Old Russia may appear static, but in general only to those who, for the comfort of their own cultural and historical assumptions, consign genuine knowledge of the past to a dusty shelf. Even to old Russia’s most rooted people—the peasants—the cycles of the agricultural year, the human narratives of birth, courtship, marriage, and death were dynamic in themselves. They were marked by choral dances and songs, and hedged about with charms, spells and incantations. The whole complex of rituals surrounding betrothal and marriage, for example, was traditionally referred to as the wedding igra, a word suggesting the movements of a play or game. And the one thing that unites old Russia’s skomorokhi—the minstrels who throughout Russia’s vast territories kept alive such folk customs, as well as an entire corpus of heroic songs and verse tales—is that they traveled widely. Most of their songs remain unread by the English reader to this day. With our focus in mind, it should be noted that many of their songs touched the infinite worlds of fantasy-making, replete with dreams, visitations by devils, flights of chariots, miracles, visions, and, most notably, fantastic journeys. Russia itself was at times expressed as an enchanted realm, as can be seen in the following (newly translated) excerpt from what is arguably the most inspired quest of Old Russian Literature, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign:
O Boyan the Seer, elder days’ nightingale, were you to sing of Igor’s campaign, laying your vatic fingers upon the living strings, whilst pouring your Wisdom in the Great Tree, running as a gray Wolf over the land, gliding below clouds as a blue-ashen Eagle and, recalling the feuds of former times, you’d let loose ten Falcons upon a flock of Swans, and the first Swan overtaken would sing a Song to old Yaroslav < …> [to all great men of his kin, and to] Our Igor, who—having looked up at the Sun—saw all his warriors enveloped in darkness, and called on his brethren, summoned his troops to mount their swift steeds in defense of their land, to catch but a glimpse of the blue river Don [saying]: “Far better it is to be slain in the battle than captured.”
Then, weaving Paeans from both halves of time, you’d climb that Tree of Wisdom, and sing, soaring in your mind up to the clouds, roving the Troyan Trail o’er the meads and hills: “No chance storm has swept falcons over the wide fields—swift jackdaws flock up, racing toward the great river Don; steeds neigh beyond the Sula—glory rings in Kiev; trumpets blare in Novgorod—banners fly in Putivl …” But the Sun blocks Igor’s campaign by darkness, and night, moaning with thunderstorms, awakens the birds, the whistling of the beasts arises, as Div—the bird-god Daeva—flutters up at the top of the Tree and cries out to all the unknown lands by the Volga, the Azov Sea, the river Sula, the cities of Surozh, Korsun and you, idol of Tmutorokan.—The while the Kumans hasten by untrodden paths to the Don, their carts screech at midnight, as dispersed swans.
Igor leads his warriors to the Great Don: The birds in oak forests portend his misfortunes, the wolves in ravines conjure the storms, the eagles’ screeches bid beasts to the bones, the foxes yelp at the vermilion shields. “O Russian land! Thou art now beyond the hills!” <…> Very early on the next morn bloody dawn heralds the light, ebony clouds arrive from the sea, wanting to cover the four Suns, and in them throb blue lightnings: There is to be great thunder—the rain of arrows will come from the great river Don.<…>.
As the introductory section of this twelfth-century epic clearly demonstrates, old Russia possessed a unique ensemble of myths and images, on which any modern work of fantasy could thrive. Its power resides in the mastery with which it links events of recorded history (Igor’s campaign, the solar eclipse of May 1, 1185) with events that parallel the campaign in the unrecorded history of nature. Personified, Nature becomes an active participant in history (the Sun’s eclipse blocks Igor’s campaign, birds portend misfortunes, wolves conjure up storms, foxes yelp at the shields). Igor’s campaign is further linked with the mythical universe (the bird-god Daeva), indeed, with the cultural heritage of all mankind (the Wisdom Tree, the Trojan Trail).
Even this short excerpt reveals that old Russia had a keen sense of poetry, as the apostrophic turn to the semi-legendary poet, Boyan the Seer1 would suggest. Like Boyan, the anonymous author of The Lay, perhaps more appropriately translated as The Song of Igor’s Campaign,2 is clearly a poet in his own right. Although his narrative is replete with songs, laments, and dreams—a rich ensemble of recognizable tropes, figures and sub-genres of poetry—it lacks, as all Russian medieval texts do, a recognizable system of prosody accessible to a modern reader. In fact, like all of the texts (whether prosaic or poetic) that belong to the corpus of Old Russian Literature, it shuns any kind of recognizable division, such as a verse line, stanza, or end-rhyme. Even its punctuation and paragraphs cannot be fully analyzed, counted, or commented upon. Rather, as if to underscore the very indivisibility of its poetic universe, it weaves its own dynamic and ever-changing world of fantasy-making, which is enriched by a deft use of tropes and figures—a technique, which one of the foremost scholars of this period (Czyzhevsky) has called “magic realism.” Weaving “paeans from both halves of time”, or expressing and celebrating the past as coexistent with the present, could not have been a talent possessed only by the semi-mythical poet Boyan the Seer. Consider the history behind the Lay. Igor, a minor prince, led his warriors on an expedition which ended in fiasco: his troops were defeated and he himself was imprisoned—the incident merits only the barest mention in Russia’s medieval chronicles. Yet the Lay’s anonymous author adroitly transforms and transmutes this material into a splendid victory of verbal craft, permanently fixed in the annals of Russian literature.
