Chapter III: Preface: v (1)

A SKETCH OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE 1

I. The Oldest Period 3

II. The Folklore 18

III. The Eighteenth Century 26

THE OLDEST PERIOD 39

Treaty with the Greeks (911) 41

Luká Zhidyáta (XI. c.) 44

Instruction to his Congregation 44

The Russian Code (XI. c.) 45

Ilarión, Metropolitan of Kíev (XI. c.) 48

Eulogy on St. Vladímir 48

Vladímir Monomákh (1053-1125) 50

His Instruction to his Children 51

Abbot Daniel, the Palmer (XII. c.) 56

Of the Holy Light, how it Descends from Heaven upon
the Holy Sepulchre 56

Epilogue 61

Cyril, Bishop of Túrov (XII. c.) 62

From a Sermon on the First Sunday after Easter 62

Néstor’s Chronicle (XII. c.) 65

The Baptism of Vladímir and of all Russia 65

The Kíev Chronicle (XII. c.) 71

The Expedition of Ígor Svyatoslávich against the
Pólovtses 72

The Word of Ígor’s Armament (XII. c.) 80

The Holy Virgin’s Descent into Hell (XII. c.) 96

Daniel the Prisoner (XIII. c.) 100

Letter to Prince Yarosláv Vsévolodovich 101

Serapión, Bishop of Vladímir (XIII. c.) 104

A Sermon on Omens 104

The Zadónshchina (XIV. c.) 106

Afanási Nikítin (XV. c.) 111

Travel to India 111

Apocryphal Legends about King Solomon (XV. c.) 114

The Story of Kitovrás 114

Prince Kúrbski (1528-1583) 115

The Storming of Kazán 116

Letter to Iván the Terrible 118

Iván the Terrible (1530-1584) 121

Letter to Prince Kúrbski 121

The Domostróy (XVI. c.) 126

How to Educate Children and Bring them up in the
Fear of God 126

How to Teach Children and Save them through Fear 127

How Christians are to Cure Diseases and all Kinds of
Ailments 128

The Wife is always and in all Things to Take Counsel
with her Husband 128

How to Instruct Servants 129

Songs Collected by Richard James (1619-1620) 130

Incursion of the Crimean Tartars 131

The Song of the Princess Kséniya Borísovna 132

The Return of Patriarch Filarét to Moscow 133

Krizhánich (1617-1677) 134

Political Reasons for the Union of the Churches 135

On Knowledge 136

On Foreigners 136

Kotoshíkhin (1630-1667) 136

The Education of the Princes 137

The Private Life of the Boyárs and of other Ranks 139

Simeón Pólotski (1629-1680) 149

On the Birth of Peter the Great 150

An Evil Thought 151

The Magnet 151

The Story of Misery Luckless-Plight (XVII. or XVIII. c.) 152

THE FOLKLORE 161

Epic Songs 163

Volkh Vseslávevich 163

Ilyá of Múrom and Nightingale the Robber 165

Historical Songs 172

Yermák 172

The Boyár’s Execution 174

The Storming of Ázov 176

Folksongs 177

Kolyádka 178

Bowl-Song 179

A Parting Scene 179

The Dove 180

The Faithless Lover 182

Elegy 182

The Farewell 183

Sing, O sing again, lovely lark of mine 184

Wedding Gear 185

The Sale of the Braid 185

Marriage Song 186

Beggars’ Song 186

An Orphan’s Wailing 187

Conjuration of a Mother 188

Fairy Tales 189

Frost 190

The Cat, the Goat and the Ram 195

The Fox and the Peasant 198

Proverbs 199

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 203

Pososhkóv (1670-1726) 205

On Merchants 205

On the Peasantry 209

Prokopóvich (1681-1763) 211

The Spiritual Reglement 212

Funeral Sermon on Peter the Great 214

Tatíshchev (1686-1750) 218

From the “Russian History” 219

Kantemír (1708-1744) 223

To my Mind 224

Tredyakóvski (1703-1769) 230

Ode on the Surrender of Dantzig 230

Princess Dolgorúki (1714-1771) 233

From her “Memoirs” 234

Lomonósov (1711-1765) 241

Letters to I. I. Shuválov 242

Ode on the Capture of Khotín 246

Morning Meditations 252

Evening Meditations 253

Sumarókov (1718-1777) 254

The False Demetrius 255

Instruction to a Son 257

To the Corrupters of Language 260

The Helpful Gnat 260

Four Answers 261

Vasíli Máykov (1728-1778) 263

The Battle of the Zimogórans and Valdáyans 263

The Cook and the Tailor 267

Danílov (1722-1790) 269

From his “Memoirs” 269

Catherine the Great (1729-1796) 272

O Tempora 272

Prince Khlor 276

Shcherbátov (1733-1790) 287

On the Corruption of Manners in Russia 287

Petróv (1736-1799) 291

On the Victory of the Russian over the Turkish Fleet 291

Kheráskov (1733-1807) 298

The Rossiad 298

Metropolitan Platón (1737-1812) 300

What are Idolaters? 300

Address upon the Accession of Alexander I. 304

Khémnitser (1745-1784) 306

The Lion’s Council of State 306

The Metaphysician 307

Knyazhnín (1742-1791) 308

Vadím of Nóvgorod 309

Odd People 311

Princess Dáshkov (1743-1810) 316

The Establishment of a Russian Academy 316

Poroshín (1741-1769) 321

From his “Diary” 321

The Satirical Journals (1769-1774), and Nóvikov (1744-1818) 326

From _All Kinds of Things_ 328

Sound Reasoning Adorns a Man 329

From the _Drone_ 332

Recipe for His Excellency Mr. Lacksense 332

The Laughing Democritos 333

From _Hell’s Post_ 335

From the _Painter_ 337

Fon-Vízin (1744-1792) 341

The Minor 342

An Open-Hearted Confession 351

Letters to Count Pánin 355

Kostróv (1750-1796) 358

Letter to the Creator of the Ode in Praise of Felítsa 359

Radíshchev (1749-1802) 361

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow 362

Ablesímov (1742-1783) 370

The Miller 370

Bogdanóvich (1743-1803) 374

Psyche. From Book I. 374

” ” ” II. 375

Derzhávin (1743-1816) 377

Ode to the Deity 379

Monody on Prince Meshchérski 382

Felítsa 385

The Waterfall 390

The Storm 391

The Stream of Time 392

Neledínski-Melétski (1752-1829) 392

To the Streamlet I’ll Repair 392

He whose Soul from Sorrow Dreary 394

Muravév (1757-1807) 395

To the Goddess of the Nevá 395

Kapníst (1757-1824) 397

The Pettifoggery 398

Obúkhovka 402

On Julia’s Death 404

Gribóvski (1766-1833) 405

From his “Memoirs” 405

Kámenev (1772-1803) 411

Gromvál 412

Ózerov (1770-1816) 418

Dimítri Donskóy 419

Prince Dolgorúki (1764-1823) 422

The Legacy 422

My Moscow Fireplace 425

Dmítriev (1760-1837) 428

The Little Dove 429

During a Thunder-Storm 430

