Buryat language in schools. In 1996 the Russian Parliament finally passed a bill concerning the nation-alalities policy of the Russian Federation, allowing the Buryatlanguage and native customs to be taught and preserved. See also: ALTAI; KALMYKS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; SIBERIA; TUVA AND TUVINIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. (1997). Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Hudgins, Sharon. (2003). The Other Side Of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. College Station: Texas A amp;M University Press. Preobrazhensky, Alexander. (1993). “The Beginning of Common Road,” International Affairs, May 1993. Tkacz, Virlana, Sayan Zhambalov, et al. (2002). Shanar: Dedication Ritual of a Buryat Shaman in Siberia. New York: Parabola Books.
(1821-1866), Russian revolutionary democrat and political organizer.
A graduate of St. Petersburg University Law Department and a clerk at the Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Butashevich-Petrashevsky founded (in 1844) and headed a clandestine society of educated youth, from moderate to radical, that were opposed to Tsarism and serfdom. The “Petrashevskians” (pe-trashevtsy) held gatherings at his home on Fridays; their members included Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then an upstart story writer, and a future nationalist thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Petrashevskians engaged in the study of Western democratic and socialist thought, in particular, the works of Charles Fourier, French utopian socialist and advocate of reorganizing society into a federation of grassroots communes (falanst?res). Petrashevsky apparently organized a falanst?re in his own estate, although it was subsequently destroyed by peasants. Petra-shevskians authored and published two issues of The Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words (1846, 1849) that included explanations for a number of terms from the “revolutionary” lexicon and was later used against them as incriminating evidence. They also disseminated the Letter of Belinsky to Gogol that was banned in Russia. Their circle is viewed as Russia’s closest reflection of the revolutionary movements of 1848 in Western and Central Europe. In 1849, with the onset of political repression in Russia after the revolutions in Europe had been crushed, Petrashevsky was arrested together with other members of his circle. Most of them, except himself, pleaded guilty of anti-government activities, and all were sentenced to death, but the sentence was revoked by Nicholas I; the announcement was made at the last moment at the scene of the execution. For Petrashevsky, death penalty was replaced by a lifetime sentence to forced labor in a penal colony in Eastern Siberia. In 1856 he declined the pardon offered by Alexander II to political prisoners as part of the general amnesty.
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See also: DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH; DOS-TOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; PETRASHEVTSY
Evans John L. (1974). The Petrasevskij Circle, 1845-1849. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton.
Oral epic song type.
The term bylina is a nineteenth-century scholarly innovation, although it is found with a different meaning (“true happening”) in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Zadonshchina. Folksingers generally called any such songs starina or starinka (song of olden times). Known first from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the bylinas were mainly collected in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth. They had survived on the margins of the Russian state: in the north, the Urals, parts of Siberia, and among cossacks in the south. Since true epics are relatively scarce in world folklore, the Russian repertoire is significant. It is also notable for its relative brevity (typically a few hundred lines) and native subjects and heroes.
Epic composition of some kind probably was practiced in early medieval times, as witness literary reflections in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, Zadon-shchina, passages of the Destruction of Ryazan, and the tale of Kozhemyaka in the Primary Chronicle. The first two of these would seem to indicate that epic singing started in princely courts and was performed by professional bards. But the bylina known to researchers it was performed by peasant singers of tales, both men and women. Most of the surviving examples are set in Kievan Rus in the time of a Prince Vladimir (unclear which one), often with the heroes anachronistically fighting Tatar armies, and this suggests that the songs originated in later centuries when Kiev as capital was only a vague memory and circumstances could be confused with those of the Tatar Yoke. Attempts have been made to attach certain of the exploits to historical events, but this remains doubtful. Rather, it seems that bylinas are fictions reflecting wish fulfillment pervasive in Russian folklore; with superhuman strength and prowess, native heroes always win against the steppe enemies, turning history upside down. Being improvisational, performances differ according to the talents and tastes of performers. It is believed that early practitioners were professionals who chanted to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, the gusli. In modern times the bylinas were often spoken or sung (the latter especially by cossacks). The bylina’s metrical principle is accentual: a fixed number of strong stresses (three or two) per line, usually with the last stress on the third from last syllable (marking the end of the line) and often with the first stress coming on the third syllable of the line. The number of weak syllables between stresses varies. Conventionally, extra syllables and words might be inserted in order to get the desired spacing of stresses.
Approximately one hundred subjects of the bylina are known. Scholars categorize the epic songs either chronologically (old and new) or by region (Kievan and Novgorodian). The older heroes (Volkh, Svyatogor) are called that because they appear to be connected with ancient myths. Characteristic Kievan heroes (bogatyrs) are Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich, while Dyuk Stepanovich is an aristocratic dandy and Sukhman a rare tragic hero. The few bylinas from Novgorod (Sadko, Vasily Buslayev) reflect the commercial interests of that merchant republic of the North.
Related to the bylinas as epic compositions are the so-called historical songs and spiritual songs. See also: FOLK MUSIC; FOLKLORE; HISTORICAL SONGS; LAY OF IGOR’S CAMPAIGN; MUSIC; SKAZ; ZADONSHCHINA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailey, James, and Ivanova, Tatyana, tr., ed. (1999). An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Sokolov, Y. M. (1971). Russian Folklore, tr. Catherine Ruth Smith. Detroit: Folklore Associates.
Toward the end of the tenth century-the conventional date is 988-Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich of Kiev made Christianity the official religion of his people, the Rus. In choosing his faith, he also had to choose between its two institutional structures- that of the Western (Latin) Church under the au190
thority of the pope in Rome, and that of the Eastern (Greek) Church under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople (Byzantium). Although the two churches were not formally in opposition at the time-the Great Schism occurred in 1054- nevertheless they had grown apart over the centuries, and each had developed its own distinctive features. Vladimir chose the Byzantine version, a decision with consequences at many levels. However, the nature and extent of Russia’s Byzantine heritage has been controversial. Some have argued that, since Christianity was imported into Rus from Byzantium, the culture that grew therefrom cannot be said to have been merely influenced by Byzantium: it simply was Byzantine, a local development from and within the broader Byzantine tradition. Others, by contrast, stress the active nature of cultural borrowing-namely, the adoption and adaptation of selected elements of Byzantine culture to serve local needs and hence to develop a native culture that, while indebted to Byzantium in superficial aspects of form, was indigenous in substance and essence. Such are the crude extremes. The more productive discussion lies in the nuances between the two.
For seven hundred years from the official Conversion, high-status cultural expression among the East Slavs of Rus and then of Muscovy was almost entirely limited to the celebration, affirmation, and exposition of Christianity, and hence was almost entirely limited to the appropriate forms inher-ited-directly or indirectly-from Byzantium. In painting this was the age of the icon: not really art in the modern sense (as the product of an individual artist’s
