Slavic Epic: Past Tales and Present Myths*

Abstract

Slavic epic is, in fact, something of a misnomer. By "Slavic" we designate first and foremost one of the major branches of the Indo-European family of languages, while "epic" is a type of composition which, more often than not, deals with foundational or national myths. No texts have survived in which both characteristics, Slavic and epic, were concurrent. We do not have any written accounts dating to the time of the unified Slavic proto-language. Writing arrived late to Slavic-speaking peoples, only after they had abandoned their original homeland and spread across the land between Europe and Asia that is nowadays mostly populated by speakers of languages of the Slavic family. 1 Unfortunately, too, none of the literate peoples with whom the Slavs had contact recorded a hypothetical Common Slavic Epic.We therefore have no such thing as a long Slavic epic poem narrating a foundational myth, either in written form or somehow preserved in oral form. In fact, what we refer to nowadays as "Slavic epic" are speculative and partial reconstructions of certain aspects of purported common oral epic poetry, such as the type of verse or the characteristics of performance. Not only are we dealing, then, with an uncertain, reconstructed tradition, but such reconstruction is founded only upon late written evidence from only two of the three linguistic areas of Slavic (South and East Slavic); there is little or no evidence of any West Slavic epic. 2 Bleak as this outlook might seem, there is still much to be said about epics written or performed in Slavic languages, and how they functioned, in the distant as well as in the more recent past, in the societies that produced them and kept them alive. Past TalesWithin the sphere of Slavic languages, we can attest with a relative degree of certainty only to the existence of written epic poems in East Slavic, produced in medieval Epic and History Edited

Revisiting Pan-Slavism in the Contemporary Perspective

“…To begin with, Burry and Orr (2015) focus on the Russian and Slavic cultural identities, examining the novel, Anna Karenina. Prieto (2009), for her part, continues in very much the same manner, treating the influence of Pan-Slavism on the literature of Slavic nations, while Boldin (2018) aims at the role of the Russian language for the integration of Slavs into one country or a kind of superstate of Slavic people, taking into consideration two generations of Pan-Slaviststhe "patriarch of Russian Slavic studies" and a convinced Slavophile, V. I. Lamansky; and a supporter of the 'new Slavic worldview' and a leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Ljubomir Stojanović. Dusza (2014) goes on to explore other arts, analyzing whether Pan-Slavic ideas did indeed find their way onto the canvas of the Czech painter Alfons Mucha, credited with the cycle of 20 large canvases called "The Slav Epic."…”