Ermák 431

What Others Say 436

Index 441

A SKETCH OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

I.--THE OLDEST PERIOD

Of the many Slavic nations and tribes that at one time occupied the east of Europe from the Elbe and the headwaters of the Danube to Siberia, and from the Ionic Sea to the Baltic and White Seas, some have entirely disappeared in the ruthless struggle with a superior German civilisation; others, like the Bulgarians and Servians, have paled into insignificance under the lethargic influence of the Crescent, to be fanned to life again within the memory of the present generation by a breath of national consciousness, which is the result of the Romantic Movement in European literature; others again like the Bohemians and Poles, rent asunder by fraternal discord and anarchy, have forfeited their national existence and are engaged in an unequal battle to regain it. Of all the Slavs, Russia alone has steadily gathered in the lands of the feudal lords, to shine at last as a power of the first magnitude among the sisterhood of states, and to scintillate hope to its racial brothers as the “Northern Star.”

The unity of the Russian land was ever present to the minds of the writers in the earliest days of the appanages. The bard of the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_ and Daniel the Palmer made appeals to the whole country and prayed for all the princes in the twelfth century, and for upwards of four centuries Moscow has been the centre towards which the outlying districts have been gravitating. Yet, in spite of so continuous and well-defined a political tendency, Russia is the last of the Slavic nations to have evolved a literature worthy of the name. Bohemia had a brilliant literature of the Western stamp as early as the thirteenth century; Bulgaria had made a splendid start three centuries before, under the impulse of the newly introduced religion; the Servian city of Ragusa, receiving its intellectual leaven from its Italian vicinage, invested Petrarch and Dante with Servian citizenship in the fifteenth century, and, shortly after, gloried in an epic of a Gundulić, and in a whole galaxy of writers; Poland borrowed its theology from Bohemia, took an active part in the medieval Latin literature, and boasted a golden age for its native language in the sixteenth century. Russia produced an accessible literature only in the second half of the eighteenth century, became known to Western Europe not earlier than the second quarter of the next, and had not gained universal recognition until within the last twenty-five years.

In the case of the Western and Southern Slavs, a community of interests, whether religious or social, has led to an intellectual intercourse with their neighbours, from whom they have received their models for imitation or adaptation. Without a favourable geographical position, or some common bond with the external world, no nation can have a healthy development, especially in the incipient stage of its political existence. Blatant Slavophiles of fifty years ago heaped reproach on the reforms of Peter the Great, on the ground that they were fashioned upon Western ideals, and that he had retarded the evolution of Russia according to its inherent Slavic idea. There still survive men of that persuasion, though a comparative study of Russian literature long ago demonstrated that every step in advance has been made by conscious or unconscious borrowings from abroad. If there was a Russian literature previous to the introduction of Christianity, it certainly stood in some kind of relation to the literatures of the neighbours. The few extant treaties with the Greeks for that period show unmistakable Byzantine influences, and the Russian Code of Yarosláv, with its purely Norse laws, dates from a time when the Varyágs had not yet disappeared in the mass of the Slavic majority.

With the introduction of Christianity, Russia, instead of entering into closer communion with the rest of the world, was separated from it even more securely than before, and soon after, an intellectual stagnation began that lasted very nearly to the end of the seventeenth century. Various causes combined to produce this singular effect. Chief of these was its geographical position. Living in the vast eastern plain of Europe, which in itself would have been productive of a larger life, the Russian tribes had civilised neighbours on one side only. On the north they were separated from the Swedes by rude Finnish tribes; on the south, they had for centuries to contend against all the nomads, Pechenyégs, Cumanians, Khazars, who slowly proceeded from Asia to central Europe to become lost in the nations to the south of the Carpathians and in the Balkan peninsula; in the east the Finns of the north met the Tartars of the south, and behind them lay unprofitable Asia. On the north-west, it is true, was the civilised Teutonic Order, but the inveterate hatred between these Germans and the Slavs prevented any intercommunication from that quarter. There was left Poland, through which Russia might issue into Europe; but savage Lithuania was wedged in between the two, so as to reduce still more the line of contact with the West. When Lithuania became civilised, and a part of Poland, the latter had grown suspicious of the youthful Ilyá of Múrom who “had sat thirty years upon the oven,” and enunciated a political maxim that either Russia would have to become Polish, or else Poland Russian. Knowing that there was no other exit for Russia, Poland permitted no light to reach it from the West. When England began to communicate with Russia in the sixteenth century, King Sigismund made an earnest appeal to Queen Elizabeth to stop sending skilled mechanics, lest the Colossus should awaken and become a danger to Europe.

