Epic Songs of Russia

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In this issue the author has made a few slight corrections or alterations; but the Songs them selves, as well as the Introduction and Appendix, are substantially unchanged. Of the circum stances in which the Epic Songs of Russia are now placed before English readers, of the new spirit in which we now regard the Russian people, the dedication which she has prefixed to this edition may speak sufficiently. In the original edition of the work the late Pro fessor Francis Child, in a brief preface, bespoke a welcome for it, and expressed his own obligation to the author for her Spirited and sympathetic rendering. To that fine scholar, whose classical work on the English and Scottish Ballads gives him a lasting claim on our gratitude, its primary value was in the light it threw on his own studies in popular poetry, and the enlarged Scope it gave to a field that he had made peculiarly his own. But the vital and human value of these Epic Songs is not so much for the professed student of national tradition and popular art, as for a much larger circle for those who can still delight in the stories which kindled the imagination of past ages, and who recognize, in these fragments of a vanished world, spiritual kinship with all that poetry, from the Odyssey downwards, in which epic magnifi cence is interwoven with the witchery of romance.