The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

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СКАЧАТЬ the inhabitants of Northern Livland to throw off the Catholic yoke and call the citizens of Novgorod to their assistance, propitiating them with a portion of the spoil they had wrested from the Germans and Skandinavians. Novgorod, by a curious revulsion of feeling, had, after a succession of princes of the house of Souzdal, elected the same Yaroslav who had treated her people with such heartless cruelty. Possibly, in the turn affairs were taking on their west, the Novgorodskie saw an opportunity for employing his malignant genius against their obnoxious enemies. But the warlike efforts of the men of Lake Ilmen and their Souzdalian prince were neutralised by the fact that the Germans, fighting behind the walls of their towns, were more skilled in the handling of the slings and stone-hurling engines, the rude artillery of the day; the old Russian proverb, “Who can resist God and Velikie Novgorod?” had to be modified in the face of such weapons of precision, and the Westerners remained masters of the greater part of the disputed territories.

      Two hundred years of unending domestic strife, carving and shredding off into a crowd of incoherent provinces—Kiev, Tchernigov, Riazan, Souzdal, Smolensk, Polotzk, Novgorod, Pskov, Volhynia, Galitz, and others of less importance—had not fitted Russia to contend with the expanding powers of Catholic Christendom, or to show a solid front against the incursion of teeming Asiatic hordes on her east.

The Chronicles of Russian history at this period were wholly in the hands of the monks who wrote them around the deeds of the princes or of the luminaries of the Church; hence little can be gleaned from them of the social life and condition of the people, who existed therein solely for the purposes of supplying raw material for a massacre or a pestilence. The history of Novgorod is valuable as yielding occasional glimpses of the life-pulse that beat beneath the over-crust of court or cathedral annals, but this city was too impregnated with outside influences to furnish a faithful picture of the inward state of old-time Russia. Of the towns it may be broadly stated that they were yet little more in scope than walled villages; universities or seats of learning other than the monkish cloister there were none, and much of the trade was in the hands of foreign merchants. The wealthy boyarins had their houses and palaces clustered within the walls, and often possessed in addition other houses in the sloboda, or detached village, without, where there was more space available for gardens, etc. Freemen as well as slaves (the latter captured in war or bought) were in their service, but the abject poverty of the lower classes of freemen bound them in almost servile dependence on their masters. Even more grinding was the normal state of poverty in which the peasants eked out their livelihood, and the name smerd applied to them was one of contempt, something akin to our “rascallion.” For the most part the peasants tilled the soil for the landowners under a system which allowed them a half, or other fixed share, of the harvest produced, the freeman having this distinction from the kholop or bondman that he was able to move from one estate to another at will. Under these conditions of hand-to-mouth existence farm-craft remained at a very low ebb; with axe, scythe, and plough the peasant won precarious roothold for his crops, which might be blighted by an untimely frost-coming or damaged by a too-late thaw, leaving him to propitiate his appeal-court of saints by an involuntary emptiness ofstomach. With cattle-stock, horses, and horned beasts, the Russian lands, of the north especially, were ill-provided, and possibly this was partly the outcome of the unsettled state of the country, which discouraged the multiplication of movable property, even the heaviest church bells being now and again swept off in the wake of some pilfering kniaz-raid.34

22 See Table I. for Grand Princes of Kiev.

23 The affix vitch signifies son of: Sviatoslavitch—son of Sviatoslav.

24 Vseslav Briatcheslavitch.

25 “The Song of the Expedition of Igor.”

26 Georg Pray.

27 N. G. Riesenkampff, Der Deutsche Hof zu Nowgorod.

28 Rambaud, History of Russia.

29 See Table III. for house of Souzdal.

30 Stribog was the Slavonic wind-god.

31 Rendered into English partly from H. von Paucker’s German translation, Das Lied von der Heerfahrt Igor’s Fürsten von Seversk, and partly from a modernised Russian reproduction of the Slavonic text.

32 Kadlubek, Origine et rebus gestis Polonorum.

33 S. Solov’ev.

34 Karamzin; S. Solov’ev; Schiemann; Kostomarov, Sieverno Rousskiya Narodopravstva, Chronique de Nestor.

      CHAPTER IV

       THE COMING OF THE MONGOLS

       Table of Contents

      As an advancing tide, engulfing in its progression the stretches of ooze-land which lie in its onward path, sends scurrying before it flights of waders and other shore-haunting birds, driven from their feeding grounds, so the great Mongol wave which was creeping upon Eastern Europe drove before it disordered troops of the Polovtzi nomads, seeking among their old enemies the safety which their desert fastnesses no longer afforded. Into the principality of Kiev poured the fugitives, bringing with them droves of horses, camels, cattle, and buffaloes—a wonderful and misgiving sight to the staring Russians, who saw their fierce, untamable foes, the incarnation to them of all that was barbarous, outlandish, and terrible, cowering and fleeing from some unseen horror behind. That the wolf of the steppes should come to lie down, panting and trembling, with the lamb, boded the advent of anything but a millennium. The accounts given by the Polovtzi khans of the Mongol hordes which had swept the tribes of Western Asia before their advancing host, roused the Russian princes to a sense of the danger they courted by their disunion, and gathered them together in the old capital to deliberate on a common action in opposition to the threatened invasion. Mstislav of Galitz, erstwhile of Toropetz, Mstislav Romanovitch (of the house of Smolensk), Prince of Kiev, Daniel of Volhynia, Mstislav of Tchernigov, and other princes of less importance, held high counsel between them, and debated the means of averting the Mongol advance; and as they paused in their deliberations to mark the unwonted caravans and uncouth brutes of the desert that thronged the streets and approaches of Kiev, it must have been borne in upon them that already Asia had overflowed her limits and swept the Russian lands into her embrace. And while, taking heart of grace from the assemblage of so many important princes and the leadership of the redoubtable Mstislav of Galitz, they consider how best to oppose these fearsome enemies, it will be of interest to learn something of the history of this Mongol horde, this mushroom growth that had over-spread the northern empire of China, made a desolate waste of Persia, carried its arms into Hindostan, and risen to be the greatest power in Asia, and which was now threatening to attack the outskirts of Christendom.

In the dreary steppe-land of the Gobi desert, south of the Baikal Sea, where flows the Onon, СКАЧАТЬ