The russian folk art

    Strange sounds woke me up. Before that I had heard many songs and religious verses, but I had never heard such a tune. Lively, whimsical, and cheerful, it at times became faster, at times broke off, and recalled something ancient that people of our time had forgotten. For a long while I didn't want to wake up and to listen closely to the words of the song - it was too tempting to remain under the influence of a completely new impression. Despite my drowsiness, I made out that several peasants were sitting about three steps from me and that a grayish old man with a thick white beard, quick eyes, and a good-natured expression on his face was singing. Squatting by the dying fire, he turned to one neighbor and then to another and sang his song, interrupting it sometimes with a grin. The singer finished and started singing another song. Then I understood that he was singing a bylina about the merchant Sadko, the rich guest. Of course I immediately jumped to my feet, persuaded the peasant to repeat what he had just sung, and took it down from his words. I asked whether he knew anything else. My new acquaintance, Leonty Bogdanovich from the village Seredka of Kizhi District, promised to perform many bylines for me: about Dobrynya Nikitich, about Ilya Muromets and about Mikhailo Potyk the son of Ivan, about the daring Vasily Buslavyevich, about Khoten Bludovich, about forty pilgrims and one, and about Svyatogor the bogatyr, but he knew only incomplete variants and somehow never finished telling the words... "
    In this passage that has since been quoted many times by folklorists Rybnikov, he writes about how in May 1860 he was caught in a storm on Lake Onega, found shelter on an island, and accidentally discovered that Russian epics (bylines) were still being sung. Scholars employ the term bylina for russian epics, a word that is derived from the past tense of the verb "to be" and implies "something that was."
    By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was believed that the Russian oral epic tradition had died out. P.M. Rybnikov, who had been sent into administrative exile to the city of Petrozavodsk on Lake Onega in the northwest, was given the job of collecting vital statistics in the area and had to do much traveling, an activity that allowed him to become closely acquainted with the life of the peasants in the region.
    Rybnikov was to learn much more in the following years, but during his first enthusiastic encounter he nevertheless discerned several basic characteristics of the Russian oral epic tradition: the bylines had survived among the peasants in northern Russia, a close relationship existed between the performers and their audience, epics were sung primarily for entertainment, they were usually performed by a single person, they were sung to a distinct kind of melody, they had no instrumental accompaniment, many subjects or themes existed in variants, and the quality of the singers differed considerably. Rybnikov and his correspondents gathered several hundred bylines, as well as other kinds of songs, which were published from 1861 to 1867 in four volumes entitled "Songs Collected by P.N. Rybnikov." Although this collection forms one of the main compilations of Russian epics, the texts have one serious drawbacks - they were recorded chiefly from a spoken paraphrase rather than from a sung performance.