Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/33

 which alone constitutes the eastern division, may be described as straightforward and sans souci. Russian is the most important of the Slavonic languages and is spoken by 103 million people; it is usually and most correctly divided into two groups: Great Russian, of which White Russian is a variation, and Little Russian. It is impossible here to consider the separatist motives which have prompted many Little Russian philologists to treat their own dialect as a language independent of and on a level with Great Russian. Without in any way underrating the peculiar and original beauties of Little Russian, it is from the scientific point of view unjustifiable to regard it as anything but a strongly-marked variation of Great Russian. Whether the efforts of the Little Russians of Austrian Galicia succeed in artificially elaborating a different language is another question.

In the ninth century, when their authentic history may be said to have begun, the territory occupied by the Slavonic tribes of the eastern division was of smaller dimensions than that included in the political Russia of to-day. The names of all of these tribes are known, but they are now almost totally obsolete; one of the few survivals is that of the Kriviči, which is to be seen in the general designation for Russians and Russia in Lettish, Kreewis. That of the Vyatiči survives in the name of the town Vyatka, that of the Volinyani in the name of the province Volinia.

But the homogeneity of all these tribes east of the watershed between the basins of the Dnieper and the Vistula is illustrated by the general application from the earliest times to themselves by themselves and by foreigners of the collective name Rus; this is in itself merely the name by which the Scandinavian invaders were known, who in the ninth century conquered the Eastern Slavs and laid the foundations of the Empire; but, like the Bulgarians south of the Danube, they were soon assimilated by the people that had, as the court historians used euphemistically to put it, invited them to come to rule, bequeathing the people over whom they had obtained control only