These external causes of Russia’s aloofness were still more intensified by a systematic determination of Russia to keep out the Catholic contamination that would come from intercourse with Europe. This was a direct outgrowth of its adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, instead of Rome. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, were themselves Bulgarians from Macedonia. When they first carried the new religion to Moravia and later to Bulgaria, they, no doubt, preached and wrote in the dialect with which they were most familiar. This innovation of preaching the gospel in another than one of the three sacred languages was a necessary departure, in order to win over the troublesome Slavs to the north of Byzantium. Though at the end of the ninth century the various dialects were already sufficiently dissimilar to constitute separate languages, yet they were not so distant from each other as to be a hindrance to a free intercommunication. When, a century later, Christianity was introduced into Russia from Constantinople, Bulgarian priests and bookmen were the natural intermediaries, and the Bulgarian language at once became the literary medium, to the exclusion of the native tongue. Soon after, the Eastern Church separated from Rome, and the Greek-Catholic clergy inculcated upon their neophytes an undying hatred of the Latins, as the Romanists were called. In Moscow, the slightest deviation from the orthodox faith was sufficient cause for suspecting a Romanist heresy, and anathemas against Roman-Catholics were frequent, but at Kíev, where the contact with Poland was inevitable, the disputes with the Latins form a prominent part of ecclesiastical literature. To guard the country against any possible contagion, the punishment of Russians who crossed the border, in order to visit foreign parts, was so severe, that few ever ventured out of the country. The seclusion of Russia was complete.

Even under these difficulties, literature and the arts might have flourished, if Constantinople had been able to give to the new converts even its degraded Byzantine culture, or if there had not been other powerful causes that militated against a development from within. In the west of Europe the Latin language of the Church did not interfere with an early national literature. Latin was the language of the learned, whether clerical or lay, and mediated an intellectual intercourse between the most distant members of the universal faith. At the same time, the native dialects had received an impulse before the introduction of Christianity, often under the influence of Rome, and they were left to shift for themselves and to find their votaries. The case was quite different in Russia. The Bulgarian language, which was brought in with the gospel, at once usurped on the native Russian to the great disadvantage of the latter. Being closely related to the spoken Russian, Bulgarian was easily acquired by the clergy, but it was not close enough to become the literary language of the people. On the one hand, this new gospel language could at best connect Russia with Byzantium by way of Bulgaria; on the other, Russian was looked down upon as a rude dialect and was discouraged, together with every symptom of the popular creation which was looked upon as intimately connected with ancient paganism.

This Bulgarian language was not long preserved in its purity. Detached from its native home, it was immediately transformed in pronunciation, so as to conform to the spoken Russian; thus, for example, it at once lost its nasals, which were not familiar to the Russian ear. In the course of time, words and constructions of the people’s language found their way into the Church-Slavic, as the Bulgarian was then more properly called. Naturally, many words, referring to abstract ideas and the Church, passed from the Bulgarian into the spoken tongue. Thus, the two dialects, one the arbitrary literary language, the other, the language of every-day life, approached each other more and more. At the present time, the Russian of literature contains a large proportion of these Church-Slavic words; the language of the Bible and the liturgy is the Church-Slavic of the sixteenth century, which differs so much from the original Bulgarian that, though a Russian reads with comparative ease this Church-Slavic, he has to study Bulgarian as a German would study Old German. This Church-Slavic of the Russian redaction has also been, and still is, in part, the ecclesiastical language of the other Greek-Catholic countries of the Slavs.

Some time passed before Russia could furnish its own clergy. All the leading places in the Church were at first filled with Bulgarians and Greeks who were steeped in Byzantine religious lore. The Church at Constantinople stood in direct opposition to the classical traditions of Greece. These were not separated from the old heathenism, and to the luxury and voluptuousness of medieval Greece, which was ascribed to classical influences, the Church opposed asceticism and self-abnegation. Monasticism was preached as the ideal of the religious life, and arts and sciences had no place in the scheme of the Church. Theology and rhetoric were the only sciences which the hermit practised in his cell, in the moments that were free from prayer and self-castigation. And it is only the Church’s sciences that ancient Russia inherited from Byzantium. The civil intercourse between the two countries was very slight, and the few Russian ecclesiastics who visited Mount Athos and the Holy Land brought back with them at best a few legends and apocryphal writings. The Byzantine influence at home showed itself in a verbal adherence to the Bible and the Church Fathers, and an occasional attempt at pulpit oratory in the bombastic diction of contemporary Greece.