Other poets emerged as Russia itself underwent a cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the invading Mongolian hordes in 1237—a defeat which was recorded in practically all of her chronicles, and which meant her obliteration as an independent country for at least two centuries. And yet during this dark period of Russian history (commonly referred to as the Mongol yoke), when countless Russians were forcibly removed from their native soil and displaced to the East to serve as slave labor in building the Mongol empire, another unnamed poet enshrined in words the longing that the departing Russian men and women must have had for their now ruined homeland. Commonly referred to as The Orison on the Downfall of the Russian Land, this highly poetic, but still quite obscure, thirteenth-century Russian work was written shortly after the Mongol invasion. It opens with a passage depicting Russia as an enchanted world—a utopian, but clearly tangible vision of peaceful plenitude:
O radiant brightness—most finely adorned Thou art, Rus’!
Magnificent Land art Thou, charmed with such myriad beauties:
Countless deep lakes, cerulean rivers, and sacred clear springs,
Mountains so tow’ring, steeply pitched slopes, and oak groves unnumbered,
Dazzling wide meadows, teaming with creatures, abundant in birds,
Many great cities, and beautiful boroughs, monastic sweet vineyards,
Princes most feared, proud boyars of honor, and countless great lords.
All wealth is contained in Thine heart—O Christian and Orthodox Faith!
The manuscript, which returns the reader’s mind to a time just prior to the Mongol invasion, is often regarded as second in importance only to The Song of Igor’s Campaign in the Old Russian literary canon. Its extant text (only slightly longer than the passage quoted) consists of a fragment from what was most likely a much longer work, lamenting Russia’s lost glory. Our passage is, however, rhetorically complete in the sense that it represents an organized verbal medium, with a recognizable beginning and closure: its last line provides a mirror-like restatement of its rhythmic and poetic opening. As mentioned earlier, Russian pre-sixteenth-century prosody remains a mystery in that scholars working from surviving manuscripts have to this day been unable to derive its systemic unity. Nevertheless, On the Downfall of the Russian Land is clearly a rhythmically executed text, which is transposed in our translation into eight verse lines of irregular ternary meters. Thereby we give it a visual organization lacking in the original, but which is implicit in its rhetorical design. It is noteworthy that the author, lamenting a ravaged Russia, chose the present tense to represent its natural beauty. In this sense the passage unscrolls a bird’s-eye-view fantasy of a recreated past—an Edenic utopia which for the author and his generation is now irretrievably lost.
Many centuries were to pass before Russian literature would be able to express such awareness of the land’s intense beauty with comparable power. That is not to say that during this period Russia had no literature. On the contrary, forced by the tragic loss of its independence, Russia turned especially to holy writ for inspiration and produced wonderful translations of countless hymns and books of the Bible. Yet no matter how groundbreaking the various transpositions of the sacred texts may have been, translational literature is rarely studied with an eye to the originality of the translator as a poet in his own right. Moreover, since such texts had anonymous translators, they are further neglected due to the post-Romantic notion of the pre-eminence of the persona of the writer, and are usually not considered as literature proper.3 Although original in their transformations of the model texts, they require their own explication and fall outside of the corpus of the present anthology. Quite unfortunately, we are able to offer here only a snapshot of a vast and self-contained medieval fantasy universe, which included many other genres (lives, martyrions, travelogues, chronicles, orations, sermons, etc.)4 from which modern Russian writers drew productive motifs, images and inspiration. Dostoevsky himself, for instance, found the Lives of the Saints to be a rich trove.
Since our volume has space limitations, we should like to introduce here only one additional work, namely The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself (1682). This text, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, and The Orison on the Downfall of the Russian Land are arguably the three most original and most celebrated Russian works composed before Peter the Great. Avvakum (the Russian form of the Old Testament name Habbakuk) was born in 1621 and became a priest at the age of twenty. A zealot and a staunch traditionalist, for forty years Avvakum was a thorn in the side of Church authorities. A vociferous opponent of the ecclesiastical reforms imposed on the Russian Orthodox Church by the Patriarch Nikon, in 1653 Avvakum was exiled to Siberia with his family. Their wanderings through this vast, largely unexplored territory were to last nine years. In 1682 he was burned at the stake. His death, just as his uncompromising life, have left an indelible mark in Russian consciousness as supreme examples of an unbending spirit, which many Russians have grown to admire and emulate. But for our purposes, we should also remember that Avvakum was a sophisticated writer and that his Life is considered one of the most accomplished autobiographical journey “novels” ever composed in Russia.5
TITLE PAGE:
Avvakum,
the Archpriest,
hath been charged to write his Life
by the monk Epifanii—his personal confessor,
so that the works of GOD shall not pass into oblivion;
and to this end hath he been charged by his confessor
for the glory of Christ our GOD.
