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Bunyn - копия

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn highlights the deep connection between Russian poetry and the historical suffering of the Russian people. The roots of Russian literature trace back to the East Slavs and the significant cultural shift brought by Byzantine Christianity in 988 CE, which influenced the development of the Old Church Slavonic language. This language dominated Russian literature for centuries but limited exposure to Western Humanistic ideas and reinforced the autocratic nature of Russian governance.

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9 views1 page

Bunyn - копия

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn highlights the deep connection between Russian poetry and the historical suffering of the Russian people. The roots of Russian literature trace back to the East Slavs and the significant cultural shift brought by Byzantine Christianity in 988 CE, which influenced the development of the Old Church Slavonic language. This language dominated Russian literature for centuries but limited exposure to Western Humanistic ideas and reinforced the autocratic nature of Russian governance.

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distortion504
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Introduction

For Russians, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, “Poetry is born from the torment of the
soul.” Russia is a vast land, bordered on the north and south by the Baltic and the Black
Seas, on the west by the Carpathian Mountains, and on the east by the mighty Volga
River. In the thousand-year history of Russian literature, no natural barrier has
preserved the Russian people from the agony of invasion, and Russian poetry has
become unbreakably forged to their historical suffering.

The poetry of Russia’s youth


The earliest ancestors of the modern Russians, the agricultural East Slavs, settled the
inland plateau of the thirteen-hundred-mile Dnieper River and were preyed on during
the ninth century by the Varangians, piratical Scandinavian merchants who founded
petty principalities around Kyiv. Under Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, their loose
confederation was converted to Byzantine Christianity in 988 CE, an immense religio-
cultural invasion that consolidated its position in Russia by introducing the Old Church
Slavonic alphabet based on the spoken dialect, importing Byzantine Greek forms as
literary models, and assimilating native pagan elements into religious ritual. Although
Old Church Slavonic served as the chief vehicle of Russian literature from the eleventh
to the eighteenth centuries, it choked off exposure to the classical Humanistic heritage
of the West and rigidly identified church with state, fortifying the autocracy of Russian
rulers.

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