Not a science penetrated into ancient Russia. Historically the rest of the world did not exist for it, and geographically it was only of interest in so far as it came into contact with Russia: Russia knew more of Tartars and Cumanians than of Germany or France. Arithmetic, not to speak of mathematics, and physics, medicine and engineering, were unknown before the sixteenth century, and then only when a few foreigners practised these arts in the capital and at the Court. The only literature that reached Russia was the legendary lore of the South and West, through Bulgaria and Poland, generally at a time when it had long been forgotten elsewhere: thus, the Lucidarius and Physiologus were accepted as genuine bits of zoölogical and botanical science, long after sober knowledge had taken possession of the universities of the world. The literature of Russia before Peter the Great is by no means meagre or uninteresting, but it lacks an important element of historical continuity; in fact, it is devoid of every trace of chronology. What was written in the twelfth century might with equal propriety be the product of the sixteenth, and _vice versa_, and the productions of the earliest time were copied out as late as the seventeenth century, and relished as if they had just been written. Where a certain literary document has come down to us in a later copy, it is not possible to date it back, unless it contains some accidental indication of antiquity. In short, there was no progress in Russia for a period of six or seven centuries, from the tenth century to the seventeenth.

In this achronism of literary history, there may, however, be discerned two periods that are separated from each other by the first invasion of the Tartars. Previous to that momentous event, Kíev formed the chief intellectual and political centre of the Russian principalities. Here the Norse traditions, which had been brought by the Varyág warriors, had not entirely faded away in the century following the introduction of Christianity, and the Court maintained certain relations with the rest of the world, as in the case of Yarosláv, who was related, by the marriage of his children, to the Courts of Norway, France, Germany and Hungary. On the other hand, Vladímir’s heroes were celebrated abroad, and Ilyá of Múrom is not unknown to German tradition and the Northern saga. Not only its favourable geographical position, but its climate as well, inspired the inhabitants of Kíev with a greater alacrity, even as the Little-Russians of to-day have developed less sombre characteristics than the Great-Russians of the sterner north. It is sufficient to compare the laconic instructions of Luká Zhidyáta in the commercial Nóvgorod with the flowery style of Serapión’s sermon, or the dry narrative of the northern chronicles with the elaborate adornment of the stories in the chronicles of Néstor and Sylvester, to become aware of the fundamental difference between the two sections of Russia. The twelfth century, rich in many aspects of literature, including that beautiful prose poem of popular origin, the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_, gave ample promise of better things to come. Similarly, the bylínas of the Vladímir cycle, the best and most numerous of all that are preserved, point to an old poetic tradition that proceeded from Kíev.

The fact that these bylínas have been lately discovered in the extreme north-east, in the Government of Olónetsk, while not a trace of them has been found in their original home, has divided the scholars of Russia into two camps. Some assert that all the Russians of Kíev belonged to the Great-Russian division, and that the Tartar invasion destroyed most of them, and caused the rest to migrate to the north, whither they carried their poetry. The Little-Russians that now occupy the south of Russia are supposed by these scholars to have come from Galicia to repeople the abandoned places. The Little-Russians themselves claim, with pardonable pride, to be the direct descendants of the race that gave Russia its Néstor and the bard of the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_. There are weighty arguments on both sides, and both the Great-Russians, with whom we are at present concerned, and the Little-Russians, or Ruthenians, who have developed a literature in their own dialect, claim that old literature as their own.

The terrible affliction of the Mongol invasion marks, on the one hand, the beginning of the concentration of Russia around Moscow, and, on the other, accentuates more strongly the barren activities of the Russian mind for the next few centuries. Historians have been wont to dwell on the Tartar domination as the chief cause of Russian stagnation, but the calmer judgment of unbiassed science must reject that verdict. It is true, the Tartars carried ruin to all the Russian land, but after every successful raid, they withdrew to their distant camps, ruling the conquered land merely by exacting tribute and homage from its princes. The Tartars in no way interfered with the intellectual and religious life of the people; on the contrary, they mingled freely with the subject nation, and intermarriages were common. It has already been pointed out that the germ of unprogressiveness was older than the invasion, that the Byzantine religious culture was the real cause of it. That Moscow was even less progressive than Kíev is only natural. All its energies were bent on political aggrandisement, on throwing off the hated Tartar yoke, and it was farther removed from Europe than the more fortunate southern metropolis. All these conditions were unfavourable to the practice of the gentler arts.

The religious lore of ancient Russia was derived from the gospel, which was hardly ever accessible in continuous form, but only as an _aprakos_, _i. e._, as a manual in which it was arranged according to the weekly readings. This was supplemented by two peculiar versions of the Old Testament, the _palæas_, in which passages of the Bible were intermingled with much apocryphal matter, and which originally had served as controversial literature against the Jews, and to prove the coming of Christ; there was no translation of the whole Old Testament, and as late as the eighteenth century a priest referred to the _palæa_ as to Holy Writ. Prayers to saints, lives and legends of saints, with moral instructions, complete the list of the religious equipment that Russia received from Byzantium. One of the oldest Russian manuscripts, the _Collection of Svyatosláv_, made for Svyatosláv of Chernígov in 1073, is a copy of a similar production, translated from the Greek for Simeón of Bulgaria. It is an encyclopedia of ecclesiastic and moral themes, culled from the Church Fathers, among whom John Chrysostom is most prominent. Later, there were many similar collections, known under the names of _The Golden Beam_, _Emerald_, _Golden Chain_, and so forth.

