The rise to dominance of the 'forest land,' the Volga-Oka heartland of
Great Russia, particularly during the Mongol overlordship, 1240-1480.
The strengthening of communal ties during a period of weakened central
authority. The fears and fascinations of the forest: bears, insects, and, above
all, fire. The enduring importance for the Russian imagination of the key
artifacts of this primitive frontier region: the icon and the axe within the
peasant hut. The cannon and the bell within populated centers: symbols of
metallic might in a wooden world.
A culture of concrete sights and sounds rather than abstract words and ideas. The images of sainthood on wooden icons; the image of divine order and hierarchy on the icon screen. The Vladimir Mother of God as the supreme mother figure of Great Russia; Andrew Rublev (1370-1430) as its supreme artist. Bells as 'angelic trumpets' and hypnotic cacophony.
rVEDUCED ?? its simplest outline, Russian culture is a tale of three cities: Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. None of them is really old by the standards of world history. The first was probably founded sometime in the eighth century, the second in the twelfth, the last at the beginning of the eighteenth. Each served as the capital of a sprawling Slavic empire on the eastern periphery of Europe; each left a permanent impact on the culture .of modern Russia.
The emergence of Moscow and then that of St. Petersburg are decisive events of modern Russian history, and the profound if subtle rivalry between the two cities is one of the recurring themes of its mature cultural development. Yet the cultural context for this drama was provided by Kiev: the first of the three great cities to rise and to fall. However weakened and transformed in later years, however subject to the separate claims of Polish and Ukrainian historians, Kiev remained the 'mother of Russian cities' and 'joy of the world' to the chroniclers.1 Memories of its accomplishment lingered on in oral folklore to give the Orthodox Eastern Slavs an enduring sense of the unity and splendor that had been theirs. In the words of the popular proverb, Moscow was the heart of Russia; St. Petersburg, its head; but Kiev, its mother.2
The origins of Kiev are still obscure, but its traceable history begins with the establishment by northern warrior-traders of a series of fortified cities along the rivers that led through the rich eastern plains of Europe into the Black and Mediterranean seas.3 The main artery of this new trade route down from the Baltic region was the Dnieper; and many historic cities of early Russia, such as Chernigov and Smolensk, were founded on strategic spots along its upper tributaries. Kiev, the most exposed and southerly of the fortified cities on this river, became the major point of contact with,the Byzantine Empire to the southeast, and the center for the gradual conversion to Orthodox Christianity in the ninth and tenth centuries of both the Scandinavian princes and the Slavic population of this region. By virtue of its
protected location on the raised west bank of the Dnieper, Kiev soon became a major bastion of Christendom against the warlike pagan nomads of the southern steppe. Economically, it, was an active trading center and probably the largest city in Eastern Europe. Politically, it became the center of a Slavic civilization that was less a distinct territorial state in the modern sense than a string of fortified cities bound by loose religious, economic, and dynastic ties.
Kievan Russia was closely linked with Western Europe;-through trade and intermarriages with every important royal family of Western Christendom.4 Russia is mentioned in such early epics as the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied.5 Indeed, the cultural accomplishments of the high medieval West which these works represent might not have been possible without the existence of a militant Christian civilization in Eastern Europe to absorb much of the shock of invasions by less civilized steppe peoples.
These promising early links with the West were, fatefully, never made secure. Increasingly, inexorably, Kievan Russia was drawn eastward into a debilitating struggle for control of the Eurasian steppe.
The political history of this the greatest undivided land mass in the world has been only very partially recorded. Like the Scyths, Sarmatians, and Huns before them (and their Mongol contemporaries and adversaries), the Russians were to acquire a reputation ?.more stable societies for both ruggedness and cruelty. But unlike all the others who dominated the steppe, the Russians succeeded-not just in conquering but in civilizing the entire region, from the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas in the east.
The inspiration for this accomplishment came from neither Europe nor Asia, but from a Byzantine Empire that lay between the two, Greek in speech but Oriental in magnificence. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople lay on the strait of water separating Europe from Asia and connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and the rivers leading into the heartland of Central and Eastern Europe: the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Don. Known as the 'new' or 'second' Rome, this city of Constantine continued to rule the Eastern half of the old Roman Empire for almost a thousand years after the Western Roman Empire had crumbled.
Of all the cultural accomplishments of Byzantium, none was more important than the bringing of Christianity to the Slavs. When the Holy Land, North Africa, and Asia Minor fell to Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, Byzantium was forced to turn north and east to recoup its fortunes. By the ninth century, Constantinople had regained the self-confidence needed for fresh expansion. The long-debated questions of Christian doctrine had been resolved by the seven councils of the Church; Islamic invaders
had been repelled from without and puritanical iconoclasts rejected within the capital. Emperors and Patriarchs had both begun to challenge the authority of a West not yet clearly emerging from the Dark Ages.
Thej-apidjixtostor^ of: Byzantine political and cultural influence into the Balkans during the ninth century dramatized the exuberance of this 'second golden age' of Byzantine history. The key moment in this penetration was the mission to the Slavs of two Greek brothers from the borderlands of the Slavic world in Macedonia: Cyril, a widely traveled and rcndwnedsctfolaf, and Methodius', ah administrator with experience in Slavic-speaking areas of the Byzantine Empire. In distant Moravia and later in Bulgaria, they helped turn vernacular Slavic into a written language suitable for translating the basic'books of Orthodox Christendom. They apparently did their first work with the exotic and specially invented Glagolitic alphabet; but their followers soon concentrated on the Cyrillic alphabet, which had many relatively familiar Greek letters. A rich store of Christian literature was transcribed in both alphabets within a half century of thejnissionaries' death.* Slavonic became the language of worship of all Orthodox Slavs; and Cyrillic,'which ???? the name of the more scholarly brother, became the alphabet of the Bulgarians and South Slavs.
When the followers of Cyril and Methodius extended these liturgical and literary activities to Kievan Russia in the tenth and the early eleventh century, the Eastern Slavs acquired a language that had become (together with Latin and Greek) one of the three languages of writing and worship in medieval Christendom. Though subjected to many changes and variations, Church Slavonic remained the basic literary language of Russia until late in the
