Slavic literature

“ If we attempt to characterize Slavic popular poetry as a whole, we have chiefly to consider those shorter songs, which are common to all Slavic tribes, and which alone can be compared to the ballads of other nations. For, among the Slavi, only the Servians, including the Dalmatians, Montenegrins, and Croats, who speak the same language,—and indeed among all other modern nations they alone,—possess long popular epics, of a heroic character. ”

“ The near relationship of the Slavic nations among each other, is exhibited in no feature more strikingly than in their national popular poetry, especially in the little lyric songs, the immediate effusion of their feelings, wishes, and cares; whilst epic poetry, which draws her materials from the external world, must hence, in every nation, be in some measure modified by their different fortunes and situations. ”

“ These are the dictates of nature, which only an artificial point of honour can overcome.
But, for the full enjoyment of Slavic popular poetry, we must exact still more from the reader. He must not only divest himself of his habitual ideas and views, but he must adopt foreign views and prejudices, in order to understand motives and actions; for the Oriental races are far from being more in a state of pure nature than ourselves. He will have to transport himself into a foreign clime, where the East and the West, the North and the South, blend in wonderful amalgamation. ”

“ We cannot approach the region of their mysterious existence without an awful shuddering; while the few fairies, which Slavic poetry and superstition present us, strike us by the distinctness and freshness of their forms, and give us the unmingled impression either of the ludicrous or of the wild and fantastic. ”

“ The suppleness of Asia and the energy of Europe, the passive fatalism of the Turk and the active religion of the Christian, the revengeful spirit of the oppressed, and the child-like resignation of him who cheerfully submits,—all these seeming contradictions find an expressive organ in Slavic popular poetry. Even in respect to his moral feelings, the reader will frequently have to adopt a different standard of right and wrong. ”

“ We therefore give the specimens of Slavic popular poetry, which we here present to the reader, not merely as poems to be admired, but rather as characteristic features of the mental condition of the respective nations, and of their manner of thinking and feeling.
This is the age of utilitarianism. The Genius of poetry still lives indeed, for he is immortal ”

“ As for the purity and universality with which popular poetry is preserved among the Slavic nations, we strongly fear, that the chief cause of these advantages lies in the barrenness of their literature, and in the utter ignorance among the common people even of its elements. ”

“ Slavic popular poetry in general has none of the vulgarisms, which, in many cases, deface the popular ballads of the Teutonic nations. Yet dignity of style cannot be expected in any popular production. Those whose feelings, from want of acquaintance with the poetry of nature, are apt to be hurt by certain undignified expressions interspersed unconsciously sometimes in the most beautiful descriptions, will not escape unpleasant impressions in reading the Servian songs. ”

“ Much less of barbarism and wild revenge meets us in their modern productions, namely, the epic poems relating to the war of deliverance in the beginning of the present century; although their oppressors had given them ample cause for a merciless retaliation. In the shorter and more lyric songs, of which a rich treasure is the property of most Slavic nations, and in which their common descent is most strikingly manifested, there prevails a still purer morality, and the most tender feelings of the human breast are displayed. ”

“ In general, they appear as a peaceful, industrious, hospitable people, obedient to their chiefs, and religious in their habits. Wherever they established themselves, they began to cultivate the earth, and to trade in the productions of the country. There are also early traces of their fondness for music and poetry; and some circumstances, of which we shall speak in the sequel, seem to justify the supposition of a very early cultivation of the language.
All the knowledge we have respecting the ancient history of the Slavic race, as we have seen, is gathered from foreign authors ”

“ After having ceased for centuries to be a language of common life, the Old Slavic has of course lost that kind of pliancy and facility, which only a living language, employed to express all the daily wants of men, can possibly acquire. ”

“ Yet the subject in itself is not without a high interest and importance; relating, as it does, to the languages and literature of a population amounting to nearly or quite seventy millions, or more than three times as great as that of the United States. These topics embrace, of course, the history of mental cultivation among the Slavic nations from its earliest dawn; their intellectual development; the progress of man among them as a thinking, sentient, social being, acting and acted upon in his various relations to other minds. ”

“ All that the other Slavic nations, or the Germans, the Scotch, and the Spaniards, possess of popular poetry, can at the utmost be compared with the lyrical part of the Servian songs, called by them female songs, because they are sung only by females and youths; but the long epic extemporized compositions, by which a peasant bard, sitting in a large circle of other peasants, in unpremeditated but perfectly regular and harmonious verse, celebrates the heroic deeds of their ancestors [pg.115] or cotemporaries, has no parallel in the whole history of literature since the days of Homer. ”

“ The general prevalence of a musical ear and taste among all Slavic nations is indeed striking. "Where a Slavic woman is," says Schaffarik, "there is also song. House and yard, mountain and valley, meadow and forest, garden and vineyard, she fills them all with the sounds of her voice. Often, after a wearisome day spent in heat and sweat, hunger and thirst, she animates, on her way home, the silence of the [pg.319] evening twilight with her melodious songs. ”

“ The analogy between the Slavic and the Sanskrit languages indicates the Oriental origin of the Slavonians, which appears also from their mythology. The antithesis of a good and evil principle is met with among most of the Slavic tribes; and even at the present time, in some of their dialects, everything good and beautiful is to them synonymous with the purity of the white color; they call the good spirit the White God, and the evil spirit the Black God. ”

“ The long contests of the Bohemians for liberty of conscience, and their final destruction, present one of the most heart-rending tragedies to be found in human history. Not less ready to maintain their convictions with the pen than with the sword, the theological literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first twenty years of the seventeenth centuries, is of an extent with which that of no other Slavic language can be compared. It is true, however, that most of these productions bear decidedly the stamp of the period in which they were written. ”

