Dukhovnye Stikhi and Epic Songs

[Robert Mann]

Natalie Kononenko made an interesting comment in her recent message about dukhovnye stikhi:
---"With epic poetry, you could argue that it originated
elsewhere and then "sank" to the minstrel guilds (not that I buy this
argument). This is harder to do with dukhovnye stikhi, though you could argue
that they were written by seminarians and picked up by minstrels."---

I would add: there is now evidence that one of the earliest cycles of Russian epic songs was actually inspired by a tale that we know as a "dukhovnyi stikh". The song about St. George and the Evil Roman Emperor preserves motif patterns that came from the region of Iran and were passed along to Slavic singers through Byzantium. The byliny about Elijah and Idol and about Elijah and Solovei can be seen as fragments of an earlier epic song that followed patterns found in the song about St. George and Diocletian. The "epic" hero Elijah (the Prophet, later russified as a native Russian warrior), who grappled with the idol of Perun and the pagan Div (Solovei) was a spiritual warrior no less than St. George.  -- Robert Mann

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