HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

COMPARATIVE SLAVIC EPIC 427name historical personages and places associated with them, althoughthe action is not historical and may, indeed, be mythical. Let meillustrate with some famous examples. The Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian,and Russian traditions all have epics about a hero's long absence fromhome and his return to find his wife about to marry again: in Russianthis is told of Dobrynja Nikititch, in Serbo-Croatian, of JankovicSto jan and many others, and in Bulgarian, of Krali Marko and others.But this theme is not found in the Ukrainian dumy. Another subjectcommon to the first three Slavic areas is that of a "wedding," that is,bride-capture in a variety of forms, including rescue, combined occasionallywith escape. This subject, too, is either lacking or handledquite differently in the Ukrainian dumy. The comparison rests, then,with the other three Slavic traditional epics. In these cases we can trulyspeak about comparative Slavic epic in terms of subject matter.The Russian bylina of Dobrynja and Aljośa is the classic Russianreturn song, but it is not the only bylina treating this subject. Animportant element is lacking at the beginning of this Russian song —that is, the wedding. In short, Dobrynja is not called away on hiswedding night — a significant fact because it excludes the possibility ofthere being a son who might play a role in the story. On the otherhand, in South Slavic the mention of the wedding is very common,although in the classical "Ropstvo Jankovica Stojana" (The captivityof Jankovic Stojan), the reference is oblique: 24"U Uije miada osta ljuba, /Ilija left behind a young bride,miada ljuba od petnaest dana, a young bride of fifteen days,U Stojana mladja osta ljuba,Stojan left behind a younger bride,mladja ljuba od nedelje dana." a younger bride of a week./Although the significance of the recent wedding seems lost in theSerbo-Croatian song, since there is no son, nevertheless a vestigeremains in the quoted lines. In the song about Marko and Mina there isno hint of departure on the hero's wedding night, although, interestinglyenough, Marko receives two invitations simultaneously with asummons from the sultan to fight against the Arabs. One invitation isto be vencani kum (sponsor) at the wedding of the king of Buda, andthe other is to be godfather to Sibinjanin Janko's two sons. The idea ofa wedding seems to haunt the beginning of this return song, althoughnone actually occurs. The real difference, then, in the openings of the24Karadzic, Srpske narodne pjesme, 3, no. 25, lines 5-8.