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- Impressions of Russian Literature
- II
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II.
The Russian national literature, like the Danish,
dates from the eighteenth century, and it is even a
little younger than the latter. The foundation was
laid by Lomonósof, thirty years after Holberg became
the founder of ours. But between the ancient literature
written in the Church Slavic together with the bîlinî,
which date from a period before the reign of the Tatars,
and the modern Russian book-world there lie the popular
ballads, the short lyrical poems, Little Russian as well
as Great Russian, rich and attractive from their
tenderness and their sadness.
Little-Russian and Great-Russian popular ballads, each
written in its own dialect, sung by widely different
people, belong, in fact, to two different literatures, of which
one, in later times, by despotic command, has been
suppressed; but, in spite of the differences, the two groups
present so many points of resemblance that they
influence the mind in a cognate manner.
The Little-Russian ballads treat exclusively of the
life of the Cossack people in older and later times. The
Ukraine steppes are the theatre of this life, but the
ballads also follow the Cossack in all his bold excursions
away from home for centuries. They present picture
after picture of the dangers in the martial life on
horseback, in eternal conflicts with enemies in the east and
west. There is the mortal hour of the wounded Cossack
longing for home in a foreign land; the corpse which is
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