378 RUSSIAN BALLADS

that no store of wealth he save,
neither me, Marusja the slave,
child of Boguslav the priest,
evermore seek to release,

for become a Turk I am, I'm become a Mussulman,
for the Turk's magnificence,
and for my concupiscence.

It is suggested that the case of Marusja Bogoslavka would be that
of Roxolana (Rossa), wife of Suleiman I, who seems to have been
a priest's daughter from Galicia (d, 1558). Something of the old
'bogatyr' spirit breathes in Cossack Golota's Duel with a Tatar (43).
For the most part we are dealing with fragments in regular
metres on quite general themes. It is only possible to identify a
name or an allusion by chance. An adventurous and romantic
scholarship has thus room to work out identifications, as Chodzko
did, stretching back to a remote pagan antiquity, with the dynasty
of Rurik as almost a middle point in the series. Dragomanov,
though more prudent, assigns his first twenty items to 'the age of
the "druziny" and princes*. These pieces are almost entirely
dancing-songs, and not at all easy to interpret in an exact fashion.
Some of them mention names of persons or places. In one the
dancers propose to sail down the silent Don and attack Constanti-
nople ; others speak of sieges of Constantinople, Lwow, Mogila,
Kamenec, Mier, &c., the Greeks and others being specified as
enemies. If these are references to real events, then they take us
back to dates in the remote middle ages. The classical attack on
Constantinople was that of Oleg in the early tenth century. But in
the absence of narrative context or other guarantees of historicity,
there is nothing to compel us to believe these sieges were more than
figments of fancy. Take, for instance, The Duel with the Turkish
King (6). A Russian hero, it is alleged, seized a Turkish (or Czech)
king and would not release him. Turkish sultans appeared at the
head of large armies only in 1620 and 1672, and no Russian gained
then the 'spolia opima'. There is no way of connecting the allega-
tions with any Czech king. The 'spolia opima' were won by
Svjatopolk Izjaslavic in 1103, when he captured the Polovcy
leader Khan Belduz. The ballad might be emended in this sense,
but there is not really any reason to believe that this is more than
an imagined case. So, too, with a dance which speaks of the arrest
of some one called Ivan while dancing (n).