By the aid of this literature and such Greek models as were accessible to the priests, were produced the sermons that have come down to us in a large number, and a few of which, like those of Cyril of Túrov and Serapión, do not lack literary polish, and are not inferior to Western pulpit oratory of the same period. Whenever the preachers turned to praise the princes, as in the case of Ilarión who eulogised Vladímir, they had in mind only their orthodox Christianity, for religion was the all-absorbing question. Similarly, when Vladímir Monomákh wrote his _Instruction_ to his children, he composed it according to the model given in Svyatosláv’s _Collection_. Sermons and Instructions, from the introduction of Christianity to the middle of the eighteenth century, form one of the most important ingredients of Collections, and served as models for _Spiritual Testaments_ even in the eighteenth century. Sylvester’s _Domostróy_ belongs to the same type, though what in Vladímir was the enthusiasm and earnestness of the new faith, has in this later document become a series of external observances. Formalism and adherence to the dead letter characterise the whole period of Russian unprogressiveness, and remained the characteristic of the Church at a much later time, in spite of the enlightened labours of a Feofán or Platón; and it was the same formalism that caused the schism of the raskólniks, who saw in Nikón’s orthographical corrections of the corrupt Bible text an assault upon the orthodox religion.

Only a small proportion of the literature of ancient Russia was produced outside the ranks of the clergy. There were few literate persons who were not priests or monks; for there hardly existed any schools during this whole period, and even princes could not sign their names. The influence of the lettered priest was paramount, and if he was at all equal to the task of composing readable sermons, these were eagerly sought for by all who could read them. When, in the sixteenth, and still more in the seventeenth century, rays of light began to penetrate into Moscow, the chief and most dangerous task of instruction fell to the share of those preachers who had come in contact with Polish learning at Kíev; in the days of Peter the Great, Feofán Prokopóvich was an important factor in the civilisation of Russia, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century the sermons of Platón still form an integral part of literature.

To the student of comparative literature the semi-religious lore, which finds its expression in the apocrypha, is of vastly greater interest. The poetical creative activity of the people, combining with the knowledge of religious lore, has ever been active in producing spurious legendary accounts of matters biblical. The book of Enoch and the Talmud disseminated such legends in regard to the Old Testament long before the birth of Christianity. The Russian apocryphal literature is rich in legendary accounts of the creation of the world, the confession of Eve, the lives of Adam, Melchisedec, Abraham, Lot, Moses, Balaam, the twelve patriarchs, David, and particularly Solomon. Much more extensive is the store of legends from the New Testament. The birth of the Holy Virgin is dilated upon in the gospel of Jacob, the childhood of Christ is told in the gospel of Thomas, while a fuller story of Pilate’s judgment of Christ and of Christ’s descent into Hell is given in the old gospel of Nicodemus. Lazarus, Judas, and the twelve apostles have all their group of legends, but the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Judgment-day were the most popular. The list is far from being exhausted, and only a small part of the material has been scientifically investigated and located. Most of these stories travelled by the customary road over Bulgaria from Byzantium. As they have also reached the west of Europe, the investigator of their Western forms has to look into Byzantine sources; but as many of the legends have been preserved in the Slavic form, and when they have disappeared from the Greek, or as fuller redactions are to be met with in the North, he cannot well afford to overlook the Slavic sources. The _index librorum prohibitorum_ of Russia, fashioned after the Greek, includes all such apocrypha as were current at the time of the composition of the first _index_. The clergy were continually preaching against them, yet their efforts were useless, especially since they themselves were at the same time drawing extensively on the apocryphal accounts of the _palæas_, lives of saints, etc.

There is this vast difference in the literature of this kind as it was current in Russia and in the West. Elsewhere the legends were early seized upon by the fancy of the poets, were clothed in the conventional garb of verse, remodelled, combined, beautified, until they became the stock in trade of literature, while the memory of the unadorned story had entirely faded from the popular consciousness. Dante’s _Divine Comedy_ is an illustration of how transformed the legends had become at a very early date. In Russia nothing of the kind has taken place. With the usual achronism of its literature, legends of the eleventh and eighteenth centuries live side by side, or mingle in the same version, and they have undergone no other change than corruption of misunderstood passages, transposition of motives, modernisation of language. The religious songs that a mendicant may be heard singing at the present time in front of a church are nothing but these old legends, almost in their primitive form.

Nearly allied to the apocryphal stories are the profane legends that form the subject-matter of so much of European medieval literature. The stories of Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, Digenis Akritas, Barlaam and Josaphat, Calilah-wa-Dimnah, are as common in Russian literature as in that of France or Germany. Byzantium is the immediate source of most of these legends both for the East and the West, but there are also many motives in the Russian stories that were derived from the West through Servia and Bulgaria. It is not yet quite clear how these stories came to travel in a direction opposite to the customary route of popular tales; no doubt the crusades did much to bring about an interchange of the oral literature of the nations. In the West, these stories have furnished the most beautiful subjects for medieval poetry, but as before, the Russian stories have not found their way into polite literature. They have either remained unchanged in their original form, or, being of a more popular character than the religious legends, have adapted themselves to the style of folktales, as which they have been preserved.

It is not unlikely that many of these tales were brought back from Palestine, the common camping-ground of the Christian nations during the crusades. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land began soon after the introduction of Christianity into Russia, and in the twelfth century we have the first account of such a journey, from the pen of the abbot Daniel. None of the later accounts of Palestine and Constantinople compare in interest with the simple narrative of Daniel the Palmer, after whose _Pilgrimage_ they are fashioned and whose very words they often incorporated in their _Travels_. The purpose of all these was to serve as incitements to religious contemplation. There is but one account of a journey to the west of Europe. It was undertaken by the metropolitan Isidor who, in 1437, attended the Council of Florence. A few years later Afanási Nikítin described his journey to India, which was one of the earliest undertaken by Westerners in the same century; but while Vasco de Gama and Columbus were revolutionising the knowledge of geography, and were making the discovery of a route to India the object of mercantile development, Nikítin’s report, important though it was, had absolutely no effect upon dormant Russia.

