cannot continue to study the “Lay”, in particular the problems of its attribution and the time of creation. The book is intended not only for specialists in ancient Russian literature, but and for everyone interested in the controversial issues of the emergence of the “Word”.