160 CURIOSITIES OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE. 



enshrouded in darkness are the earliest efforts of this ancient literature, 

 that we with difficulty discover the name of Boiam, " the nightingale of 

 the olden times." However melodious and brilliant may have been the 

 songs of this first poet, they died with him, or rather they but faintly 

 exist in the old traditions. The deeds of St. Vladimir and his heroes, 

 inspired a great number of poets, and the round table of this first great 

 Christian prince was not then less celebrated than that of our famous 

 King Arthur. However, all the romances and ballads of that period 

 are not entirely lost, and the exploits of Dobrina Nikititch, of Tchourilo 

 Plenkovitch, and others, live yet in some heroic poems, and especially 

 in the popular stories ; conveyed from tongue to tongue through many 

 generations, they constitute the delight of millions. Their wild and 

 plaintive melody enlivens the steps of the traveller across the dreary 

 steppes of the Ukrane, and forms the pastime of the peasantry through 

 the long dreary nights of their hyperborean winter. The courage of 

 Felipater and of Maximus, the nuptials of Derguierva, the rape of 

 Stratigovna, the History of Imogrip, Tsar of the Adorians, such are the 

 favourite subjects of the Sclavonian Troubadours, whose lyres inspired 

 by the miracles of Paganism, could not totally divest themselves of the 

 mythology of the Sclavi, which, in the romantic and poetical composition 

 of its elements, rivals even that beautiful creation of the imagination 

 that we owe to the more genial climate of Asia Minor, and ancient 

 Greece. 



A very pretty poem of the beginning of the twelfth century has 

 happily been preserved, but the name of the author has perished. It is 

 a discourse on the army of Igor, consecrated to the relation of the 

 expedition which that prince undertook against the Polqflses, who made 

 him prisoner and defeated the army. The Chronicle, or the Annals of 

 Nestor, a monk of the Petcherskii convent of Kief (1056 a 1116) belongs 

 to the same era ; independent of its high historical importance, this 

 chronicle possesses some literary merit the narratives, animated by 

 the powerful interest of the subject, assume, at times, a dramatic 

 character, and breathe throughout a spirit of the purest benevolence 

 and exalted piety. Silvester, Bishop of Pereisaslavl, and two other 

 anonymous writers, continued them unto the year 1203. This is all 

 that has been saved of the early literature of Russia, the progress of 

 which was untimely arrested by the invasion of Tchinguis Khan, but 

 these relics prove how extensively Byzantine erudition was spread in 

 Russia, and lead us at the same time, to the well-founded hypothesis, 

 that they were not its only fruits. 



At the period of the Tartar invasion, letters took refuge in the cloister, 

 where, for the space of two centuries, they remained shut up, to 

 which we are indebted for a series of annals that leaves no hiatus in 

 the history of Russia. 



Two years after the battle of Kalka (1226) died St. Simon, Bishop of 

 Souzdal, who left behind him some very important annals ; the St. Sophia 

 Chronicle, and the Book of Degrees (stepennaiakniga), are considerably 

 posterior to them, and the interval between them is filled up, but by 

 translations from the Greek into the Sclavonian, by some books of 

 prayer and puerile stories, dignified with the name of history. Such 

 were the dying efforts of a literature that commenced under such 

 brilliant auspices. But in the ,midst of this barbarism, we still admire 