Amen!
Vision 1:
In our Russia there was a sign: the Sun was dimmed in [7]162 (1654), a month or less before the plague. Simeon, the Archbishop of Siberia, was sailing along the Volga river, as darkness covered the light at midday, two weeks or so before St. Peter’s day. Simeon and his crew lingered by the shore, weeping for three hours. The Sun grew black, as the Moon approached, gliding from the West. According to Dionysios, GOD thus reveals his wrath against men: at that time Nikon, the Apostate, was defiling the Faith and the laws of the Church, and for this GOD poured forth the vial of his wrathful fury upon the Russian land; a mighty plague it was—no time to forget—we all remember. The Sun grew dark once more about fourteen years later, during the Fast of St. Peter, on Friday during the sixth hour, when the Moon covered all by darkness—ebbing from the West—again revealing the wrath of GOD: at this time the hierarchs in a cathedral church were shearing the Archpriest Avvakum—that destitute and poor soul—along with some others, and after damning them, they cast them into a dungeon at the Ugresha river. The True Believer will understand what is happening to our Land due to the turmoil in the Church. Enough talk of it: On Judgment Day everyone will understand! Let us endure till then …
Vision 2:
[Upon hearing the confession of a young woman, burdened with many sins], I reached my izba home. The hour must have been nigh onto midnight. I wept before the icon of the Lord, so that my eyes swelled: I prayed in earnest that God might detach me from my spiritual children, since the burden was heavy and hard to bear. And I threw myself face-down on the ground, sobbing in grief. As I lay there, all unawares of my bitter weeping, the eyes of my heart beheld the river Volga, and this is what I saw: Two stately golden boats were sailing gracefully—their oars and masts were of gold—all was of gold. At the helm of each sat a man for the crew, and I said to them: “Whose ships are these?” They answered: “Luke’s and Lawrence’s.” Now Luke and Lawrence had been my spiritual children; they set me and my house on the path to salvation, and their passing had been pleasing to God. And lo, I then saw a third ship, not adorned with gold, but decked out in varied hues—red, and white, and blue, and black, and ashen—so that the mind of man could not take in all its beauty and excellence. A radiant youth sat at the helm, steering so eagerly toward me from the Volga, as if he would want to devour me. And I called out to him: “Whose ship is this?” And he—sitting in it—replied: “Your ship. Sail in it with your wife and children, if you’re going to pester the Lord.” And I was seized with wonder and, having seated myself aboard, I pondered: “What is this vision? And what kind of voyage will it be?”
Vision 3:
Having fixed our boat, we let out our sails and made ready to cross the Baikal—the sea-lake. But midway the air grew eerily quiet, so we took up oars. In that place the sea is not very broad, maybe a hundred—or some eighty—versts (65-50 miles). Just as we were reaching for the shore a storm sprang up with mighty winds, and it was hard to find refuge sheltered from the waves. At the banks—ringed by steep mountains—the cliffs of rock stood fearfully high: I have wandered twenty thousand versts, and more, over the face of the earth, but never have I seen their like. Along their summits are pavilions and turrets, gates and pillars, walls and courtyards—all skillfully fashioned from stone and earth—all works of GOD. Onions grow there, and garlic, bigger than the Romanov onion and uncommonly sweet. Wild hemp grows there as well in the care of GOD; in the courtyards grow fine, red grasses and most colorful, exceedingly fragrant flowers. And there are great numbers of birds—geese and swans that drift over the lake like snow. The water is fresh, but huge seals and sea-lions live in it: I saw no such sea-calves and sea-hares all the time I lived on the shores of the ocean-sea Mezen. This lake swarms with fish—sturgeon and trout, sterlet, salmon and whiting and many other kinds. The sturgeon and taimen salmon are fat as can be; one can’t fry them in a pan—nothing but fat would be left. And all this has been done through our Jesus Christ, our Light, for man, so that he—with a mind at last at rest—might lift his praise to God. But such is man that he is given “to vanity, and his days are as a shadow that passeth away.” He capers like a goat; he puffs himself up like a bubble; he rages like a lynx; he seeks to devour others like a serpent; when he covets the beauty of his neighbor’s mate, he neighs like a colt; he is fiendish as a devil; when he has gorged himself full he drops off to sleep like any heathen, without saying his prayers. He puts off repentance till his old age and then disappears—we know not where, to light or darkness. But all will be revealed on Judgment Day. Forgive me all: for I have myself sinned more than other men.
While neither The Lay of Igor’s Campaign nor The Life of Archpriest Avvakum can properly be called a fantasy, let us note that both involve a journey—a subgenre considered a principal venue for fantasy-making, as, for example, in Lewis Carol’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. To be sure, Igor and Avvakum travel over real geography, but a geography so foreign to the average reader of their day as to take on the function of a fantastic topography akin to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. At the same time, both the military tale and the spiritual narrative posit a universe replete with signs and wonders, natural and supernatural phenomena sent to guide, assist and admonish the human soul in its travels.
