In 1518, Maximus, a Greek monk, who had lived in Florence with Savonarola, came to Moscow, bringing with him the first specimens of printing. He reformed the schools, and collected around him a group of men eager for knowledge. About this time the so-called civil deacons, the embryo of future tchinovnism,[A] began to assist the students of Latin and Greek in their translations.
Father Sylvester also wrote the “Domostroi,” a treatise on morals and domestic economy; a practical encyclopædia for Russians of the sixteenth century.
In the second half of this century Ivan the Terrible introduced printing into Russia. A part of the venerable building he erected at Moscow for a printing establishment is still standing. He tried to obtain from Germany skilful hands in the new art, but they were refused him. Each sovereign jealously guarded every master of the great secret, as they did good alchemists or skilful workers in metals.
A Moscow student, Ivan Fedorof, cast some Slavonic characters, and used them in printing the Acts of the Apostles, in 1564. This is the most ancient specimen of typography in Russia. He, the first of Russian printers, was accused of heresy, and obliged to fly for his life. His wretched existence seemed a prophetic symbol of the destiny reserved for the development of thought in his native country. Fedorof took refuge with some magnates of Lithuania, and printed some books in their castles; but his patrons and protectors tore him from his beloved work, and forced him to cultivate the land. He wrote of himself:—“It was not my work to sow the grain, but to scatter through the earth food for the mind, nourishment for the souls of all mankind.” He fled to Lemberg, where he died in extreme poverty, leaving his precious treasure to a Jew.
The seventeenth century produced a few specimens of secular literature. But it was an unfavorable time, a time of anxiety, of usurpations; and afterwards came the Polish invasion. When intellectual life again awoke, theological works were the order of the day; and even up to the time of Peter the Great, all the writers of note were theologians.
The development of general literature in Russia was precisely analogous to that of Western Europe, only about two centuries later, the seventeenth century in Russia corresponding to the fifteenth in France. With popular literature, or folk-lore, however, the case is quite otherwise; nowhere is it so rich and varied as with the Slavonians.
Nature and history seem to have been too cruel to this people. Their spirits rise in rebellion against their condition, and soar into that fantastic realm of the imagination, above and outside the material world; a realm created by the Divine Being for the renewal of man’s spirit, and giving him an opportunity for the play of his fancy. According to the poet Tutschef, “Our earthly life is bathed in dreams, as the earth by ocean’s waves.” Their songs and myths are the music of history, embracing their whole national life, and changing it into dreams and fancies. The Cossack fisher-folk have sung them upon their mighty rivers for more than eight centuries.
When, in the future, Russia shall produce her greatest and truest poets, they have only to draw from these rich sources, an inexhaustible store. Never can they find better material; for the imagination of that anonymous author, the people, is the more sublime, and its heart more truly poetical, because of its great faith, simplicity, and many sorrows. What poem can compare with that description of the universe in a book, written in the fifteenth century, called “Book of the Dove”?—
“The sun is the fire of love glowing in the Lord’s face; the stars fall from his mantle…. The night is dark with his thoughts; the break of day is the glance of his eye….”
And where can the writers of the modern realistic Russian novel find tenderer touches or more sharply bitter allusions than in the old dramatic poem, “The Ascension of Christ”? Jesus, as he is about to rise to heaven, thus consoles the sorrowing crowd clustered around him:—