As there existed no external geography, so there was no external history. But fortunately for Russia, a long series of chronicles have saved historical events from oblivion. The earliest chronicle, that of Néstor, was the model for all that followed. Excepting the history of Kúrbski, who had come into contact with Western science through the Polish, and Krizhánich, who was not a Russian, there was no progress made in the chronological arrangement of historical facts from Néstor to Tatíshchev, while in style and dramatic diction there is a decided retrogression. The promise held out by the historian of the twelfth century was not made good for six hundred years. Néstor and Sylvester, the continuator, were of the clerical profession, and naturally the religious element, richly decked out with legend, folktale and reports of eye-witnesses, is the prevailing tone throughout the whole production. The Bible and the Byzantines, Hamartolos and John Malalas, serve as models for the fluent style of this production, but the vivid, dramatic narrative bears witness to considerable talent in the author. At first only the cities of Kíev, Nóvgorod and Súzdal, and Volhynia seem to have possessed such chronicles; but those that are preserved show traces of being composed of shorter accounts of other individual places. In the following centuries, most of the larger cities and monasteries kept chronological records of important events, and with the centralisation of Russia about Moscow there also appeared a species of Court chroniclers whose dry narration is often coloured in favour of the tsarate.

All this mass of literature is essentially ecclesiastic, and hardly any other could raise its head against the constant anathemas of the Church. No prohibition of the priests was strong enough to obliterate the craving for a popular literature, for no school, no science, was opposed to the superstition of the people, which therefore had full sway. The best the Church was able to do for the masses was to foster a “double faith,” in which Christianity and paganism lived side by side. We shall see later how this state of affairs has been favourable to the preservation of an oral tradition up to the present time. Yet, but for the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_, and its imitation, the _Zadónshchina_, no one could have suspected that the elements of a natural, unecclesiastic literature were present in ancient Russia.

This _Word of Ígor’s Armament_ is unique. It was composed at a time when Russia was already well Christianised, yet the references to Christianity are only sporadic, whereas the ancient pagan divinities and popular conceptions come in for a goodly share of attention. There are some who are inclined to see in this production a forgery, such as Hanka concocted for Bohemian literature, or Macpherson for Celtic, for the absence of any later works of the kind seems to be inexplicable. But this absence need not surprise us, for no such work could have been written at a later time outside the Church, which alone was in possession of a modicum of learning. It must be assumed that the bard of the _Word_ represents the last of a bygone civilisation that had its firm footing in the people, but stood in a literary relation to the singers of the Norsemen; for there is much in the _Word_ that reminds one of the Northern sagas. The tradition of the bard came to an end with this last production, but his manner, corrupted and twisted by a wrongly understood Christianity, lived on in the folksong of the people; hence the remarkable resemblance between the two.

But for the inertia of the Russian Church and people, it would not have been necessary to wait until a Peter the Great violently shook the country into activity, for long before his time glimpses of European civilisation reached Moscow. In the fifteenth century, we have found metropolitan Isidor travelling to the Council of Florence, to cast his vote in favour of a union of the Churches under Rome. In the same century foreigners began to arrive in Moscow to practise medicine or architecture, or to serve in the Russian army; in the time of Iván the Terrible there was already a considerable foreign colony in Moscow, and its influences upon individual Russians were not rare. Iván the Terrible himself made several attempts to get skilled mechanics from the West, but his efforts were generally frustrated by Poland and the Germans of the Baltic provinces.

The most important points of contact with the West were in the Church itself, through Kíev and Western Russia. These outlying parts of Russia had early come into relation with Poland, and their unyielding orthodoxy had been mellowed by the prevailing scholasticism of the Polish theology. In the academy of Kíev, Greek and Latin grammar, theology and rhetoric were taught, while these sciences--especially grammar, even though it were Slavic grammar--were looked upon at Moscow as certain expressions of heresy. The correction of the corrupt church books, which in itself was advocated by priests who had imbibed the Kíev culture, made the presence of learned men--that is, of such as knew grammar enough to discover orthographical mistakes--an absolute necessity. In the reign of Alexis Mikháylovich, Kíev monks were called out for the purpose of establishing a school, and only in 1649 was the first of the kind opened. This innovation divided the churchmen into two camps,--those who advocated the Greek grammar, and those who advocated the Latin,--that is, those who would hear of nothing that distantly might remind them of the Latins, and those who were for a Western culture, even though it was to be only the scholastic learning already abandoned in the rest of Europe. The battle between the two was fought to the death. Those who were in favour of the Latin were generally worsted, and some of the most promising of them were imprisoned and even capitally punished; but men like Medvyédev, and later Simeón Pólotski, laid the foundation for an advancement, however gradual, which culminated in the reforms of Peter the Great.

Where a few individuals gained some semblance of Western culture, they could not write freely at home, and had to develop their activities abroad. Kúrbski, who for a long time stands alone as an historian, wrote his _History_ in Poland, and it remained without any influence whatsoever at home; its very existence was not known before our own times. The same thing happened with Kotoshíkhin, whose description of Russia was known to the learned of Sweden, but the original of which was unknown until its accidental discovery by a Russian scholar of the nineteenth century. So, while the ferment of reform began much earlier than the eighteenth century, it would have been indefinitely delayed, causing many a bloody battle, if the Gordian knot had not been cut by Peter the Great in favour of the West.