Travels to enchanted and mysterious places and the heroic deeds of protagonists embarking on such journeys characterize another major source of literary creativity, namely the oral narrative tradition. The two permanent sources of inspiration for the development of fantasy in Russia were skazki (folk tales) and byliny (folk epics). No written sources for either survive from earlier than the eighteenth century, while the major corpus Russian folk tales and epics was collected, transcribed, and edited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In folk tales we find that fantastic journeys can successfully be undertaken by female protagonists, as well as by male, but the latter dominate almost exclusively the epic realm. The principal characteristics which allow a female protagonist to succeed in the world of magic transformations are usually perseverance, orderliness, and above all beauty, be it Alionushka whose youthful charms ultimately rescue both herself and her brother Ivanushka from poverty, or Marya Morevna, a warrior princess who—no matter how powerful her military exploits—is attractive to prince Ivan precisely because she is a “beautiful queen.” A poor merchant’s daughter has the success of her quest inscribed in her name, Vasilisa the Beautiful. Her story follows the typical plot of an ascent to the throne of a folk hero, who despite considerable obstacles succeeds in marrying beyond his/her social origins.
Vasilisa marries a prince at the end of the tale, but even she needs the help of magic agents and a great deal of self discipline and perseverance to be victorious in her struggle with her wicked step-mother. For the purposes of our discussion Vasilisa the Beautiful is remarkable on two counts. First, that her principal magic agent, a gift from her dying mother, is a fully animated talking, eating, and hard-working doll—rather than the magic beast typical of the folk mytho-poetic universe. The doll gives Vasilisa advice and comfort whenever she is in trouble, performs all the menial chores for her, weeds flower beds, sprays the cabbage, brings the water into the house, and fires up the stove; it even shows Vasilisa an herb that will protect her from sunburn. The wish for a magic agent in human form to accomplish daily tasks—so unambiguously expressed in this popular tale of Russia’s pre-industrial folk culture—considerably predates the futurist concept of robots or androids, a theme which has defined much of modern science fiction ever since Karel Capek coined the word in his famous [1920] play RUR.6 It is notable that the ultimate benefactor and protector in Vasilisa’s fictional universe is a superhuman doll which allows her to triumph even over the all-powerful, villainous and deceptive female ruler of Russian forests, Baba Yaga.
The behavior of the latter provides second noteworthy aspect of this folk tale. Baba Yaga normally eats people, tricking them in uncanny ways to accomplish this. But because of the magic abilities of Vasilisa’ doll, the witch here becomes yet another agent assisting the heroine to get the better of her vicious stepmother and her two step-sisters, the tale’s true villains. Her role as a positive force in Vasilisa’s quest is not immediately apparent, however, as the tale’s magically shifting and mystifying setting is described:
Vasilisa thus made ready, tucked her doll into her pocket, crossed herself before the icon, headed off into the forest. Fearful, trembling, she walked onwards. Then she heard the sound of hoof-beats and a horseman galloped past her. White his visage and his raiment, white his steed and all his trappings—and the dawn came with his passage. She went further, and another horse was heard and soon passed near her. Red was he, and all his garments, and his jade was red as fire—pallid dawn gave way to sunrise. Just as evening fell the maiden came upon a little clearing where the witch’s hut was nestled. Suddenly another horseman, black of visage and of raiment, mounted on a coal-black charger, galloped by where she was standing—night had fallen in the forest.
As if the magic of these visions was not enough, Vasilisa must still face Baba Yaga’s entry into the plot, accompanied by the usual paraphernalia surrounding the witch’s dreadful persona: terrifying noises resounding through the woods, trees crackling and dry leaves rustling as she herself appears riding in a mortar, which she prods on with a pestle, sweeping up her tracks with a broom. The only way for Vasilisa to survive is to serve the witch in her hut for the next three days and nights. Baba Yaga is truly frightening when she instructs Vasilisa to perform next-to-superhuman tasks. Her power is restated as Vasilisa learns from her captor that the three horsemen, obviously embodiments of the sun’s daily journey across the sky, are also “her faithful servants.”7 Yet after Vasilisa performs nearly impossible chores with the help of her untiring doll, Baba Yaga rewards the heroine by giving her a skull with burning eyes, whose rays consume the true villains in the tale by fire and turn them to ashes.
