Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Complete)
9781465684134
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Of the many Slavic nations and tribes that at one time occupied the east of Europe from the Elbe and the headwaters of the Danube to Siberia, and from the Ionic Sea to the Baltic and White Seas, some have entirely disappeared in the ruthless struggle with a superior German civilisation; others, like the Bulgarians and Servians, have paled into insignificance under the lethargic influence of the Crescent, to be fanned to life again within the memory of the present generation by a breath of national consciousness, which is the result of the Romantic Movement in European literature; others again like the Bohemians and Poles, rent asunder by fraternal discord and anarchy, have forfeited their national existence and are engaged in an unequal battle to regain it. Of all the Slavs, Russia alone has steadily gathered in the lands of the feudal lords, to shine at last as a power of the first magnitude among the sisterhood of states, and to scintillate hope to its racial brothers as the “Northern Star.” The unity of the Russian land was ever present to the minds of the writers in the earliest days of the appanages. The bard of the Word of Ígor’s Armament and Daniel the Palmer made appeals to the whole country and prayed for all the princes in the twelfth century, and for upwards of four centuries Moscow has been the centre towards which the outlying districts have been gravitating. Yet, in spite of so continuous and well defined a political tendency, Russia is the last of the Slavic nations to have evolved a literature worthy of the name. Bohemia had a brilliant literature of the Western stamp as early as the thirteenth century; Bulgaria had made a splendid start three centuries before, under the impulse of the newly introduced religion; the Servian city of Ragusa, receiving its intellectual leaven from its Italian vicinage, invested Petrarch and Dante with Servian citizenship in the fifteenth century, and, shortly after, gloried in an epic of a Gundulić, and in a whole galaxy of writers; Poland borrowed its theology from Bohemia, took an active part in the medieval Latin literature, and boasted a golden age for its native language in the sixteenth century. Russia produced an accessible literature only in the second half of the eighteenth century, became known to Western Europe not earlier than the second quarter of the next, and had not gained universal recognition until within the last twenty five years.
