Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/453

 Modern Russian PopiLlar Songs. 429

stages of musical and poetical understanding the song is cut up and then sewn together from fragments ; is, as it were, crumpled. This is the result to a large extent of the absence of a strong idea of unity in the story, and the dividing up of the song into strophes and images. Some- times there is a unity of tune and metre which serves as the basis of association for the various parts ; sometimes the song is put together simply because of the similarity in the metre of the various parts." Thus the popular song in its internal development is passing through a series of processes tending to make it less of a single intact song, and leading to its decline and disintegration.

Attached to and moving with the changing history of the people, different forms of the poetical traditions of antiquity exhibit, however, a different measure of stability and power to survive and to develop further. Far different is the fate of the Epics and of the Ceremonial Songs. The singing of the Bylhiy (sagas) was long since discontinued among the people in general, though it was and still is maintained in remote places of the country, particularly in the Northern districts of Russia, owing to their special historical condi- tions, while the Ceremonial Songs are maintained up to the present time, thanks to the maintenance of the ceremonies themselves, the conservatism of which has found its expres- sion in the popular proverb, — "We established it not, nor shall we change it." However, even in this ceremonial poetry a certain decay of the old poetical talent is manifest. As popular life has become more varied, the ceremonial poetry has indeed survived, but not in its integrity and completeness. Many of these songs are divorced from the ceremonies to which they properly belong ; some are con- fused with others alien to them. Yet, generally speaking, the ceremonial poetry has not become completely obsolete, it has not entirely perished, and songs of spring, of Christmas- tide, of the harvest festivals, etc., still are to be found in localities where the ancient ceremonies are maintained and