An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova

[sophia_sol]

An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova

This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.

As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.

Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.

It's GREAT.

Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!

One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:

"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"

It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.

Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.

Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!

Comments

[chestnut_pod]

This sounds very cool! I love the thought of getting to track individual performers' quirks and methods, and getting a sense of their surroundings too, by including their asides and interactions with others in the space.

Is the character canon the same as the famous Russian folktales? The Vasilisas and Ivans and so on? Or is it separate?

[sophia_sol]

There are actually surprisingly few interjections from the performers, only a few here or there -- I wonder if in a usual performance there would be more, but they were self-conscious performing for collectors, or if interrupting your performance really is unusual.

The character canon is actually very different from Russian folk-tales! Popular characters include people like Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich. Almost all the main characters are bogatyrs (powerful and higher-class warriors, basically). Prince Vladimir (Vladimir the Great) shows up extremely regularly as a secondary character, as the ruler of Kievan Rus, so the heroes are often partying at Vladimir's place. And even if a particular bylina might be about some other hero, Ilya Muromets etc will show up as minor background characters when you need other bogatyrs on the scene.

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, cool! That’s really so interesting. I like the thought of a designated secondary character, or a designated plot device host. Sort of Arthurian!

[tei]

Oh, this is so cool, I'd never heard of this form. I wonder if the reckless heads/green wine etc. are there for the same reason they are in the Greek epics, as metrical filler that make it easier to plan out the right number of syllables/convenient emphasis?

For some reason the backwards simile reminds me of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." Although not quite, because it's backwards in a different way-- the thing that is could be this other thing, but it actually isn't.

[sophia_sol]

That's my best guess too at the reason for the set phrases! It does make me wish I knew what the original Russian was, so I could analyze that

I think you're right about the closest out there in english literature to the backwards simile, though as you say it's backwards in a different way. I wonder if this kind of backwards simile is a bylina only thing or if it's a Russian thing more broadly?

[superborb]

Oh I am SO into this, I've placed a hold immediately!

I love poetic framing devices that are super different in different cultures. It's so interesting how they develop!

This kind of reminds me of what draws me to fic, actually. A body of work that shares characters and expectations, but which are all independent?

[pauraque]

This kind of reminds me of what draws me to fic, actually. A body of work that shares characters and expectations, but which are all independent?

My first thought as well!

[sophia_sol]

ah yay, I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did!

And YES I was also thinking of fanfic the whole way through, you're so right about the similarities!

[genarti]

Oh, this sounds so cool!

[sophia_sol]

It really is! And so unexpectedly too, this was one of the books I got in the massive pile of questionable fairy tale books from a friend of a friend, so I wasn't coming in expecting to be wowed

[lokifan]

This sounds fascinating, especially the inclusion of how the singers actually perform, including mistakes etc. swan_tower's New Worlds essay series just did one on how oral storytelling uses repetition etc in ways that are boring on the page, and how written storytelling so rarely includes the kind of stuff that's done in real oral performance even when it's pretending to be folklore in an oral tradition.

[sophia_sol]

yes! Oral performance is honestly very different from how things get written down, the things that work orally are just different than the things that work in other forms. And people who don't come from an oral culture (or haven't studied it) don't tend to have a good sense for it.