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.