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.