Russian Heroic Poetry

Originally published in 1932, this book presents a collection of Russian heroic poems, or byliny, edited and translated into English. The selections run in chronological order from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century, with particular focus on major historic figures such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

No detailed description available for "Bylina and fairy tale".

Key issues surrounding the composition and recording of folklore include its frequently intensely political aspect and it preoccupation with chimerical cultural authority. These issues are dramatically displayed in Soviet epic compositions of the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called noviny (“new songs”), which took their formal inspiration to a great extent from traditional Russian epic songs, byliny (“songs of the past"), and their narrative content from contemporary political and other events in Stalinist Russia. The story of the noviny is at once complex and comprehensible. While it may be tempting to interpret the excrescences of Stalinism as unique aberrations, the reality was often more complicated. The noviny were not simply the result of political fiat, an episode in an ideological vacuum. Their emergence occurred in part because of specific trends and controversies that marked European folklore collection and publication from at least the late eighteenth century on, as well as because of developments in Russian folkloristics from the mid-nineteenth century on that assumed perhaps exaggerated proportions. The demise of the noviny was equally mediated by a host of political and theoretical considerations. This study tells the story of the rise and fall of the noviny in all its cultural richness and pathos, an instructive tale of the interaction of aesthetics and ideology.

DIVTreachery and sexual intrigue abound in this gripping and influential Russian novel. Its picaresque tales trace a Byronic hero's exploits amid the rugged Caucasian frontier. /div

Akhmatova was unquestionably one of the great poets of the 20th century. These exquisite translations convey the subtle beauties and daring associations of a poet whose long life proved poetry's capacity for survival and subversive resistance to tyranny.