Bylinas

Bylina or Starina (Russian: были́на; pl. Russian: были́ны Byliny; also Russian: стари́на; pl. Russian: стари́ны Stariny) is a traditional East Slavic oral epic narrative poem. Byliny songs are loosely based on historical fact, greatly embellished with fantasy or hyperbole to create their songs. The word Bylina is derived from the past tense of the verb “to be” (Russian: быть byt') and implies “something that was.” The term most likely originated with scholars of Russian folklore; in 1839, Sakharov, a Russian folklorist, published an anthology of Russian folklore, a section of which he titled “Byliny of the Russian People,” causing the popularization of the term. Later scholars believe that Sakharov misunderstood the word bylina in the opening of Igor’ Tale as “an ancient poem.” The folk singers of byliny called these songs stariny (Russian: старины) or starinki (Russian: старинки) meaning “stories of old” (from Russian: старь star').

Most historians of East Slavic and Russian folklore believe that byliny as a genre arose during the Kievan period, during the tenth and eleventh century; byliny continued to be composed till about the arrival of the Tatars in the thirteenth century and the destruction of the Old East Slavic civilization. Byliny incorporate elements of history from several epochs into their stories. For example, byliny singers refer to many of the enemies of the Kievan people as Tartars though the stories originally referred to other steppe peoples in conflict with Kievan Rus’. The character of Prince Vladimir refers to a generalized “epic Vladimir” rather than an allusion to a specific historical Vladimir.

Byliny have been collected in Russia since the seventeenth century; initially they were published for entertainment in prose paraphrases. The Cossack Kirsha Danilov compiled the most notable of the early collections in the Ural region for the mill owner Prokofi Demidov in the middle of the eighteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century Pavel Rybnikov traveled through the region of Lake Onega and rediscovered that the bylina tradition, which was thought to be extinct, still flourished among the peasants of northeast Russia. A storm stranded Rybnikov on an island in Lake Onega where he heard the sound of a bylina being sung; he persuaded the singer to repeat the song and wrote down his words. He proceeded to collect several hundred bylina, all of which he recorded from spoken paraphrase, and published them from 1861 to 1867 in several volumes entitled Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov.

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