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the peasantry, some of which derive in apparent originfrom the golden days of "gracious Prince Vladimir . . .our Sun of royal Kiev," or of Sadko, "the trader, therich merchant" of Novgorod—Newtown; "Novgorod,Novgorod, but older than the old." 1While the surviving literature of early Russia is alltoo scanty and suggests intellectual and creative poverty,enough remains (or did remain before the present war)of the Byzantine legacy in architecture, painting, andthe minor arts to give some impression of the richnessof the aesthetic and material effects of the introductionof Christianity, at any rate in Kiev, Novgorod, Vladimirand a few other centres. Until at least the sixteenthcentury religion shaped and dominated architecture andpainting. Building in brick or stone was rare and almosta monopoly of the church, and skilled artificers were forlong Greeks or Greek-trained. (The defences of theKremlin of Moscow were wooden until 1367, over twohundred years after the first mention of Moscow, andas late as 1600 there were, apart from monasteries, onlyten stone or brick fortresses in the whole of Muscovy.)Architecture has been the outstanding Russian achievementin the arts, until the astonishing outpouring ofliterature in the nineteenth century. For its greatperiods it has three times borrowed from abroad;Byzantine, Renaissance, Baroque; but these alien formswere assimilated and blended with native elements,largely based on matchless skill in building in wood,and with other alien influences, for instance Armenian,Iranian, and later German, in such a way as to producespecific types of Russian and not mere imported architecture.Thus after a stage of copying Santa Sophiaand other Constantinople churches in the eleventhcentury, there was developed in the next century a strikingRussian version of Byzantine architecture (evolving inNovgorod the distinctive Russian 'onion' dome). Thisflowered again richly between 1350 and 1450, and then,under the influence of Italian architects, best exemplified1A representative selection of these heroic poems (byliny) is availablein translation in N. K. Chadwick's Russian Heroic Poetry (1932). Sadko,like Igor, is commemorated in opera, by Rimsky-Korsakov.180