Old East Slavic literature
It differs from Byzantine literature by its emphasized irregularity, the blurring of genres and boundaries between the prosaic and the poetic, and the lack of a clear conceptual apparatus.
Small compositions, for example, "Praying of Daniel the Immured" or the Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land did not make up separate books, but were distributed in collections.
[5] The early examples of pre-Christian Old East Slavic Rus' literature should primarily include the oral epic: legends, myths and fairy tales.
bylichka and byvalschina were often told in the villages to friends or children in order to wean them to walk far from home, and, according to Yevgeny Meletinsky, they became the prototype of "scary fairy tales".
[6] Later, a special type of druzhina poetry began to take shape – bylina, Rus' epic poems about heroic or mythological events or remarkable episodes of national history.
[citation needed] Later, the original Old East Slavic apocrypha began to be created, the most famous of which is "The Walking of the Virgin through the Torments".
Its plot is similar to the Greek "Revelation of the Most Holy Theotokos", but it also has many original features: for example, pagans who worship Troyan [ru; de], Veles and Perun are in the first circle of hell, and there are a number of anti-Semitic statements in the text itself.
[citation needed] According to the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the special popularity of apocryphal literature in Rus' is indicated by the fact that of the seven most important monuments of the Jewish apocalyptic (except for the books of the prophet Daniel), three were preserved exclusively in Old Slavonic translations.
[7] Presumably, both epics and folk tales were not recorded by contemporaries for the reason that Rus' inherited from the Byzantine Empire a ban on literary fiction and the presence of a purely artistic function in the works.
Included in these is the Palea, a collection of several interconnected ancient Rus' works that set out Old Testament history, with additions from apocryphal monuments, as well as with theological reasoning.
In the Sermon on Law and Grace of the middle of the 11th century (the future Metropolitan, Hilarion of Kiev), the newly baptized Rus' people are called new.
Thus, the lexeme Word (Old East Slavic: Слово, romanized: Slovo, also translatable as Tale, Lay or Discourse[a]) often perceived as the name of a genre, could mean a didactic teaching, a chapter of a book, a conversation, a speech, articles of various content, etc.
[14][15] Nevertheless, Nikita Tolstoy made an attempt to classify ancient Rus' literature;[16] later, the classification was edited by Evgeny Vereshchagin (the latter version is somewhat different from Tolstoy's): This classification does not distinguish between primary genres (for example, hagiographies) and unifying genres that include small works as source material (prologue, menaiat-chets, etc.).
Among the works equal to the "doctrine of numbers", scientists include the "Charter of military Affairs" created in the 15th and 16th centuries, which set out the tasks of triangulation on the ground, and the "Book of soshny writing", dedicated to land surveying.
[citation needed] The early cosmological works of Kievan Rus' were partially influenced by apocryphal writings, mixed with pre-Christian ideas about the structure of the world.
Both works have a complex structure and are probably based on Old East Slavic apocryphal legends that existed for the early period after the Christianization of Kievan Rus'.
The scientist Alexander Panchenko refers to the earliest forms of Old East Slavic versification as the so-called "penitential poems" (the metrical nature of which is not yet clear),[22] single poetic texts written by the monk of the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery Efrosin, as well as separate chapters The Tale of Igor's Campaign and the Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land containing a metric constant.
[citation needed] Some of the earliest representatives of Old East Slavic syllabic poetry are such poets as Karion Istomin, Simeon of Polotsk, Theophan Prokopovich, Antiochus Kantemir, Sylvester Medvedev and Mardary Khonykov [ru].
Thus, the acrostic is found in one of the "greetings" of Karion Istomin to Tsarevich Alexey Petrovich:[citation needed] Аминь буди слава, Любовь чиста, права Единому Богу, К себе в слогах многу.
Взрасти тя Бог в славе, Имети ю здраве!Here the acrostic is "Alexy Tsarevich live forever" (Алексий царевич вечно живи; in the fourth verse in the original, the first letter is the Slavic "xi").
[citation needed] The legal basis of the Kievan Rus' state[24][25] was the Russkaya Pravda, Lithuanian statutes and Moscow Sidebniks.
According to most researchers, the Lengthy Truth is based on the Short text, which was amended and supplemented, including those adopted during the Kiev reign of Vladimir II Monomakh.
However, despite the widespread existence in the written tradition, Byzantine law did not have a significant application in legal practice, and its full reception did not occur.
