Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/466

442 The chastushka is colourless and dry, and often there is little sense in the subject-matter which it treats. It is short, and not musical. In the chastushka we see a marked sign of decline in the poetical genius of the people. As a type of song the chastushka can hardly develop into an original and brilliant form of folk-song, although it is difficult to judge of the future of a form of song which is only in the process of creation, and marks a break in the people's creative faculty, which in turn is connected with a growth of new forms of national life. The advance or the further development of the chastushka may be in the direction of bringing together separate chastushki into a single complete, and longer, song. Such composite chastushki are often sung at dances, but until now they have been scarcely anything more than mechanical combinations, and the content of these composite chastushki very often has no sense at all. It is more probable that the chastushka will come under the influence of literary poetry, to which it is so similar in form, and then the distinction between the popular poetry and the poetry of the educated classes will be wiped out. The poems and songs of our national poets have already secured a strong hold upon the masses of the people. Mr. Th. Studitsky (born in 1814) remarked that in his time "the people were fascinated by the writings of the poets, especially by the songs of Koltsov, and were forgetting the creations of their forefathers." Literary productions have already to a considerable extent got into the old popular song-books, as in the case of a Russian song-book published in 1810. In a Russian song-book published in 1859 we find as many as ten poems of Koltsov, and verses of other Russian poets. With the material which we have, it is possible to state that already in the eighteenth century artificial ballads and literary poems occupied an important place in the repertoire of the Russian peasant. The spread of literacy, and of reading, among the Russian people will help them to assimilate more consciously, more completely, and more deeply the works of their national poets.