Marya Morevna, another very popular Russian folk tale, expresses three other major utopian folk themes. The first, man’s primordial wish to fly, is magically realized at the very beginning of the tale. The male protagonist, Prince Ivan, succeeds in marrying his three sisters to three brave knights, each of whom flies into his castle’s window in avian form—falcon, eagle and raven, respectively—as they seek his three sisters’ hands. Each has his wish granted and each carries his betrothed into his own land. Russia’s mythic fascination with the bird kingdom is strong, and instances of transmogrification into bird-like creatures abound in its tales and epics. The theme is also well represented in Russia’s oldest stone cathedral decorations, in objects of folk handwork, and in traditional cross-stitch embroidery designs. This powerful symbolic significance may be traced even in Russia’s choice of the Byzantine double-headed eagle as its national emblem. In this context it is perhaps natural that Russia’s foremost prose writer, N. V. Gogol, chose his pen-name from the bird kingdom—gogol’ in Russian is a goldeneye duck—and that one of Turgenev’s major novels is titled The Nest of Gentlefolk. By Turgenev’s time the word “nest” was mainly used as a metaphor for home comfort, but in Marya Morevna the nests inhabited by the Prince Ivan’s sisters are far closer to their avian counterparts’, and their raptor-husbands’ ability to fly plays an important role later in the tale. In many ways, then, Sputnik and Russia’s primacy in space exploration were the technological realization of a national folk dream.
The second utopian motif in Marya Morevna, a theme closely connected with the ability to fly to distant reaches, is the innate human desire to overcome death. As opposed to Christian teachings which promise eternal life-after-death somewhere outside of temporal reality, this folk tale and many others advance the notion that the miracle of resurrection into temporal life can be achieved by a proper application of certain magic agents, available to those who seek them. This motif appears after Prince Ivan’s bride Maria Morevna has been kidnapped by Koschey the Deathless—the villain in this tale. Setting out to find her, the Prince leaves silver talismans (a spoon, a fork and a snuffbox) with each of his three brothers-in-law, all of whom can assume bird form at will. Twice the Prince rescues Maria Morevna but is overtaken—and spared—by Koschey, who warns him that a third attempt will mean his death.
Once again Koschey the Deathless left the castle where he kept her. Once again the Prince came riding, begged Maria to come with him. “But Prince Ivan, he will catch us, hew you into little pieces.” “Let him do so-for I cannot live in happiness without you.” They made ready, left the castle as Koschey was wending homewards. In pursuit The Deathless galloped, overtook the Prince’s charger. Then he hewed the Prince in pieces, put them in a tar-daubed barrel, bound it well with hoops of iron, flung it in the deep blue ocean. At that very hour and moment, each small talisman of silver shone no more, grew black with tarnish. Eagle hurried to the ocean, seized the barrel, hove it shorewards. Falcon flew to fetch the Water That Gives Life. Likewise did Raven fetch the Water That Gives Death, and then the brothers broke the barrel, ranged the pieces all in order. Raven flecked them with the Water That Brings Death—they grew together. Falcon flecked the new-formed body with the Water That Brings Life—the Prince awakened. “Ah, how long have I been sleeping?” he inquired. “Longer had you slept without us,” Eagle answered.
It must be noted that the hero in any tale may be revived only if he has helpers who can obtain the Water of Life and the Water of Death and who know how to use them. Above, had the brothers merely sprinkled the pieces of Prince Ivan’s body with the Water of Life each piece might have become animated, but would have then remained separate from all the others in a surrealist or neo-Boschian way.
The final utopian aspect of Marya Morevna worth noting is found in its projection of gender equality. Unlike Vasilisa the Beautiful, in which most of the participants are female, Marya Morevna presents its characters in an equilibrium of the sexes. Prince Ivan’s three sisters get three male-bird husbands, Ivan himself marries Marya Morevna, and even Baba Yaga, who in this tale returns to her normal villainous ways, is paired with an evil male counterpart, Koshchei the Deathless (apparently a Russian folk-tale progenitor of the Skeletor character in TV cartoons). Marya Morevna is introduced as a famed female warrior, and in both the evil and the good agencies of the tale the female character is at least as strong as the male. Even if it is Prince Ivan who rescues Marya Morevna from Koshchei the Deathless and who finishes the villain off with his mace, it is noteworthy that at the tale’s outset it was Marya Morevna who had captured Koschey and kept him chained in her dungeon. The Russian folk belief in the innate worth of both genders also finds expression in numerous iconic representation of twin male and female saints. It recurs repeatedly in written literature, for example in The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum. The fact that this ideal was not realized in Russia’s developing industrial society is clearly expressed in Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to be Done.
Russian folk epics, however, are nearly entirely dominated by male heroes and some folklore specialists find their genesis around the tenth century, during the creation of a Christian Russian statehood. The oldest of them center around the court of Prince Vladimir of the Riurik dynasty who christianized Russia in 988 AD. His court had its seat in Kiev, the capitol of modern-day Ukraine, which is regarded as the ancient locus of Russian culture. Kiev—a city situated on the edge of the northern forest zone and the southern steppes—enjoyed fame as early as the ninth century. Kievan princes controlled much of the territory all the way to the Black Sea, conquering individual nomadic tribes and threatening at times to conquer Constantinople. Kiev’s day came to an end in 1237 when the city was sacked by the Mongol hordes. Heroic exploits of Kievan princes were recorded by the folk of these regions in the epic songs, called byliny.8 Unlike the Igor Song, most of these byliny were not recorded before the 19th century. They interweave factual and mythical elements in fantastic ways, and their protagonists exhibit superhuman strength.9 Some, such as Volkh Vseslavyevich (a child of a human mother and a serpent), adopt animal forms to achieve their ends (Volkh can, for instance, shift his shape to become a falcon when he needs to cover great distances, or an ant, when he needs to crawl under the gates), others rely on their gigantic size. Some byliny are not without irony relative to this attribute, as in the case of Svyatogor, one of Russia’s oldest epic heroes or bogatyrs:
High is the height under the heavens, deep is the depth of the ocean sea,
Wide is the plain across the whole earth,
Swift must be the rider attempting to cross it.
