Untitled - OUDL Home

eligious, ecclesiastical, or legal, together with somechronicles. 1 Translations of the Bible, of the servicebooks, and of Byzantine collections of the Fathers, churchcouncils, and law books predominate. Extant originalcompositions, on Byzantine models, such as homilies,exegetics, or lives of the Russian saints, are all too rarebefore the thirteenth century: hardly any charters earlierthan that survive. Legal enactments, law books, andchronicles are the main written sources for the history ofKiev Russia, apart from Arabic and Byzantine writers.The transmission of the written heritage of Byzantinecivilization was due partly to direct translation from theGreek, very largely to southern Slav versions of Greekoriginals. Bulgarian influence was specially importantat the very beginning of Russian Christianity, and therewas later, between 1350 and 1450, a notable revival ofsouthern Slav literary, intellectual, and artistic influenceon Russia, not only in the shape of various Greek asceticand polemical works previously unknown in Russiaand of new chronicles, but of secular tales and romances.For the first time, for instance, a few Russians thenbecame acquainted with the tale of Troy and the tale ofAlexander the Great through Serbian versions. Similarlysouthern Slav influence caused a change of handwritingin Russian manuscripts during that period.Of earlier popular literature there is almost nothingleft, with the stirring exception of the late-twelfthcenturypoetic lay The Tale of the Host of Igor, now bestknown in the West through Borodin's opera with thefamous Polovtsy dances. 2 Such lays, folk-poetry, andsongs of the universally popular bards were from theirnature little likely to be recorded in writing, and thechurch frowned heavily upon them, as well as uponcommunal dancing and sports, as being wrapt up inheathen myth and non-Christian superstition. It wasonly in the last century that collections were made ofthe heroic poems then still recited or chanted among1 There is an English translation of the Russian Primary Chronicle,going down to 1110, by S. H. Cross (Harvard, 1930), and of TheChronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, by R. Michell and N. Forbes (1914).2 There is a literal translation in the edition of the Russian text byL. P. Magnus (1915)-179