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.
The freer form of the prose story and the fairy tale, which are bound by neither verse nor tune, makes them more subject to change than the ceremonial song. Whatever their original meaning may have been, they have been preserved as mere stories to amuse. Though they frequently deal with mythical beings who had some special meaning, they have all an equal value, and one tale is as good as another; consequently they easily combined with each other, and new elements were continually added to them. The prose story is, therefore, less local and even less national: it travels far and wide, and may turn up in any corner of the globe. The Russian peasant is a good story-teller, witty and dramatic; hence he has added much local colouring to all the flotsam of fairyland, and the folktales of Russia have a distinct flavour of their own, and are relished even more than the popular tales of the West. The absence of a book influence on these stories shows itself in simplicity of narration and lack of moral; the latter is particularly the case in the animal tales, which, contrary to the usual stories of the kind, contain no explicit instruction.