Russian folk culture.
Stasov turned next to the study of the byliny, the epic songs which contained Russia's oldest folk myths and legends, claiming that these too were from Asia. In his Origins of the Russian Byliny (1868) he agued that the byliny were Russified derivatives of Hindu, Buddhist or Sanskrit myths and tales, which had been brought to Russia by armies, merchants and nomadic immigrants from Persia, India and Mongolia. Stasov's argument was based upon the theory of cultural
borrowing - at that time just recently advanced by the German philologist Theodor Benfey. During the last decades of the nineteenth century Benfey's theory was increasingly accepted by those folklorists in the West (Godeke and Kohler, Clouston and Liebrecht) who maintained that European folk tales were secondary versions of oriental originals. Stasov was the first to make a detailed argument for Benfey's case. His argument was based on a comparative analysis of the byliny with the texts of various Asian tales - especially the ancient Indian stories of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Panchantra, which had been translated into German by Benfey in 1859.
Stasov paid particular attention to the narrative details, the symbols and the motifs of these ancient tales (not perhaps the strongest basis from which to infer a cultural influence, for basic similarities of plot and character can easily be found in folk tales from around the world). * Stasov concluded, for example, that the Russian legend of Sadko (where a merchant goes to an underwater kingdom in search of wealth) was derived from the Brahmin story of the Harivansa (where the flight to the underworld is a spiritual journey in search of truth). According to Stasov, it was only in the later versions of the Russian tale (those that date from after the fifteenth century) that the religious element was supplanted by the motif of commercial wealth. It was at this time that the legend was transposed on to the historical figure of Sadko - a wealthy member of a seafaring guild in Novgorod who had endowed a church of St Boris and St Gleb in the twelfth century.83
Similarly, Stasov argued that the folk heroes (bogatyrs) of the byliny were really the descendants of the oriental gods. The most famous of these bogatyrs was Ilia Muromets - a brave and honest warrior who championed the people's cause against such enemies as Solovei Raz-boinik, the 'Nightingale Robber', who was usually recast with Tatar features in the later versions of this Russian tale. Stasov drew attention to the supernatural age of Ilia Muromets - several hundred years by logical deduction from the details of the tale. This suggested that
* There is some historical evidence to support Stasov's thesis, however. Indian tales were certainly transported by migrants to South-east Asia, where these tales are widely known today; and the Ramayana tale was known from translations in Tibet from at least the thirteenth century (see J. W. de Jong, The Story of Rama in Tibet: Text and Translation of the Tun-huang Manuscripts (Stuttgart, 1989)).
Muromets was descended from the mythic kings who reigned over India for centuries, or from the oriental gods who transcended human time.84 The word 'bogatyr' was itself derived from the Mongol term for 'warrior' (bagadur), according to Stasov. He drew on evidence from European philologists, who had traced the word's etymological relatives to all those countries that had once been occupied by the Mongol hordes: bahadir (in Persian), behader (in Turkish), bohater (in Polish), bator (in Magyar), etc.85
Finally, Stasov analysed the ethnographic details of the texts - their place names, number systems, scenery and buildings, household items and furniture, clothing, games and customs - all of which suggested that the byliny had come, not from the northern Russian forests, but rather from the steppe.
If the byliny really did grow out of our native soil in ancient times, then, however much they were later altered by the princes and the Tsars, they should still contain the traces of our Russian land. So we should read in them about our Russian winters, our snow and frozen lakes. We should read about our Russian fields and meadows; about the agricultural nature of our people; about our peasant huts and generally about the native, always wooden buildings and uten-sils; about our Russian hearth and the spiritual beliefs that surround it; about the songs and rituals of the village chorus; about the way we worship our ancestors; about our belief in mermaids, goblins, house spirits and various other superstitions of pagan Rus'. Everything, in short, should breathe the spirit of our country life. But none of this is in the byliny. There is no winter, no snow or ice, as if these tales are not set in the Russian land at all but in some hot climate of Asia or the East. There are no lakes or mossy river banks in the byliny. Agricultural life is never seen in them. There are no wooden buildings. None of our peasant customs is described. There is nothing to suggest the Russian way of life - and what we see instead is the arid Asian steppe.86
Stasov caused considerable outrage among the Slavophiles and other nationalists with his Asiatic theory of the byliny. He was accused of nothing less than 'slandering Russia'; his book was denounced as a 'source of national shame', its general conclusions as 'unworthy of a Russian patriot'.' It was not just that Stasov's critics took offence at his 'oriental fantasy' that 'our culture might have been descended from the
barbarous nomads of the Asian steppe'.88 As they perceived it, Stasov's theory represented a fundamental challenge to the nation's identity. The whole philosophy of the Slavophiles had been built on the assumption that the nation's culture grew from its native soil. For over thirty years they had lavished their attentions on the byliny, going round the villages and writing down these tales in the firm belief that they were true expressions of the Russian folk. Tales such as Sadko and Ilia Muromets were sacred treasures of the people's history, the Slavophiles maintained, a fact which was suggested by the very word bylina, which was, they said, derived from the past tense of 'to be' (byl).89
One of the strongholds of the Slavophiles was the 'mythological school' of folklorists and literary scholarship which had its origins in the European Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. Stasov's fiercest critics belonged to the school, which numbered the most venerable folklorists, such as Buslaev and Afanasiev, among its followers. The exponents of the mythological theory worked on the rather questionable assumption that the ancient beliefs of the Russian people could be reconstructed through their contemporary life and art. For Buslaev, the songs about Sadko were 'the finest living relics of our people's poetry which have been preserved in all their purity and without the slightest trace of outside influence'. Ilia Muromets was a real folk hero of the ancient past 'who embodies, in their purest form, the spiritual ideals of the people'.90 In the early 1860s the byliny had suddenly become a new and vital piece of evidence for the mythological school. For it had been revealed by Pavel Rybnikov that they were still a living and evolving form. Rybnikov was a former civil servant who had been exiled to the countryside of Olonets, 200 kilometres to the north-east of Petersburg, as a punishment for his involvement in a revolutionary group. Like so many of the Tsar's internal exiles, Rybnikov became a folklorist. Travelling around the villages of Olonets, he recorded over thirty different singers of the byliny, each with his own versions of the major tales such as Ilia Muromets. The publication of these Songs, in four volumes between 1861 and 1867, sparked a huge debate about the character and origins of Russia's folk culture which, if one is to judge from Turgenev's novel Smoke (1867), even engulfed the emigre community in Germany. Suddenly the origins of the byliny had become the battleground for opposing views of Russia and its cultural
destiny. On the one side there was Stasov, who argued that the pulse of ancient Asia was still beating in the Russian villages; and on the other the Slavophiles, who saw the byliny as living proof that Russia's Christian culture had remained there undisturbed for many centuries.
This was the background to the intellectual conflicts over the conception of Sadko (1897), the opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. The evolution of the opera was typical of the collectivist traditions of the kuchkist school. The original idea had been given by Stasov to Balakirev as early as 1867; Balakirev passed it on to Musorgsky; and Musorgsky handed it to Rimsky-Korsakov. It is easy to see why Rimsky should have been attracted to the story of the opera. Like Sadko, Rimsky was a sailor (a former naval officer, to be precise) and musician who came from Novgorod. Moreover, as Stasov wrote to him with his draft scenario in 1894, the subject would allow the composer to explore 'the magic elements of Russian pagan culture which are so strongly felt in your artistic character'.91 In the standard versions of the bylina Sadko is a humble minstrel (skomorokh) who plays the gusli
