For military leaders it is very important to know by what device and cunning great forces of the enemy have been vanquished, or kept from victory, and so forth, as we see Alexander the Great having held Homer’s books on the Trojan war in great respect, and having been instructed by them. For this reason many great generals have described their own acts and those of others. Of these the most illustrious example is Julius Cæsar, who has described his wars, that future generals might after him use his acts for their own examples, and many famous generals on land and on the sea have followed in his footsteps by writing of their exploits. Many great rulers have either themselves written of their acts, or have ordered expert people to write of them, not only that their memory should live in glory, but that their descendants should have examples to follow.
As regards the usefulness of Russian history it must be remarked, that, as is the case with all other histories, the knowledge of one’s own history and geography is more important for any nation or region than that of foreign histories; at the same time it must be kept in mind that without the knowledge of foreign histories, one’s own is not clear and sufficient: 1. That the writer of contemporary history cannot know all the external influences for good and bad; 2. That the writers are frequently compelled, out of fear, to suppress, or change, or modify some very important circumstances of contemporary history; 3. That from passion, love, or hatred, they describe quite differently from what were the actual occurrences, and that the facts are frequently related more correctly and in detail by outsiders. Thus, in my present work, the first part, dealing with the Russian antiquity, has mainly been drawn from foreign sources for lack of native writers, and in the other parts many errors and lacunæ have been corrected and filled out from foreign sources. European historians accuse us of having no old history, and of knowing nothing of our antiquity, simply because they do not know what historians we possess, and though some have made a few extracts, or have translated from them a passage here and there, others, thinking that we have no better ones than those quoted, despise them. Some of our own ignorant writers agree with them, while those who do not wish to trouble themselves by looking into the ancient sources or who do not understand the text, have, ostensibly to give a better explanation, but in reality to hide the truth, invented fables of their own and thus have obscured the real facts as told by the ancients, as, for example, in the case of the foundation of Kíev, and that of Nóvgorod by Slavén, and so forth.
I wish to say here emphatically that all the famous European historians will not be able to know or tell anything correctly of many of our antiquities, no matter what their efforts in Russian history may be, if they do not read our sources,—for example, of the many nations who have existed here in ancient days, as the Amazons, Alans, Huns, Avars, Cimbrians and Cimmerians; nor do they know anything of the Scythians, Sarmatians and Slavs, their tribes, origin, habitations and migrations, or of the anciently famous large cities of the Essedonians, Archipeans, Cumanians, etc., where they have lived, and what their present names are; but all this they could find out through a study of Russian history. This history is not only of use to us Russians, but also to the whole learned world, in order that by it the fables and lies invented by our enemies, the Poles and others, for the sake of disparaging our ancestors, may be laid bare and contradicted.
Such is the usefulness of history. But everybody ought to know, and this is easily perceived, that history describes not only customs, deeds and occurrences, but also the consequences resulting from them, namely, that the wise, just, kind, brave, constant and faithful are rewarded with honour, glory and well-being, while the vicious, foolish, evildoers, avaricious, cowardly, perverse and faithless will gain eternal dishonour, shame and insult: from which all may learn how desirable it is to obtain the first and avoid the second.
Prince Antiókh (Antiochus) Kantemír. (1708-1744.)
Antiókh Kantemír was not a Russian by birth. His father, Demetrius, had for a number of years been hospodar of Moldavia. Harassed by the intrigues of a rival at Constantinople, he emigrated with four thousand of his Moldavians to Russia, where he arrived after the unfortunate Prut expedition, in 1711. Himself one of the most accomplished scholars and linguists of Europe, he with the aid of his cultivated Greek wife bestowed the minutest care on the education of his six children.
Having arrived in Russia in his third year, Antiókh acquired Russian as his mother tongue, though he also spoke fluently six or seven other languages, and was well versed in Latin and ancient Greek. By education, however, he was anything but a Russian, and his sympathies were naturally directed towards the most extreme reformatory tendencies which Peter the Great advocated for the State and Feofán Prokopóvich for the Church; both of them were not slow in recognising his unusual talents. In 1732 Empress Anna appointed him ambassador to the Court of St. James, and in 1738 he was transferred to Paris, where he passed his short life in communion with Maupertuis, Montesquieu, Abbé Guasco, and others. Besides a few shorter poems and imitations and translations of Anacreon, and an unfinished ode on the death of Peter the Great, Kantemír composed ten satires, of which the one below is the first. It is on these satires that his reputation mainly rests. In style, they are imitations of Boileau and Horace, though never slavish. His language is not always free from Gallicisms, but otherwise it represents the first successful attempt to introduce colloquial Russian into poetry. The chief value of the satires, independently of their literary perfection, lay in their powerful attack on all the contemporary elements of Russian society that were antagonistic to the Western reform.
Specimens from several of Kantemír’s satires are given in C. E. Turner’s Studies in Russian Literature, London, 1882, and the same article, in Fraser’s Magazine, 1877.
Parts of the First Satire, in article on Russian Literature, in Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. i.