“Weep not, dear brethren! I will give you a mountain of gold, a river of honey; I will leave you gardens planted with vines, fruits, and manna from heaven.” But the Apostle John interrupts him, saying:—
“Do not give them the mountain of gold, for the princes and nobles will take it from them, divide it among themselves, and not allow our brothers to approach. If thou wishest these unfortunates to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, bestow upon them Thy Holy Name, that they may glorify it in their lives, on their wanderings through the earth.”
The song of “The Band of Igor,” an epic poem, describing the struggle with the pagan hordes from the south-west, and supposed by some authors to have been inspired by Homer, is the most ancient, and the prototype of all others of the Middle Age. The soul of the Slavonic poet of this time is Christian only in name. The powers he believes in are those of nature and the universe. He addresses invocations to the rivers, to the sea, to darkness, the winds, the sun. The continual contrast between the beneficent Light and the evil Darkness recalls the ancient Egyptian hymns, which always describe the eternal contest between day and night.
Pushkin says of the “Song of Igor,” the origin of which is much disputed among scholars: “All our poets of the eighteenth century together had not poetry enough in them to comprehend, still less to compose, a single couplet of this ‘Song of Igor.’”
This epic poetry of Russia strikes its roots in the most remote antiquity of Asia, from Hindu and Persian myths, as well as from those of the Occident. It resembles the race itself in its growth and mode of development, oscillating alternately between the east and the west. Thus has the Russian mind oscillated between the two poles of attraction. In this period of its growth, it remembers and imitates more than it creates; but the foreign images it receives and reflects assume larger contours and more melancholy colors; a tinge of plaintiveness, as well as of brotherly love and sympathy.
Not so with the period we now enter. Literature is now reduced to a restricted form, like the practice of an art, cultivated for itself and following certain rules. It is an edifice constructed by Peter the Great, in which the author becomes a servant of the state, with a set task like the rest of the government officials. All must study in the school of Western Europe, and must accomplish in the eighteenth century what France did in the sixteenth. Even the Slavonic language itself must suffer innovations and adopt foreign terms. Before this, all books were written in the Old Slavonic language of the church, which influenced also all scientific and poetical productions.
The change which came about naturally in France, as the result of an intellectual revolution, for which the minds of the people were already ripe, was in Russia brought about by a single will; being the artificial work of one man who aroused the people from slumber before their time.
A new style of literature cannot be called into being, as an army can be raised, or a new code of laws established, by an imperial order or decree. Let us imagine the Renaissance established in France by Philippe le Bel! Such an attempt was now made in Russia, and its unsatisfactory results are easily accounted for.
Peter established an Academy of Science at St. Petersburg, sending its members abroad for a time at first to absorb all possible knowledge, and return to use it for the benefit of the Russian people. This custom prevailed for more than a century. The most important of these scholars was Lomonosof, the son of a poor fisherman of the White Sea. Having distinguished himself at school, he was taken up by the government and sent into Germany. Returning to supplant the German professors, whom he found established at St. Petersburg, he bequeathed to his country a quite remarkable epic poem on Peter the Great, called “La Pétriade,” for which his name is revered by his countrymen.
The glorious reign of Catherine II. should have added something to the literary world. She was a most extraordinary woman. She wrote comedies for her own theatre at the Hermitage, as well as treatises on education for the benefit of her grandchildren, and would gladly have been able to furnish native philosophers worthy to vie with her foreign courtiers; but they proved mere feeble imitators of Voltaire. Kheraskof wrote the “Rossiade” and Sumarokof, called by his contemporaries the Russian Racine, furnished the court with tragedies. But two comedies, “Le Brigadier,” and “Le Mineur,” by Von Vizin, have more merit, and are still much read and highly appreciated. These form a curious satire on the customs of the time. But the name of Derzhavin eclipses all others of this epoch. His works were modelled somewhat after Rousseau and Lefranc de Pompignan, and are fully equal to them.