A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections | Page 2

also, priests, architects,
artists for the holy pictures (ikóni), as well as the traditional style of
painting them, ecclesiastical vestments and vessels, and--most precious
of all--the Slavonic translation of the holy Scriptures and of the Church
Service books. These books, however, were not written in Greek, but in
the tongue of a cognate Slavonic race, which was comprehensible to
the Russians. Thus were the first firm foundations of Christianity,
education, and literature simultaneously laid in the cradle of the present
vast Russian empire, appropriately called "Little Russia," of which
Kíeff was the capital; although even then they were not confined to that
section of the country, but were promptly extended, by identical
methods, to old Nóvgorod--"Lord Nóvgorod the Great," the cradle of

the dynasty of Rúrik, founder of the line of sovereign Russian princes.
Whence came these Slavonic translations of the Scriptures, the Church
Services, and other books, and the preachers in the vernacular for the
infant Russian nation? The books had been translated about one
hundred and twenty-five years previously, for the benefit of a small
Slavonic tribe, the Moravians. This tribe had been baptized by German
ecclesiastics, whose books and speech, in the Latin tongue, were
wholly incomprehensible to their converts. For fifty years Latin had
been used, and naturally Christianity had made but little progress. Then
the Moravian Prince Róstislaff appealed to Michael, emperor of
Byzantium, to send him preachers capable of making themselves
understood. The emperor had in his dominions many Slavonians; hence
the application, on the assumption that there must be, among the Greek
priests, many who were acquainted with the languages of the Slavonic
tribes. In answer to this appeal, the Emperor Michael dispatched to
Moravia two learned monks, Kyríll and Methódy, together with several
other ecclesiastics, in the year 863.
Kyríll and Methódy were the sons of a grandee, who resided in the
chief town of Macedonia, which was surrounded by Slavonic colonies.
The elder brother, Methódy, had been a military man, and the governor
of a province containing Slavonians. The younger, Kyríll, had received
a brilliant education at the imperial court, in company with the Emperor
Michael, and had been a pupil of the celebrated Photius (afterwards
Patriarch), and librarian of St. Sophia, after becoming a monk. Later on,
the brothers had led the life of itinerant missionaries, and had devoted
themselves to preaching the Gospel to Jews and Mohammedans. Thus
they were in every way eminently qualified for their new task.
The Slavonians in the Byzantine empire, and the cognate tribes who
dwelt nearer the Danube, like the Moravians, had long been in sore
need of a Slavonic translation of the Scriptures and the Church books,
since they understood neither Greek nor Latin; and for the lack of such
a translation many relapsed into heathendom. Kyríll first busied himself
with inventing an alphabet which should accurately reproduce all the
varied sounds of the Slavonic tongues. Tradition asserts that he

accomplished this task in the year 855, founding it upon the Greek
alphabet, appropriating from the Hebrew, Armenian, and Coptic
characters for the sounds which the Greek characters did not represent,
and devising new ones for the nasal sounds. The characters in this
alphabet were thirty-eight in number. Kyríll, with the aid of his brother
Methódy, then proceeded to make his translations of the Church
Service books. The Bulgarians became Christians in the year 861, and
these books were adopted by them. But the greatest activity of the
brothers was during the four and a half years beginning with the year
862, when they translated the holy Scriptures, taught the Slavonians
their new system of reading and writing, and struggled with
heathendom and with the German priests of the Roman Church. These
German ecclesiastics are said to have sent petition after petition to
Rome, to Pope Nicholas I., demonstrating that the Word of God ought
to be preached in three tongues only--Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin--"because the inscription on the Cross had been written by Pilate
in those tongues only." Pope Nicholas summoned the brothers to Rome;
but Pope Adrian II., who was reigning in his stead when they arrived
there, received them cordially, granted them permission to continue
their preaching and divine services in the Slavonic language, and even
consecrated Methódy bishop of Pannonia; after which Methódy
returned to Moravia, but Kyríll, exhausted by his labors, withdrew to a
monastery near Rome, and died there in 869.
The language into which Kyríll and Methódy translated was probably
the vernacular of the Slavonian tribes dwelling between the Balkans
and the Danube. But as the system invented by Kyríll took deepest root
in Bulgaria (whither, in 886, a year after Methódy's death, his disciples
were banished from Moravia), the language preserved in the ancient
transcripts of the holy Scriptures came in time to be called "Ancient