Not far, not far away in the open field,
A cloud of dust was swirling in a column,
As Svyatogor, the mighty Russian bogatyr appeared
In the wide golden steppe:
His shoulders were wider than two yards,
And his steed was like a fierce animal.
He was riding in the field and amused himself
By throwing his steel mace into the skies:
Higher than the towering forest, yet lower than the moving clouds.
When the mace would come down, he would catch it with one hand.
Then he came across a tiny skomorokh’s (minstrel’s) bag in the open plains.
He didn’t dismount his good steed
And wanted to lift the purse with his whip,
But the little bag wouldn’t be moved.
He now dismounted his good steed and wanted to lift it with his one hand,
But the little bag wouldn’t be budged.
He then grabbed it with his both hands
And strained with his all bogatyr’s strength,
But the little bag wouldn’t be lifted.
Instead he sank into Mother Damp Earth up to his knees
And couldn’t move.
Svyatogor then muttered to himself,
“I have ridden much around the wide world,
But I have never seen such a wonder:
This tiny bag won’t give way to all my bogatyr’s strength;
My death must be near.”
He then implored his horse:
“Hail to thee, my faithful bogatyr steed!
Now come and save your master.”
He took hold of the gilded girth and held fast by the silver stirrup.
His mighty steed then strained and pulled Svyatogor
Out of the damp sinking earth.
He then mounted his good steed
And rode through the open fields toward the Ararat mountains.
But as he was tired from the skomorokh’s little bag,
He fell asleep on his good steed,
A bogatyr’s deep sleep it was under the height of the open heavens.
Irony permeates the ultimate fate of Svyatogor, which is related to the metaphoric significance of his name, literally the Sacred Mount. Sviatogor is destined to die on a mount, as is recorded in the second major bylina about him, to which the passage quoted above serves as a preamble, and which introduces one of the most popular heroes of the Russian folk epos, Ilya of Murom. Ilya has many byliny composed solely about himself, but in this older tale, of which the following is a summary in prose, he is presented as not yet fully experienced, but as a worthy heir to Sviatogor’s strength:
Ilya comes from out of the wide plains and cannot stand seeing the giant Sviatogor, sleeping on his horse as if wanting to sneer at Ilya. Ilya attempts to wake Sviatogor by striking him with a mighty mace. This first and the second blow have no affect and the giant continues to sleep, as “size clearly matters” in this bylina. With the third blow Ilya wounds his own hand, whereupon Sviatogor wakes up and complains “how badly Russian flies can bite.” When he sees Ilya he seizes the young warrior by the hair and pockets him. As he rides on toward Mount Ararat, his horse begins to stumble and to complain about having to carry two bogatyrs and another bogatyr’s horse. Only then does Svyatogor notice Ilya as a potential peer and invite him to test his strength in an open combat. Ilya wisely declines, asking instead to become his sworn brother. Sviatogor agrees and the warriors exchange their gold baptismal crosses. Now as brothers, they journey on and reach the Mount of Olives, where they see an oaken coffin. Sensing this as an omen, Svyatogor asks Ilya to try it first. It is clearly too big for Ilya, and Svyatogor then tries it himself. The coffin is exactly to Svyatogor’s measure and he asks Ilya to close its lid so that he can admire it from the inside. Ilya does so, but in a short while Svyatogor complains that he can no longer breathe. Ilya attempts but fails to raise the lid again. Svyatogor now understands that it is his destiny to remain in the coffin. Before he dies, he wants to breathe his spirit into Ilya and give him his horse. Ilya, however, declines, saying that if Svyatogor’s strength were added to his, Mother Earth could not bear him. Thereafter they say farewell to each other, Svyatogor now lying forever in the damp earth with his horse by his side on the Mount of Olives, and Ilya riding back to Holy Rus, to the city of Kiev.
Annointed by Svyatogor as his successor, Ilya becomes the central hero of the Russian epic, whithin the tradition of which he has the most complete biography. Several versions exist of his becoming a bogatyr, but nearly all record the following miracle:
In the great city of Murom, in the village of Karacharovo,
There sat upon the stove-ledge a peasant lad, Ilya of Murom,
Up this ledge he sat and sat, paralyzed, for thirty long years.
One day his good father and mother set off to labor in the fields.
The while two pilgrims came to his window and begged admittance.