II.--THE FOLKLORE

In the Russian terminology, the _people_ includes all the elements of society that are not covered by the term _intelligence_. This latter is a comprehensive designation of all the classes that have some education and can give intelligent opinions on social, political and cultural themes. The vast majority of the nation are the _people_ in the narrower sense, and it is essentially the characteristic of the democratic nineteenth century to regard the intellectual life of this people as worthy of consideration. This is true of the world at large, but, in Russia, preoccupation with the people, down to the lowest strata of society, has become a dominating note in literature. Whatever other causes may have been active in creating this strong sentiment,--and they will be discussed in a later chapter,--the strongest impulse to such a people--worship was received from the unexpected and undreamt-of wealth of that popular literature which has been unearthed by the diligent labours of a few investigators.

In the eighteenth century, the term _people_ had a wider significance. All those who did not belong to polite society, that is, all those who were not dignitaries or functionaries of a higher order, were the _people_, and at first the literati were included in that general appellation. Literature was entirely in the service of the higher classes, whom it was intended to amuse and eulogise; there was no other audience, and writers had to direct their attention to filling the demand, as hirelings of princes, and as pamperers of the pseudo-classic taste and Voltairism which held sway in refined society. Though frequently originating from the people, these writers dissevered all connection with it, for they had no longer any interests in common. With a few occasional exceptions, the people had no place in literature, and the inflated style that prevailed in prose and poetry was so far removed from the language of the people that the written literature could exert little influence upon the popular mind, and if there existed anything of a traditional nature among the lower classes, it was little, if at all, contaminated by literary influences. Whatever it had received from bygone ages was transmitted to the nineteenth century and collected just in time, before its certain disintegration.

This disregard for the enormous majority of the people was an inheritance of ancient Russia, before the reforms of Peter the Great. We have already seen with what unintelligent severity the Church persecuted every creation of a popular nature. As the nation consisted of the Church and the people, so, also, everything that was not directly of a Christian tendency was un-Christian and therefore tabooed. True Christianity could never take possession of the people that was not intelligent enough to discern what was religion and what not, and the result was that “double faith” in which, in spite of the persistent endeavours of the clergy, the old heathenism showed through the varnish of the new faith. The anathemas of the Church against “pagan rites,” which included the singing of harmless songs, continue down to the eighteenth century.

In the general unprogressiveness of the whole country, the agricultural classes, that constituted the bulk of the people, have remained unchanged for centuries. Russia was as much a country of raw products in the eighteenth century as in the twelfth, and barter and tribute in kind were common until a very late time. The life of the peasant has always moved in the same primitive conditions. Nothing whatsoever has been added to his physical and intellectual existence since the introduction of Christianity, and the latter itself did not much affect his spiritual life. He has remained essentially the same through the ages. The love of singing and story-telling that characterises him to-day has, no doubt, been his characteristic for centuries, and as the memory of the untutored man is much better than that of the lettered, he has been able to transmit orally to our own day the stock of his ancient songs and tales. The folklore of Russia, more than that of any Western nation, bridges over the chasm between the most distant antiquity and the present. It is an inheritance of the past, the more precious because it has been transmitted by an unsophisticated class, whereas in the West the people has come to a great extent under the influence of the literary caste.

When the folklore of Russia first became accessible to scholars, the adherents of the mythological theory of the origin of popular tales and songs, which had been enunciated by Grimm, set out at once to expound the epic songs and fairy tales as purely mythical symbols of a pre-Christian era. It was assumed that the songs and stories had come down to us in an almost unchanged text from the most remote antiquity, and that they were the representatives of a distinctly Russian conception. In the meantime, Benfey and his followers have pointed out that the fairy tales of Europe are traceable to their Indian home, whence they have wandered to the most remote regions, crossing and recrossing each other, and mingling in a variety of ways. Even the casual song that bears every appearance of native origin is frequently identical with similar songs in distant quarters; so, for example, Professor Child has brought together a vast number of similar motives from the whole world in his monumental work on the English and Scotch Ballads. Under the stress of these discoveries, the greater part of the mythological ballast had to be thrown overboard, and Russian folklore was brought into direct relations with the rest of the world.

It has been a rude disappointment to those who believed in an autochthonous development of the bylínas, to discover that they are often variations of similar accounts in foreign literatures; that, for example, the story of Sadkó the Merchant has been found to be identical with a French story; similarly, the ceremonial songs are not all of native growth. The study of comparative literature is of recent development, at least so far as Russian sources are concerned, and only a small part of the material has been properly located; but this much can even now be asserted,--that the folklore of Russia is much more intimately connected with that of Europe and Asia than is the written literature of the old period. Much of the apocryphal matter came through the South Slavic countries; many stories and songs must have wandered by way of Poland to White-Russia, and hence farther into the interior. Anciently there could have been an interchange of motives between Germany and Russia in the cities of Nóvgorod and Pskov, which stood in commercial relations with the towns of the Hansa, while earlier the Northern saga may have left some traces during the domination of the Norse. But one of the investigators, Stásov, and after him Potánin, have stoutly maintained that most of the stories of the Russian epic cycle came with the Tartars directly from Asia.

