GREAT RUSSIA 365

covered a far wider area and is thus more imposing. In Kiev and
the Ukraine, the original home of their heroes and of some of their
motifs, they are quite unknown. A new kind of ballad-poetry, of
western origin, reigns in their stead. There may never have been
Ukrainian 'byliny', but only a more courtly kind of verse. The
ballads are Muscovite, but they are not now to be found in any
numbers in Moscow. The institution of serfdom seerns to have
been almost as fatal to them as education has been elsewhere. It
drew the classes apart; the rich sought other amusements, the poor
invented vulgar ballads of buffoonery. The 'byliny'—so flourish-
ing in Ivan the Terrible's capital—now live vigorously to the north
of the great forested belt, where no great accumulations of wealth
are possible, but a hard and healthy struggle for livelihood occupies
all men equally. There, in the long winter pause, the visit of the
blind singer brings an audience from all the district. It is not a
paid profession, since the singer generally has some other; but the
entertainer is rewarded with gifts, and still more with universal
respect. So it is by the shores of Lake Onega, in Olonec? Archangel,
Perm, and Siberia that the best 'byliny1 have been gathered;
'byliny5 which record the names of personages dead eight centuries
previously, together with some particulars of the geography and
history of the Ukraine. Other ballads have been gathered on the
line of the Volga, and the tales circulating in the Caucasus complete
a magnificent arc drawn from the ancient capital of the Vladimirs.
The historical school of interpreters, identifying names in the
'byliny', see in these poems a storehouse of ancient facts. Another
two schools study the plots, which are fabulous; they differ accord-
ing as they find analogies In the west or the east. A fourth group
was encouraged to apply mythological methods by the enigmatic
figures Vblh or Vol'ga, Mikula, and Svjatogor. Volh or VoFga
(Rybnikov 3, 38, &c.) was born to a young princess and a snake
father in a green garden when the sun first shone. He was a prodi-
gious child:

Now when Volh was seven years old,
his little mother sent him out to learn,
and in a twinkling learned he grammarye;

she set him down to write with a pen,

and in a twinkling writing came to him.

Now when Volh was ten years old,

by that time Volh had learned the highest cunning;