“I cannot throw open our wide gates dear elders,” replied Ilya,
“These thirty years I have been unable to stand, I am not master of my arms and legs.”
“Rise up, Ilya,” repeated the pilgrims,
And lo—Ilya rose up at once on legs now swift and strong,
He flung open the wide gates, and let them in.
Making the sign of the cross and and bowing, as custom demanded,
They entered and offered what they had brought, a rare draught brewed with honey.
“Drink, Ilya,”—they said—”and you will become a great bogatyr’.”
Ilya, downing the beaker, on the instant felt a great strength flowing through his veins.
The belief that a true Russian-born hero shall arise from slumber in time of need—struck a most responsive cord in Russia, as legends of King Arthur’s return have in England. Indeed, in many byliny the tenth-century hero Ilya—now displaced in time—becomes the principal warrior challenging the invading Tartar hordes of the thirteenth century. His encounters with any heathens are handled in the following manner, with some topoi of the genre interchangeable with other byliny:
Ilya attended matins in Murom and resolved to see vespers in the great city of Kiev.
On the way he rode up to the famous city of Chernigov.
Near it a vast army had been assembled, as black as the blackest of ravens.
No man might pass there on foot, none could pass on a good steed,
No bird flew by and no grey beast scoured past.
But no bright falcon flew by, swooping down on small birds of passage—
Ilya of Murom rode up to this great black army,
Attacked it, trampled it with his steed, and crushed it with his mace.
A famous nineteenth-century Russian writer, I. A. Goncharov, devoted a whole novel, entitled Oblomov, to a very likable and gentle protagonist who spends nearly a third of the novel’s narrative in one place—his bed, from which he is trying to get up. This work is generally understood as Goncharov’s satire on the laziness of the Russian landed gentry and their inability to cope with the advent of western civilization and industrialization. Yet by naming his protagonist Ilya and giving him a disability virtually identical to that of Ilya of Murom, Goncharov might also have been implying that Oblomov’s times were unworthy of miracles and heroic deeds.
It must be noted that while neither folk tales nor folk epics can ever be properly called travelogues, they nearly always involve—just as their written counterparts noted earlier—a great deal of travel. Here again is Ilya continuing on his ride to Kiev:
Having defeated the black army, he rode up to the famous city of Chernigov,
The men of this city invited him to be their commander, hailing him as a great bogatyr of Holy Russia.
Ilya, declining, asked only to be shown the straightest path to Kiev.
The men of Chernigov replied that the straight-traveled road to Kiev was overgrown with grass
And no man might pass it on foot, nor yet ride there on a good steed.
By the Black Swamp and the crooked birch, by the Lingonberry stream, near to the cross of Lebanon,
Sits Nightingale the Robber—Odikhmanty’s son—in a green oak tree,
The villainous robber whistles and shrieks like a wild beast, and at that whistle and shriek,
All the grasslands and meadows become entangled, all the azure flowers loose their petals,
All the dark woods bend down to the earth, and all the good people lie dead.
The straight-traveled road was five hundred versts, but the round-about road was a whole thousand.
Ilya urged on his good steed and rode along the straight road to Kiev.
Deep are the pools of the Dnieper River, long are the reaches of the Lingonberry Stream,
Miraculous is the cross of Lebanon, dark are the forests, and black are the swamps past Chernigov …
Ilya’s most memorable deed in this popular bylina is bagging the man-bird creature, Nightingale the Robber, whose whistling can conjure up storms, and finally bringing him to the court of Vladimir. But the narrative space devoted to his travel over the enchanted landscapes from Murom to Kiev is at least as memorable as his deeds on the way to his ultimate destination. This can be perhaps explained by what the famous Russian cultural historian and theorist Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) called the semiosphere (a concept that he developed especially in his essay “Symbolic Spaces”). Medieval Russian thought understood locality and travel to have a religious and moral significance unknown to modern geography. Travel was a way to prove oneself in heroic deeds, to attain Utopia or Paradise (almost exclusively to be found in the East, the South, or in the high mountains) or to set off on a path to sanctity usually found in a monastery. Since social ideals were imagined to exist in geographical space—the idea of the travel itself had, as he would term it, a semiospheric significance.
Russia had looked primarily South and East for seven centuries of organized statehood, Kiev being Russia’s southernmost capital ever founded. After its utter devastation by the Mongol hordes in 1237, Russia was effectively sealed off from the West as well as from its former southern reaches. Kiev, the strategic center founded by the Riurik princes, continued to exist as a resplendent city only in the folk epos. A new center founded by the descendants of the Riurik line gradually arose within the northern forests, namely Moscow. It was nearly a century and a half before one of its princes, Dmitrii, could wage the first successful battle against the Golden Horde in 1380. This prince, unlike Ilya of Murom, was a real historical personage. But since his victory was just as vital for the Russian nation as any of Ilya’s exploits, he received the appellation Dmitrii of the Don in the epic realm of Russian history. The Don was the same river on whose banks his ancestor, Prince Igor (see The Lay above), had waged his unsuccessful campaign against a different foe two centuries earlier. It would be two centuries before another Prince from the same dynasty could take control of those lands formerly subordinated to Vladimir. Ivan the Awe-wielding (or the Terrible, as he is known in English, due to a mistranslation) would even expand these territories, but now under Muscovy.
