Besides, a variety of very old songs are sung still by the village folk themselves. Every annual holiday—Christmas, Easter, Midsummer Day—has its own cycle of songs, which have been preserved, with their melodies, even from pagan times. At each marriage, which is accompanied by a very complicated ceremonial, and at each burial, similarly old songs are sung by the peasant women. Many of them have, of course, deteriorated in the course of ages; of many others mere fragments have survived; but, mindful of the popular saying that “never a word must be cast out of a song,” the women in many localities continue to sing the most antique songs in full, even though the meaning of many of the words has already been lost.
There are, moreover, the tales. Many of them are certainly the same as we find among all nations of Aryan origin: one may read them in Grimm’s collection of fairy tales; but others came also from the Mongols and the Turks; while some of them seem to have a purely Russian origin. And next come the songs recited by wandering singers—the Kalíki—also very ancient. They are entirely borrowed from the East, and deal with heroes and heroines of other nationalities than the Russian, such as “Akib, the Assyrian King,” the beautiful Helen, Alexander the Great, or Rustem of Persia. The interest which these Russian versions of Eastern legends and tales offer to the explorer of folk-lore and mythology is self-evident.
Finally, there are the epic songs: the bylíny, which correspond to the Icelandic sagas. Even at the present day they are sung in the villages of Northern Russia by special bards who accompany themselves with a special instrument, also of very ancient origin. The old singer utters in a sort of recitative one or two sentences, accompanying himself with his instrument; then follows a melody, into which each individual singer introduces modulations of his own, before he resumes next the quiet recitative of the epic narrative. Unfortunately, these old bards are rapidly disappearing; but some five-and-thirty years ago a few of them were still alive in the province of Olónets, to the north-east of St. Petersburg, and I once heard one of them, whom A. Hilferding had brought to the capital, and who sang before the Russian Geographical Society his wonderful ballads. The collecting of the epic songs was happily begun in good time—during the eighteenth century—and it has been eagerly continued by specialists, so that Russia possesses now perhaps the richest collection of such songs—about four hundred—which has been saved from oblivion.
The heroes of the Russian epic songs are knights-errant, whom popular tradition unites round the table of the Kieff Prince, Vladímir the Fair Sun. Endowed with supernatural physical force, these knights, Ilyiá of Múrom, Dobrýnia Nikítich, Nicholas the Villager, Alexéi the Priest’s Son, and so on, are represented going about Russia, clearing the country of giants, who infested the land, or of Mongols and Turks. Or else they go to distant lands to fetch a bride for the chief of their schola, the Prince Vladímir, or for themselves; and they meet, of course, on their journeys, with all sorts of adventures, in which witchcraft plays an important part. Each of the heroes of these sagas has his own individuality. For instance, Ilyiá, the Peasant’s Son, does not care for gold or riches: he fights only to clear the land from giants and strangers. Nicholas the Villager is the personificatlon of the force with which the tiller of the soil is endowed: nobody can pull out of the ground his heavy plough, while he himself lifts it with one hand and throws it above the clouds; Dobrýnia embodies some of the features of the dragon-fighters, to whom belongs St. George; Sádko is the personification of the rich merchant, and Tchurílo of the refined, handsome, urbane man with whom all women fall in love.
At the same time, in each of these heroes, there are doubtless mythological features. Consequently, the early Russian explorers of the bylíny, who worked under the influence of Grimm, endeavoured to explain them as fragments of an old Slavonian mythology, in which the forces of Nature are personified in heroes. In Iliyá they found the features of the God of the Thunders. Dobrýnia the Dragon-Killer was supposed to represent the sun in its passive power—the active powers of fighting being left to Iliyá. Sádko was the personification of navigation, and the Sea-God whom he deals with was Neptune. Tchurílo was taken as a representative of the demoniacal element. And so on. Such was, at least, the interpretation put upon the sagas by the early explorers.
V. V. Stásoff, in his Origin of the Russian Bylíny (1868), entirely upset this theory. With a considerable wealth of argument he proved that these epic songs are not fragments of a Slavonic mythology, but represent borrowings from Eastern tales. Iliyá is the Rustem of the Iranian legends, placed in Russian surroundings. Dobrýnia is the Krishna of Indian folk-lore; Sádko is the merchant of the Eastern tales, as also of a Norman tale. All the Russian epic heroes have an Eastern origin. Other explorers went still further than Stásoff. They saw in the heroes of Russian epics insignificant men who had lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Iliyá of Múrom is really mentioned as a historic person in a Scandinavian chronicle), to whom the exploits of Eastern heroes, borrowed from Eastern tales, were attributed. Consequently, the heroes of the bylíny could have had nothing to do with the times of Vladímir, and still less with the earlier Slavonic mythology.
The gradual evolution and migration of myths, which are successively fastened upon new and local persons as they reach new countries, may perhaps aid to explain these contradictions. That there are mythological features in the heroes of the Russian epics may be taken as certain; only, the mythology they belong to is not Slavonian but Aryan altogether. Out of these mythological representations of the forces of Nature, human heroes were gradually evolved in the East.
At a later epoch when these Eastern traditions began to spread in Russia, the exploits of their heroes were attributed to Russian men, who were made to act in Russian surroundings. Russian folk-lore assimilated them; and, while it retained their deepest semi-mythological features and leading traits of character, it endowed, at the same time, the Iranian Rustem, the Indian dragon-killer, the Eastern merchant, and so on, with new features, purely Russian. It divested them, so to say, of the garb which had been put upon their mystical substances when they were first appropriated and humanised by the Iranians and the Indians, and dressed them now in a Russian garb—just as in the tales about Alexander the Great, which I heard in Transbaikalia, the Greek hero is endowed with Buryate features and his exploits are located on such and such a Transbaikalian mountain. However, Russian folk-lore did not simply change the dress of the Persian prince, Rustem, into that of a Russian peasant, Iliyá. The Russian sagas, in their style, in the poetical images they resort to, and partly in the characteristics of their heroes, were new creations. Their heroes are thoroughly Russian: for instance, they never seek for blood-vengeance, as Scandinavian heroes would do; their actions, especially those of “the elder heroes,” are not dictated by personal aims, but are imbued with a communal spirit, which is characteristic of Russian popular life. They are as much Russians as Rustem was Persian. As to the time of composition of these sagas, it is generally believed that they date from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, but that they received their definite shape—the one that has reached us—in the fourteenth century. Since that time they have undergone but little alteration.
In these sagas Russia has thus a precious national inheritance of a rare poetical beauty, which has been fully appreciated in England by Ralston, and in France by the historian Rambaud.