SLAVS 



503 



the Lusatian Wends or Sorbs dwelling in Saxony 

 and Prussia. Of the Polabes there are now no 

 traces ; their language ceased to be spoken in the 

 early part of the 18th century. Many of the old 

 Slavonic states have lost their independence and 

 are in a state of greater or less vassalage. At the 

 present time Russia, Servia, and Montenegro are 

 wholly independent. Bulgaria is a tributary state 

 of Turkey, but practically independent. Bohemia 

 and Moravia are united to Austria, and Croatia 

 forms part of the kingdom of Hungary. Poland is 

 distributed between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. 

 Some Slavonic tribes have never enjoyed independ- 

 ence ag. the Sorbs and Slovenes. The sum total 

 of the Slavonic populations U estimated at about 

 100,000,000. 



The Slavs are represented by ancient writers as 

 an industrious race, living by agriculture and the 

 rearing of flocks and herds ; as hospitable and 

 peaceful, and making war only in defence. The 

 government had a patriarchal basis, and chiefs were 

 chosen by the assemblies. But in the west contact 

 with the feudal institutions of the German empire, 

 and in the east with Byzantium and the Mongols, 

 greatly altered this primitive constitution ; the 

 Slavonic princes aimed at unlimited power, and the 

 chiefs succeeded in binding the free peasants to the 

 soil, as the feudal nobility had done. In the course 

 of the llth, 12th, and 13th centuries a hereditary 

 nobility was formed in some of the Slavonic states. 

 The people sank into the lowest condition of serf- 

 dom. Between them and the nobles there was no 

 third or middle class, as the privileges of the 

 nobility prevented the growth of towns, and such 

 trade as there was was chiefly in the hands of 

 foreigners. 



The religion of the ancient Slavs, like that of the 

 Teutonic nations, seems to have been in many of 

 its features a kind of nature-worship not without, 

 perhaps, a predominating divinity : at least so 

 Procopius tells us. But the whole subject of 

 Slavonic mythology is up to the present time in a 

 very confused state. For our information about 

 Slavonic deities we are indebted to Nestor and 

 the German chroniclers who wrote about the Baltic 

 Slavs e.g. Thietmar, Helmold, and others. We 

 thus only know the gods of these peoples and the 

 Russians. About those of the Poles, Bohemians, 

 and southern Slavs we know almost nothing. The 

 idols, from the accounts given of them, appear to 

 have been of wood ; and this is probably the reason 

 why no genuine remains of them have come down 

 to us. The chief deity, whose worship was prob- 

 ably common to all the western Slavs, was 

 Sviatovit, with whom may be associated Perun 

 jui'l Radegast and some have thought that these 

 three names denote different personations or mani- 

 festations of the same power. Perhaps we may 

 find parallels in Sviatovit to Mars and Zeus, Perun 

 to Jupiter and Thor, and Radegast to Mercury and 

 Odin. Of gods of an inferior order we may name 

 Pro we, perhaps a god of justice, and Chernobog, 

 the black god, together with multitudes of demons 

 and spirits good and bad. Thus, among the Rus- 

 sians there were rusalki, water-nymphs, lies/tie, 

 satyrs ; and among the Serbs and Bulgarians, vitas 

 and unmodimts, a kind of malicious fairy. 



Some of these deities were worshipped under 

 monstrous forms : thus, Sviatovit had four heads, 

 Rugewit, the god of war, had seven faces, and so 

 on. The Slavs seem to have had some crude notion 

 of existence and retribution after death. Worship 

 was performed in groves and temples, cattle and 

 fruits being offered ny the priests, whose office was 

 originally performed by the head of the family or 

 chieftain ; perhaps this may be the reason why 

 there is a common name for priest and prince 

 (knez) among the western Slavs: the word, how- 



ever, is certainly borrowed from the O. H. Ger. 

 chuning. Tbe eastern Slavs received Christianity 

 from Byzantium in the 9th century, through the 

 instrumentality of Cyril (q.v. ) and Methodius ; the 

 western from Rome and Germany. They were 

 Christianised with little opposition, for they had 

 no religious caste, and there were no persons polit- 

 ically or socially interested in the cultus of their 

 idols. Panslavism is the subject of an article 

 (q.v.). See Schafarik, Slawische Alterthiimer. 



SLAVONIC LANGUAGE. The term Slavonic, as 

 applied to language or race, is a generic name 

 (like Celtic or Teutonic) for a group of kindred 

 languages and people belonging to the great Indo- 

 European or Aryan family. The Slavonic lan- 

 guages are in a highly inflected state : the noun 

 has seven cases, and all the numerals are declined. 

 An article is implied in the termination of the 

 adjective, as is shown by the form which it assumes 

 when used as a predicate. As regards tenses, 

 Russian, Polish, and Bohemian in their modern 

 forms have lost the imperfect and aorist, but they 

 are preserved in the Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. 

 The poverty of the tense-system is amply compen- 

 sated by the so-called aspects, which are found in 

 every Slavonic verb e.g. the frequentative, the 

 momentaneous, and others, which supply tenses 

 that may be wanting to the simple verb and 

 express very delicate distinctions of time and 

 manner. The Slavonic family in preserving these 

 aspects has been truer to the old Aryan type of 

 language than Teutonic. Traces of them can be 

 seen in Greek (as Curtius has shown) and in Old 

 Irish. The prepositions in and out of composition 

 are used with a delicacy reminding us of ancient 

 Greek. These languages have great power of com- 

 pounding words and rich vocabularies. The oldest 

 form known is the Palseo-Slavonic or ecclesiastical 

 Slavonic, so called because used in the Orthodox 

 churches. The original home of this language has 

 been the subject of much dispute, and has divided 

 Slavists into two camps ; some finding it in Bul- 

 garia, others in the ancient Pannonia, now corre- 

 sponding to the territory occupied by the Slovenes 

 viz. Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola ; hence it is 

 sometimes called Old Bulgarian and sometimes 

 Old Slovenish. It is, however, only an elder sister 

 and not a mother language. The Slavonic family 

 of languages may be grouped as follows : first, the 

 south-eastern branch ( 1 ) Russian, including Malo- 

 Russian and White Russian. The second of these 

 has great claims to be considered a distinct 

 language, and is go treated by Miklosich. (2) Old 

 and modern Bulgarian, the latter being in a some- 

 what decomposed form, having lost nearly all its 

 rases and the infinitive mood. (3) Serbo-Croatian. 

 (4) Slovenish. Secondly, the western (1) Polish, 

 including Kashubish. (2) Bohemian, including 

 Slovak. (3) Lusatian-Wendish, or Sorbish, divided 

 into two sharply defined dialects. (4) Polabish, 

 which died out at the beginning of the 18th cen- 

 tury, and like Cornish has been preserved in some 

 vocabularies, &c. : from these fragments Schleicher 

 constructed a grammar. See the sections on lan- 

 guage and literature in the articles BOHEMIA, 

 POLAND, RUSSIA, and SERVIA. We may here 

 remark that in literature Russian, Polish, or Bo- 

 hemian are richest, the two latter nations having 

 developed a literature much earlier than the former. 

 This remark applies especially to Bohemian) which 

 can show good prose-writing in the 14th century. 

 Many of the Russian and Polish poets have great 

 merit. Slovenish and Sorbish are poor. The 

 Serbs have developed a respectable literature in the 

 19th century, and the Bulgarians are already active. 

 But both have only recently shaken off the Turkish 

 yoke, fatal to all progress. Serbian, Russian, and 

 Bulgarian are very rich in old ballads and popular 



