 | The epic songs of Russia |  |
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
These translations from the wonderful fragments
of the Russian epic poetry of the Middle
Ages were originally published thirty years ago.
The time was too early. In the West, dense ignorance
of Russia still prevailed. She was thought
of, not as a nation with a great historic past and a
still vaster outlook towards the future, but as a
mere shapeless mass with no intelligible history
and in no vital relation either to the rest of Europe
or to the movement of the civilized world. The
Epic Songs found no large audience either in America
or in England; and in England, at least, they have
for many years been inaccessible.
Yet to the few who appreciated it, the volume
came as a precious gift, and little short of a new
revelation. Like another work which, by an interesting
coincidence, appeared within the same
year, Sir Charles Lyall's Ancient Arabian Poetry,
it made an epoch; it opened out an undiscovered
realm of poetic imagination and achievement. A
better and larger understanding, both of Russia
and of those Middle Ages out of which, in Russia
as elsewhere, the modern world was born, now may
—and surely will—secure to the Epic Songs something
like the admiration and acceptance that they
deserve. Miss Hapgood, in giving her consent to
this re-issue of her book, speaks to me of its contents
as "just as wonderful, just as fascinating,
as when I first encountered that goodly fellowship
shared by all those to whom, ever since they made
its acquaintance, the book has been a treasured
possession.
In this issue the author has made a few slight
corrections or alterations; but the Songs themselves,
as well as the Introduction and Appendix,
are substantially unchanged. Of the circumstances
in which the Epic Songs of Russia are now
placed before English readers, of the new spirit in
which we now regard the Russian people, the
dedication which she has prefixed to this edition
may speak sufficiently.
In the original edition of the work the late Professor
Francis Child, in a brief preface, bespoke a
welcome for it, and expressed his own obligation
to the author for her spirited and sympathetic
rendering. To that fine scholar, whose classical
work on the English and Scottish Ballads gives
him a lasting claim on our gratitude, its primary
value was in the light it threw on his own studies
in popular poetry, and the enlarged scope it gave
to a field that he had made peculiarly his own.
But the vital and human value of these Epic Songs
is not so much for the professed student of national
tradition and popular art, as for a much larger
circle: for those who can still delight in the stories
which kindled the imagination of past ages, and
who recognize, in these fragments of a vanished
world, spiritual kinship with all that poetry, from
the Odyssey downwards, in which epic magnificence
is interwoven with the witchery of romance.
The Epic Songs date from a period when the
Russian people shared fully in that brilliant resurgence
of the human spirit which culminated, in
Western Europe, in the thirteenth century. In
Russia its progress was violently interrupted. The
centuries of dislocation which followed, not only
checked the development of the Russian people
themselves, but cut them off from the rest of
Europe. Only in modern times has the broken
union been painfully and partially resumed. Russia
is now entering into the full European movement.
In literature she has produced, during the nineteenth
century, what are perhaps the greatest
names of that age throughout the world. But we
shall better appreciate, not only the soul of the
Russian nation, but even the universal masterpieces
of Turgenief or Tolstoi or Dostoievsky, if we
know something of the rich soil out of which they
sprang. In these Songs, worn down and flawed
as they are by many generations of purely oral transmission,
the imaginative flame of the Middle Ages
still burns clearly. On the leaves of the cypresses
that grew by the junction of the two rivers that
flowed from the graves of Dunaï and Nastasya
was written, "This marvel came to pass for the
wonder of all young people and the solace of the
old." The words may be taken as a symbol; their
spirit is the same as that of Homer's lines, "This
the Gods fashioned, and spun destruction for men,
that there may be a song even for times to be."
And just as they embody the spirit of the epic, so
the marvel and mystery of romance are embodied
in the words describing the harp-playing of Stavr,
"One string he strung from Kief and one from
Tzargrad, and the third from far Jerusalem. He
played great dances, and sang songs from over the
blue sea."
Kief, Constantinople, and Jerusalem all meet and
mingle in the Songs, and lands even further, from
Normandy to China. Fine Arabian bronze "more
precious than gold" (as it is also called in the Old
and chain-armour appear alongside of the fabrics
and implements of the West. The scarlet ships of
the heroes, like the vermilion-prowed galleys of the
Odyssey, sail wide across perilous seas. The picture
of the gorgeous East in the Song of Diuk Stepanovitch
has all the splendour of the Arabian
Nights. But what we feel throughout the Songs
is the way in which this wealth of material has been
fused by the Russian genius and moulded into its
national forms. In the crystal casket of Svyatogor,
in the wiles of the Tzaritza Solomonida, we recognize
the Thousand and One Nights and the Talmud,
but both have become Russianized, and have sprung
to new life in the process. The forms and motives
of romance have taken here a fresh and living
embodiment. There are princesses who look out
of lattices; kings who, like Arthur at Caerleon or
Camelot, hold high feast at Easter in their palaces;
and such warrior-maidens as reappear, long after,
in the adorable figure of Bradamante. The palace
built in a night for the Princess Love by Nightingale
Budimirovitch has a sun and moon under its golden
domes. Heroes meet on the steppe with a background
of infinite solitary landscape; at crossroads
in the wilderness there is a white burning
stone, and a writing thereon. The figures of youths
and maidens on the clasps of Churilo's cloak, that
pour green wine or pluck their little harps when he
fingers clasp or loop, are a sort of allegory of the
magical power of art not merely to interpret but
to create life. When Svyatogor cannot lift the
wallet of the Villager's Son, though he strains at it
until the blood streams down his face, he is told the
reason, "The whole weight of the earth lieth therein."
This profound Russian mysticism—akin to
and yet different from the Celtic—shows itself most
which (like passages in the contemporary
mystical Romance of the Grail) records how "a
damsel came forth weeping bitterly, and bearing
in her hands the book of the Holy Gospel," and
how the mother aurochs tells her children, "That
was no damsel weeping, but the city-wall lamenting,
for she hath foreseen ill fortune for Kief."
But this mysticism is an undertone in a pattern
of life which is large, cheerful and simple. In the
Songs there is the clear lyric note of direct passion, as
in the lament of Ilya, Greek in its clarity, universal
in its human appeal: "O age, old age, like a raven
thou hast alighted on my turbulent head, and
youth, thou youth, my lovely youth, thou hast flown
away like the falcon over the open plain." There is
the naïve epic simplicity of narrative and epithet,
with its familiar unfailing recurrences, the enrichment
of familiar things (the damp earth, the blue
sea, the white world) by touches no less vivid
because they are customary. There is the epic
strength and sanity; the Songs often end on a quiet
note of peace: "None of these forty heroes and
one ever again roamed the open plain seeking adventures,
or stained their white hands with blood.
When young Kasyan Mikailovitch came to his own
land, he raised a church to Mikola of Mozhaisk, and
began to pray constantly to God, and to repent of
his sins." There is the rough popular humour shot
across the tissue of romantic adventure, breaking
out in pithy proverbs like the favourite "Long is a
woman's hair, but short is her wit," or Ilya's terse
retort to the bragging of Idol, "The priest of Rostof
had a cow; she ate and drank until she burst."
The "green wine" of the Songs is racy of the soil,
generous and strong.
For centuries these poems remained the treasure
unknown or neglected by the rest of the world.
We welcome them now as a recovered inheritance.
In them we pass, as Vladimir and the Princess
Apraxia passed at the leading of Plenko the silk-merchant,
to a richly patterned chamber, to another
of crystal and a third of lattice-work, and so to the
golden-domed tower where all is heavenly with sun
and moon, stars innumerable and white dawns.
Here is God's plenty, for those who will enter in.
| The epic songs of Russia | |