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Bunyn - копия

The document discusses the origins of modern Russians, tracing back to the East Slavs who settled around the Dnieper River and were influenced by Varangians in the ninth century. It highlights the conversion to Byzantine Christianity under Grand Prince Vladimir in 988 CE, which shaped Russian culture and literature through the Old Church Slavonic language. Additionally, it explores the significance of bylina, the early poetic form that celebrated heroes and mythological figures, influencing Russian literature until the nineteenth century.

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8 views1 page

Bunyn - копия

The document discusses the origins of modern Russians, tracing back to the East Slavs who settled around the Dnieper River and were influenced by Varangians in the ninth century. It highlights the conversion to Byzantine Christianity under Grand Prince Vladimir in 988 CE, which shaped Russian culture and literature through the Old Church Slavonic language. Additionally, it explores the significance of bylina, the early poetic form that celebrated heroes and mythological figures, influencing Russian literature until the nineteenth century.

Uploaded by

distortion504
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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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.

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.

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