Three and a half centuries of incessant struggle to resurrect its independence from the power which had come from the East had exhausted the Riurik line. A new dynasty, the Romanov, was elected to face Poland—a western foe which nearly subjected Muscovy to its rule at the outset of the seventeenth century. Russia was able to secure its political independence from Poland under the Romanovs, but the first century of their reign was marked by religious strife, undermining Russia’s unity and also inspiring such works as The Life of Avvakum. As that century was coming to a close, a new Romanov, Peter I, charted a fresh course for Russia, envisioning a social order based on modern science and technology. He was the first czar to leave his realm and to travel (incognito) to the West—or to Hell, for believers like Avvakum. The immediate post-Petrine period of Russian literature largely glorified Peter’s course, and many of those who were on the side of his reforms also provided entirely new readings of the cosmos surrounding Man. Much of this new awareness was directly tied to the efforts of M. V. Lomonosov (1711-65)—the Russian Newton and a member of several western academies. Equally and uniquely famous for his literary craft and his science, Lomonosov was among the first to express in a newly devised syllabotonic system of prosody (akin to that of English and German) far grander visions of space than had been previously offered in Russia’s oral tradition. His seminal work in this regard was the following sacred ode (1743), which he later appended to his treatise on the nature of electricity:
EVENING MEDITATION ON THE MAJESTY OF GOD ON THE OCCASION OF THE GREAT NORTHERN LIGHTS
Its face concealed, now hides the Day;
As meads are cloaked in gloomy Night;
Tall hills are scaled by blackest shade;
That bends the beams from out our sight;
The depthless star-vault gapes ajar:
Unending vault, unnumbered stars!
A grain of sand caught in the wave,
A spark within an icy maze,
A speck of dust borne on the gale,
A feather in a raging blaze,
Thus I now drown in this dark vault
Adrift and lost in weary thought!
The mouths of wise men teach us thus:
One finds there countless worldly spheres;
Unnumbered there are burning suns,
There nations mark the circling years:
For Godhead’s greater glory there
Does Nature reign as it reigns here.
Yet Nature, where is now thy Law?
The northlands see the dawn arise!
May Sol establish there his throne?
May frozen seas breed storms of fire?
Lo, we are rapt in icy flame!
Lo, night now ushers in the Day!
O you whose swift all-seeing minds
Descry the Book of ageless law,
To whom the smallest atom’s signs
Show Nature’s rule without a flaw,
To you the planets’ course is known,
What is it then perturbs us so?
What strength the midnight’s rays can jolt?
How may thin flame the welkin cleave?
How, absent clouds, may lightning bolt
Its rising path to Zenith weave?
Can steam pent in an icy frame
Mid Winter’s snow engender flame?
There viscous fogs and seas contend;
Or Sol its darting rays does turn,
Through thickened air to us they bend;
Or peaks of pregnant mountains burn;
Or Ocean’s zephyrs cease to blow,
And tranquil waves ‘gainst ether flow.
Replete with doubt is your retort
About the near—much less the far.
Canst tell the measure of the world?
What lies beyond the smallest star?
How endless is Creation’s chord?
Tell then: how great our Author-Lord?
The questions with which Lomonosov ends here embody the poet’s wish to express the greatness of God. This will be picked up in the works of other poets, such as Derzhavin, as we shall see, but Evening Meditation exemplifies a curious hybrid: one might expect the scientist Lomonosov to frown on the reverent acceptance of such a natural event as the aurora borealis, yet Lomonosov the poet celebrates its paradox via the oxymoron—a favorite trope of the Baroque which negates rational resolution. By imagining his rhethorical persona to be immersed, adrift in space earlier in the poem, Lomonosov can be still seen as the first scientist who seeded the ideas from which the Russian space program ultimately sprang. Having no spaceships at his disposal, Lomonosov’s poetic “eye” could transcend the necessity of their use and offer accurate visions of the physical processes occurring in space—concretely on the Sun—in the companion piece to his Evening Meditation, the Morning Meditation on the Majesty of God:
If we—the mortals—had the fortune
To soar beyond the Earth in flight,
And train our eye on Sol’s orb scorching,
Enhancing thus our fleeting sight,
We would behold then from all sides
A burning Sea of timeless tides.
There fiery billows swell up, seeking
Repose on shores not to be found,
There flaming whirlwinds churn by, streaking,
Contend through ages’ ceaseless round;
There rocks like water come to boil,
And rains blast down—in flames embroiled.
Two centuries later these grand visions would inspire sci-fi writers, like Ivan Efremov (author of our last selection) to imagine and advocate a space program which could actually impel Russia’s first space-faring vessel to leap from the decks of Avvakum’s dream-ships into the Cosmos itself.