If we admit all possible borrowings from the West and the East, Russian folklore is still of unique interest to the student of literature on account of the evident traces of great antiquity which it has preserved. The same cause that kept the written literature of Russia at a low level and destroyed all appreciable chronology has been active in the traditional literature, and has saved it from violent transformations. It cannot be asserted that any one song has come down to us in its original shape. The change of the spoken language naturally affected the stories and songs, and many a word that has become obsolete has been superseded, or preserved in an unrecognisable form. Contemporary facts of history have been introduced in the place of older ones, as when the heroes of the cycle of Vladímir are made to fight the Tartars. Motives have become mingled by superposition of related stories, or by accretion of foreign material. But never has the people wilfully transformed, corrupted, added or taken away. Though individuals continually produced new songs and stories, yet they moved in narrowly prescribed traditional limits, and the moment these passed to the people and became its common possession, they suffered only the accidental changes just spoken of. The task of separating later and adventitious elements from the bulk of this literature has only begun, and when that is accomplished, the past of Russia will be reproduced much more clearly than that of other countries of Europe, because an achronous period separates the last two centuries from the tenth.

Only one epic, the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_, has survived from antiquity. That others existed, the bard assures us when he tells of princes, for a period of a whole century, whom Boyán, an older singer, had celebrated. This precious relic is not only interesting for its intrinsic poetical merit, permitting us to guess the possibilities of the Russian untutored mind before the introduction of the repressive Byzantinism, but it serves as a guide in redating much of the oral literature of the present day. In the bylínas, the ceremonial songs, the fairy tales, we continually come upon passages that are constructed in the same manner as in the _Word_, and the popular poetry of to-day and the writings of the whole old period contain many identical phrases and illustrations.

The epic songs, or bylínas, have been discovered in out-of-the-way places in the swampy region of the Government of Olónetsk. It has puzzled all the investigators to explain why the memory of Vladímir and his heroes should have lived so long in these distant regions when every recollection of them has entirely disappeared in Kíev, the scene of all their deeds. Throughout these epic songs there is evidence of their southern origin, yet nothing whatsoever is known of them in the south of Russia. Various explanations have been attempted, but the most wide-spread is that the Great-Russians of the south had been exterminated by the Tartars, and that the few who survived had taken refuge in the north, while the present inhabitants of the south have come from the south-east and represent a different tribe. There seems, however, to be a more plausible explanation. Considering that the _Word of Ígor’s Armament_ has not survived except in writing, and that there are no old epics living in the mouths of the people, except in inaccessible regions, it is natural to assume that no longer poem, nor a cycle of poems, which demanded a great amount of mental exertion and a special class of singers, could outlive the persecution of the Church, and that only where the people were separated from the rest of the world by impassable swamps and forests, and where, therefore, the influence of the Church was of necessity weakest, was it possible for the class of traditional bards to maintain itself.

There is ample evidence that these epics were based on historical events, and that they belong to the same category as the historical songs, of which a number have been recorded from the seventeenth century and later. The oldest are those that Richard James had written down in 1619; they were composed by some popular bard immediately after the incidents which they relate. Later historical songs deal with Peter the Great, while the song collections contain many others that range in time from Iván the Terrible to the nineteenth century. The manner of all these is identical, and strongly reminds us of the epic songs. From this it may be inferred that the bylínas were separate songs, composed by contemporary bards, and that their present condition is merely due to that series of corruptions to which all orally transmitted literature is subject.

In the _Word_, Germans, Venetians, Greeks and Moravians are made to sing the glory of Svyatosláv. This is certainly not a mere adornment of speech, but rests on the actual fact of a lively intercommunication between the East and the West before the introduction of Christianity and in the first century following it. Thus, the chief hero of the Vladímir cycle, Ilyá of Múrom, was known to German song and the Northern saga, where he is often mentioned. It has also been found that many of the heroes are real personages whose names are recorded in chronicles. Yet, though Vladímir is made the centre of the Kíev cycle, his heroes seem to range over two or three centuries; from this we may conclude that poetical activity continued for a long time, and that it is only a later tradition that has grouped all the interesting events around the famous Vladímir. Originally, there must have been a number of cities of prominence around which separate epics centred, but in time they were transferred to the three great cities, Kíev, Nóvgorod and Moscow, where the national life had its fullest development.

In the ceremonial songs, antiquity is even better preserved than in the epics, and quite naturally. The epics arose on special occasions, were adapted to transitory historical incidents, and only the most favourable conditions of seclusion could save them from entire oblivion. Not so the ceremonial songs. These belonged to a heathen religion, contained a mythological element, and were part and parcel of the people’s belief and customs. The chief labour of the Church consisted in battling against the survivals from heathenism; but all it accomplished was to ensure an existence for the Christian tenets by the side of the traditional customs. The pagan festivities were merged in the corresponding holidays of the Church, but the old games, rites and songs went on as before. In time, the meaning of all the customs connected with the seasons, marriage, death, was forgotten, but the simple ditties were easily remembered, though frequently transferred to other occasions. Had there existed in the Russian Middle Ages any incitement to the introduction of new songs, the old ones would have been abandoned long ago; but city life was weakly represented in the country, most of the towns hardly differing from agricultural settlements, and the city song, which always plays havoc with the country tunes, had little chance to spread. City life is of quite recent growth in Russia, and industrialism, which is only now developing under our very eyes, draws many forces away from the plough; when these return to the village, they bring with them the refrains of the modern opera, and degraded street ballads. The same lowering of the popular poetry has been caused in the nineteenth century by the soldiers who have come in contact with the city. The result of this is the complete disappearance of popular song from some districts, and its gradual dying out in others. Should this tendency continue with any regularity, a new kind of folksong will result, but in the meanwhile there is produced an uninteresting chaos.