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러시아의 영웅이야기 빌리니북 .The Book of Byliny Book,Hero Tales of Russia, by Marion Chilton Harrison PREFACE. This is a Byliny Book. What does “Byliny” mean? It is a Russian word, and it means stories about What-has-Been, what happened in Russia in the old days long ago. We all read about the Greek heroes Jason and Perseus and Theseus and Heracles. The Russians had splendid heroes too, who met with wonderful adventures. Russia and France and Italy and England are fighting side by side a great fight for freedom, and these old heroes of Russia fought for freedom too, against great barbarian armies of Huns and Tartars. The Russians are our brave friends, our “Allies,” as we call them now, and it is good to get to know about their heroes of olden times. We all know and honour our French Allies, and most of us try to speak French. We are proud to read in history how our William the Conqueror came over from France and brought with him many good laws and customs, and, best of all, beautiful French words that have now become English?why, the very word beauty came to us from France. But Russia is much further away than France, and very few of us learn to speak Russian, or even to read it. [viii] Far the best way to get to know people is to learn their language, but it is not quite so easy to learn to read Russian as it is to read French, because the Russians use different letters. You will see Russian letters in the pictures1; they are beautiful, delightful things and some of them are like English, so it is exciting to try and make them out, but some of them are like Greek, for the Russians always liked the Greeks better than the Romans. The Russian names of the heroes look a little strange at first, but they are not really hard to pronounce. There are a great many Russian heroes, but this book only tells about four of them, Volga and Mikula and Svyatogor and Ilya. The Volga is quite short and easy, and so is Mikula, which is pronounced as if it was written Mikoolla. Svyatogor looks rather hard, but you only have to remember to say it like this?Svy?t?gorr, and you must roll the r’s as if you were a Scotsman. The Russians put the accent on the end of their words much oftener than the English. We say ??-v?n and they say Eevahn. And so it is with the last hero, Ilya; he is pronounced Eely?? h. Besides the heroes, there is Vladimir the king, and he is called Vladeemir. The only really hard word to say right is Byliny itself, and that you can call Bw?leeny, but our English lips do not make quite the Russian sound. These heroes Volga and Ilya and the rest lived very [ix]long ago, and their great city was not Petrograd but Kiev (Kieff). Petrograd means “Peter’s fortified town,” and we all know how till the war it used to be called Peters-burg. But if you look on the map you will find no Petrograd, only Kiev on the river Dnieper, which winds down to the Black Sea. The old Russian heroes used to sail down the river on through the Black Sea down to Constantinople, and there of course they met the Greeks, and the Greeks taught them to be Christians. That was in the days of good King Vladimir, and he was reigning before our William the Conqueror, hundreds of years before Peter the Great came to Holland and England and learnt to build boats, and made the great city of Petrograd. But though the heroes lived so long ago, they are never forgotten. The Russian children in the village schools learn about Volga and Ilya as soon as they can read, and old minstrels in far away villages beyond lake Onega and even in Siberia sing the Byliny, the songs of What-has- Been to the peasants as they sit round the fire at night. I have seen a picture of one of these singers, an old peasant over seventy, with a long white beard and shaggy hair and bright deep-set eyes. He could not write or read, and his voice was rather cracked, but when he sang the old songs he was all on fire, and he sang them so splendidly that the villagers crowded round to hear. The old men say that the young ones will not learn to sing the songs because they are gramotnye, “grammar-people,” who read books and learn to write?what a pity. [x] A learned Russian called Hilferding went to North Russia to live among the peasants and listen to these stories. The peasants are very poor, and are shy with strangers, but they learned to love and trust Hilferding, and sang their songs to him. It is nice to know that he was able to help the peasants, and get them a little more money and food. Other learned men had been before Hilferding, but nearly all the stories in this book were collected by him, so we like to remember his name. It is the peasants who sing the Byliny, not the nobles, and two of the greatest Russian heroes, Ilya and Mikula, are peasants’ sons. Mikula is a ploughman. It sounds strange to us that a ploughman should be a hero; but the Russians did not feel like that. They love their land with all their hearts. Some of it has very black fertile soil, but some of it is very hard and full of stones, and sometimes of forests to be cleared, and the man who does all this is a hero. The Russians sing a hymn to the honour of Mikula; it ends “Glory to thee, good Mikula, the peasant who worked.” In one of the pictures you see Volga, the prince, come to beg Mikula to leave his plough and join his warriors. Mikula was sad, but a man must leave even his work to defend his country. Mikula is my favourite of all the heroes. The peasant heroes, Mikula and great Ilya, are very proud and independent, and sometimes not very respectful to the King; they seem to think they are as good as he is, and so they were. It is their country [xi]they love, and their beautiful city of Kiev and its Church, and in those old days they had not learned that the King stands for the country. Ilya is always wanting to get to Kiev; you see him on the cover of this book, riding up to the Holy City. It is like Jerusalem to him, and he was buried there. But though he dreams of the City, he loves the place where he was born, near Murom. Murom is a real place still, with forests round it and a river full of fish. The peasants in the old days owned the land in common, so each village was like a little kingdom. Ilya hates the dog, King Kalin, because he slays the villagers. Svyatogor’s name means Holy Mountain. He is very strong and huge, like a mountain, but he is clumsy and rather boastful. He boasted he could lift anything, but he soon found he couldn’t. At the end he stops boasting, and is good to young Ilya, and gives him all his strength, so that makes up. The hero who really can do everything is Volga. He was a prince, not a peasant, and he was a mighty hunter, like Nimrod in the Bible; and he was a wizard, too, and could turn himself into a grey wolf. Some people said his father was a wolf, some said he was a serpent. The story says “damp earth was his cradle,” and that sounds uncomfortable, but the Russians always call the earth “damp earth.” They mean that the rain has rained on it, and that it is not hard and dry, but full of sap like the trees. Volga learnt all his wisdom from the beasts and birds. S. Francis used to preach to the birds, but Volga let [xii]the beasts and birds preach to him, and that is better, for the Bible says: Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; And the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee. The first story is about Volga, and in the first picture you see him listening to a wise old Bear. JANE ELLEN HARRISON. This book is for children, and is no place for bibliography, but we should like to own our debt to three books. Chudinov’s Byliny in the “Russian School Library” was our first introduction (in Russian) to the hero-tales; but for Rambaud’s La Russie Epique it would have been difficult to put the stories together; and, last, to the kindness of Mr. E. T. Minns we are indebted for the loan of Hilferding’s invaluable Sbornik, now out of print, and not easily obtainable during the War. M. C. H. J. E. H. [xiii]

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