“ Twenty years hence, and a trace will not be left, except the dried specimens which the amateur lays between two sheets of paper, and the copies preserved in cabinets.
Among the nations of the Slavic race alone is the living flower still to be found, growing in its native luxuriance; but even here, only among the Servians and Dalmatians in its full blossom and beauty. For centuries these treasures have been buried from the literary world. ”

“ It would be difficult to decide what portion of the still existing Slavic tongue has kept itself the purest; the Old Slavic has its Græcisms, the Servian its Turcisms, the Polish and Bohemian their Germanisms, the Russian its Tartarisms, Germanisms, and Gallicisms. No language in the world will ever resist the influence of the languages of its neighbours; and even the lofty Chinese wall cannot protect the inhabitants of that vast empire from corruptions in their language. ”

“ THE Bohemians have been the torchbearers in the Slavic revival which has awakened the dormant national consciousness of the minor Slavic peoples, and which had indirectly brought Russian literature to its fullest fruition. ”

“ Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, Tacitus, and several other classical and a few oriental writers, allude to the Slavic nations occasionally. But the first distinct intelligence we have of them, is not older than the middle of the sixth century. ”

“ But perhaps the most interesting production of this period is Adam Mickiewicz's course of Lectures on Slavic literature and the condition of the Slavic nations, delivered in French at Paris, where he had found employment as a professor in the College de France. [300] The deep enthusiasm which pervades these lectures, the mental excitement by which they would seem to have been dictated from beginning to end, forbid us to consider them in the ordinary light of a mere course of instruction on the subject to which they relate. But there is no other work more full of ideas, or richer in thought ”

“ Nationality and honour with us, too, have disappeared; Nature alone has remained unchanged. Woods, rivers, towns, and villages would not abandon their Slav names. [155] The sound still remains, but the Slavic spirit has fled...." The introduction ends thus: "It is shameful when in misery to moan over our fate; he who by his deeds appeases the wrath of Heaven acts better. Not from a tearful eye, but from a diligent hand fresh hope will blossom. Thus even evil may yet be changed to good. A crooked path may indeed lead men astray, but not humanity at large. ”

“ Indeed, if any kind of poetry must needs lose half its beauties in a translation, the truth of the Latin saying, Dulcius ex ipsa fonte bibuntur aguæ, will never be more readily acknowledged, than in respect to the idiomatic [pg.316] peculiarities of popular ballads. This holds good principally of merely lyric productions, the only kind of songs which are left to some of the Slavic tribes. They are grown into the very bone and marrow of the language itself; and a congenial spirit can at the utmost imitate, but never satisfactorily translate them. ”

“ If we compare the Servian epics with those, which other Slavic nations formerly possessed, we find them greatly superior. In the Russian Igor, the whole narrative is exceedingly indistinct; you may read the whole of it five times, without being able clearly to follow out the composition. Not a single character stands out in relief. The mode of representation has more of the lyric than of the epic. The ancient Bohemian poems have more distinctness and freshness. No obscurity disturbs us. ”

“ The division of the verbs adopted in all other European languages into Active and Passive, seems to be useless in Slavic; for their being active or passive has no influence upon their flexion; and the forms of the Latin Passive and Deponent must in Slavic be expressed by a circumlocution. A division of more importance and springing from the peculiarity of the language itself, is that into verbs Perfect and Imperfect. Neither the Greek, nor the Latin, nor the German, nor any of the languages derived from them, admits of a similar distinction. ”

“ That this Slavic branch, a mountain people, had its treasures of popular poetry, has always been supposed; and many single pieces, not without beauty, have been communicated to the public in German translations. A collection of these flowers, which fade rapidly away in this German neighbourhood, was ten years ago made by Achazel and Korytko. [150]
The literature of a people, among whom every individual of any education may call another highly cultivated language in the fullest sense his own,—as is the case with the Bohemians and Slovenzi in respect to the German,—cannot be very extensive. ”

“ The deeper investigations [pg.26] of modern times, wherever an equal share of profound erudition and love of truth has happened to be united in the same persons, have sufficiently proved, that the church Slavonic is to be considered, not as the mother of all the other Slavic languages, but as standing to them only in the relation of an elder sister,—a dialect like them, but earlier developed and cultivated. The original mother-tongue, from which they were all derived, must have perished many centuries ago. ”

“ The great political questions which in the East of Europe have already disturbed the peace of nations—the idea of Panslavism, the disputed preponderance of Austria or Russia, the jealousy of the Slavic races against the Germans and among each other—have been allowed to exert a decided influence even on this purely historical question. ”

“ What of this species of poetry still survives among the other Slavic nations, or indeed in any other country of Europe, is only the echo of former times. The endlessly protracted "Storie" of the Italians are, indeed, often longer than the Servian heroic tales; but in no other respect do they afford a point of comparison with them.
The Slavic popular songs have nothing, or very little, of the bold dramatic character which animates the Scotch, German, and Scandinavian ballads. Even dialogues occur seldom, except in some narrative form ”

“ Too many vowels sound just as unpleasantly as too many consonants; a suitable number and interchange of both is requisite to produce true harmony. Even harsh syllables belong to the necessary qualities of a language; for nature herself has harsh sounds, which the poet would be unable to paint without harsh sounding tones. The roughness of the Slavic idioms, of which foreigners have complained so frequently, is therefore exclusively to be ascribed to the awkwardness of inexperienced or tasteless writers ”