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Bunyn - копия

Russia's earliest poetic form, the bylina, celebrated mythological and heroic figures, with notable cycles including the Kyivan byliny centered on Grand Prince Vladimir and the Novgorod cycle featuring Aleksandr Nevsky. The twelfth-century poem Slovo o polku Igoreve marked Russia's first written poetic achievement, blending themes of warrior spirit and self-sacrifice while foreshadowing impending defeat. Despite debates over its authenticity, it is regarded as a significant work that influenced later Russian poetry.

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20 views1 page

Bunyn - копия

Russia's earliest poetic form, the bylina, celebrated mythological and heroic figures, with notable cycles including the Kyivan byliny centered on Grand Prince Vladimir and the Novgorod cycle featuring Aleksandr Nevsky. The twelfth-century poem Slovo o polku Igoreve marked Russia's first written poetic achievement, blending themes of warrior spirit and self-sacrifice while foreshadowing impending defeat. Despite debates over its authenticity, it is regarded as a significant work that influenced later Russian poetry.

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distortion504
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Russia’s earliest poetic form was the vernacular and formulaic bylina (plural byliny;

literally, things-that-have-been). These oral epics celebrated mythological figures and,


more frequently, human heroes in groupings that resembled the Arthurian cycles. In the
Kyivan byliny cycle centered on Grand Prince Vladimir, the hero Ilya becomes “a
symbol of the self-consciousness of the people,” according to Felix J. Oinas in Heroic
Epic and Saga (1978). Novgorod, a northern city belonging to the Hanseatic League,
had a byliny cycle whose central figure was Aleksandr Nevsky, prince and saint, who
repelled the Livonian and Teutonic knights. The Galician-Volhynian byliny cycle records
the strife between this area and its western neighbors in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. As Oinas remarks, the byliny of patriarchal Russia “captivated and thrilled
people of all walks of life until the nineteenth century,” inspiring later poets with
traditional Russian ideals.

During the twelfth century, the disintegration of feudal Russia set the bitter groundwork
for the Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1240 and the imposition of the “Tartar yoke.” Slovo o
polku Igoreve (c. 1187; The Tale of the Armament of Igor, 1915) is Russia’s first written
poetic achievement, a stirring blend of the aristocratic warrior spirit and a call to self-
sacrifice in defense of the Land of Rus. The poem poignantly and accurately predicts
the great defeat to come: “O, how the Russian land moans, remembering her early
years and princes!/…in discord their pennons flutter apart.” Based on the Novgorod
Prince Igor’s unsuccessful attempt in 1185 to dislodge Turkish Polovtsian usurpers from
the lands near the Don, and startlingly modern in its complex imagery, allusion, and
symbolism, The Tale of the Armament of Igor has sometimes been considered an
imposture since its discovery in the early 1790s. Alexander Pushkin claimed, however,
that not enough poetry existed in the eighteenth century for anyone then to have written
it, and more recent scholars concur.

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