| Summary: | The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chronograph on the Great Narration family and other Old Russian compendia as well as its sources within the framework of the description of life of Alexander the Great and to restore the composition of the proto-text. Such features as repeated or on the contrary omitted fragments allow us to trace the stages of assembling the compilation. The study applies for the methodology of textual criticism, literary criticism and comparative source studies. Scientific novelty: for the first time, Alexander the Great story after the text of extant representatives of the Chronograph on the Great Narration, as well as the Slavonic Chronicle of George Hamartolos and early editions of the Chronographic Alexandria are systematically compared and analyzed. A series of textual tables demonstrates similarities and differences in the versions, numerous abbreviations, lexical and form substitutions, permutations, etc. Particular attention is paid to direct coincidences or any cases of similarities in the extant representatives of the Chronograph on the Great Narration versus versions others compendia which are not a part of that family. Conclusions. To describe the reign of Alexander the Great some borrowings from Slavonic Hamartolos were already incorporated into the chronographs with the Chronographic Alexandria of the 1st edition. While the proto-text of the Chronograph on the Great Narration did not include the direct inserts from the Chronographic Alexandria, it used a corresponded record of the Slavonic Hamartolos. However, the compiler made a large number of abbreviations and introduced many of his own innovations in this piece. As for extant representatives of our Chronograph family, the Complete Chronographic Palaea is the closest version to the proto-text of the Chronograph on the Great Narration despite the fact that in other readings its text is mostly secondary. Meanwhile, the Trinity chronograph has its further individual divergences layered on common features of the Chronograph (above all it have incorporated the Chronographic Alexandria of the 2nd edition).
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