Russian Classics Ultimate Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

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СКАЧАТЬ who was supposed to visit the farms and villages in mid-winter and bring fertility to the pent-in herds and frost-bound seeds. The festival in honour of Kolyada was held about the 25th of December, the date when the Sun was supposed to triumph over the death in which Nature had gripped him and to enter on his new span of life.

      Blended with Eastern mysticism there was, no doubt, in their religious ideas a considerable sprinkling of Northern magic. In their dark and lonely forest dwellings there was likely to be something more than a natural dread of that lurking prowler which stamped such an eerie impression upon the imaginations of primitive folks in many lands. The shambling form, the wailing howl, and the narrow eyes that gleamed wicked hunger in the winter woods gave the wolf a reputation for uncanny powers, and the old Slavic folk-songs clearly set forth a belief in wehr-wolf lore.

In the matter of disposing of their dead the Slavs of Eastern Europe had a variety of customs and usages, some of which were probably local practices of the different tribes. In general the body was burned and the bones enclosed in a small vessel, which was placed upon a post near the roadside. Grave-burial was also in vogue, hill-sides being chosen for that purpose. Drinking and feasting were usual accompaniments of the funeral rites, while the opposite extreme was sometimes exhibited by the slashing and scratching of the mourners’ faces in token of grief.2

Thickly mingled with the Slav homesteads in the lake regions of Peipus, Ladoga, and the forest country stretching eastwards, were the outlying villages of the Finns, who seem to have lived in harmony with their alien neighbours without at the same time showing the least tendency towards a fusion of national characteristics. Branches of the same people, Tchouds and Livs, occupied the lands of the Baltic sea-board on the north-west. South of these, wedged in between the Slavs of Poland and those of the east, in the marshy forest-lands of the Niemen basin, were the Lit’uanians, a people of Indo-European origin, who were divided into the sub-tribes of Lit’uanians, Letts, and Borussians (Prussians). Of doubtful affinity with the first-named were the Yatvyags, a black-bearded race dwelling on the extreme eastern limit of the Polish march. The Lit’uanians were even more ill-provided with towns and strongholds than their Slav neighbours, but they had at least a definite system of tribal government, remarkable for the division of the sovereign power between the prince (Rikgs) and the high-priesthood, the former having control of outside affairs, including the important business of waging war, the latter administering matters of justice and religion. The gods of the Lit’uanians were worshipped under the symbolism of sacred trees, and the religious rites included the putting to death of deformed or sickly children; this was enacted, not with the idea that bloodshed and suffering were acceptable to the Higher Powers, but rather because the latter were supposed to demand a standard of healthy and physical well-being on the part of their worshippers.3

      In the lands lying to the south and south-east, where the forests gave way bit by bit to the open wolds of the steppe country, the Slavs had for neighbours various tribes of nomads, for the most part of Turko-Finnish origin, and these completed the encircling band of stranger folk by which the primitive forest dwellers were shut in from the outside world. At this yonder world it is now necessary to take a glimpse.

      Europe towards the middle of the ninth century was still simmering in a state of semi-chaos, out of which were shortly to be evolved many of the national organisms which have lasted to modern times. Charles the Great, by the supreme folly of dividing amongst his three sons the empire he had so carefully built up, had to a great degree undone the work of his life, and political barriers are rather difficult to trace after the partition of Verdun (843), though in the dominions assigned to Charles II. some semblance of the later kingdom of France may be traced. Germany was in a transition state; the strong hand which had established dependent and responsible dukes and counts in the various Teutonic provinces—Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, and Karinthia—had been withdrawn, and as yet these princes had not erected their fiefs into independent hereditary duchies. Scarcely tamed and civilised themselves, the frontier districts of the east were bordered continuously by Danes, Wends, Czechs, Avars, and Slavonians, ever ready to make hostile incursions upon their territory. Hamburg in those days stood as a frontier town, almost an outpost in an enemy’s country, and formed with Paderborn and Bremen the high-water mark of the Frankish expansion on the north-eastern marches.

      In England national unification was in a more advanced stage; Wessex had gradually absorbed the other constituents of the so-called Heptarchy, with the exception of Mercia, which still held out a nominally separate existence. London, at this period a wooden-built town surrounded by a wall of stone, was beginning to be commercially important.

      In Spain the Christians had established among the mountains of Asturias the little kingdom of Leon, and were commencing the long struggle which was eventually to drive the Moors out of the peninsula.

      South of Rome and the Imperial territories in Italy, the duchy of Benevento alone foreshadowed the crowd of principalities and commonwealths which were to spring into existence in that country.

      To the east the Byzantine Empire, pressed by the Saracens in its Asiatic possessions, by Bulgars and Slavs on its northern boundary, severed from Rome, Ravenna, and the Western world by divergencies of ritual and dogma, humiliated by military reverses in various quarters, still loomed splendid and imposing in her isolation, and the dreaded Greek fire, if no longer “the Fire of old Rome,” helped to make her navies respected in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

      But if she still attracted the attention of the world, civilised and barbarian, it was scarcely by the exhibition of any grand moral qualities; her annals were one long record of vicious luxuries, servile flatteries, intrigues, disaffection, and cruelties, which grew like an unhealthy crop of fungi in an atmosphere charged with the gases of theological dogmatism. Revolution succeeded revolution, and each was followed by a dreary epilogue of torturings, executions, blindings, and emasculations, while synods and councils gravely discussed the amount of veneration due to pictures of the Virgin, or the exact wording of a litany. In one respect, however, the first Christian State approached the New Jerusalem of its aspirations, namely, in upholstery and artificial landscape gardening, and its gilded gates and rooms of porphyry, its jewelled trees with mechanical singing-birds, might well challenge comparison with the golden streets and walls of precious stones and sea of glass that adorned the Holy City of the Apocalypse.

      North of what might be termed the European mainland of the Eastern Empire, between the south bank of the Danube and the ridge of the Balkans, was wedged in the kingdom of Bulgaria, a Turko principality whose territory waxed and waned as its arms were successful or the contrary in the intermittent warfare it carried on against its august neighbour. Though never rising to the position of a considerable power, and at times being reduced to complete subjection, it continued to give trouble to the Byzantine State for many centuries, and the adjoining Zupanate of Servia was from time to time brought under the alternate suzerainty of whichever factor was in the ascendant.

      Beyond the Danube the Magyars had not as yet established themselves in Hungary, in the lands lately overrun by the Avars, and a considerable section of that country was absorbed in the great Moravian kingdom, a Czech state whose existence was coterminous with the ninth century, and which also embraced within its limits the vassal duchy of Bohemia, the latter country having, however, its separate dynasty of dukes.

      Farther north, Poland had scarcely commenced to have a defined existence in the polity of Europe. Its people, if the early annals are not merely fables borrowed from the common stock of European folk-lore, had elevated to the dignity of sovereign duke a peasant nicknamed Piast, from whom sprang the family of that name who held the throne not less than 600 years. From the fact that the Poles remained independent both of the Western Empire and of the neighbouring Moravian power, may be deduced the assumption that they already possessed some degree of cohesion and organization—more perhaps than distinguished them in later stages of their history.

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