Historical monuments — legends, tales, chronicles, ancient Russian literature — are the sources through which we learn about the fate of the Russian people in its early age; they help us understand what it was like in the past.
Our Russian life was formed only relatively recently — in the history of humanity, a millennium is equivalent to a year — but we possess a wealth of monuments of folk life, and we have ancient oral and written literature. A portion of this folk wealth is offered to readers in a free retelling...
When reading bylinas, we should not imagine the heroes as real, once-living people. The heroes are the embodiment of an entire era of folk life, traits of folk creativity that have survived and come down to us in the form created by the people. In the images of the heroes, we see what the people loved and what they hated, we see the people themselves with their good and bad qualities. The bylinas maintain a household, local color, expelling all the fantastical, everything that could give a false representation of ancient life. Bylinas are not fairy tales, and depicting heroes as fairy-tale knights would mean distorting the meaning and deep significance for studying the ancient life of the people...
O. I. Rogova (Shmidt-Moskvitinova)
To the long-gone times, to a completely different world — the world of knights and heroes, unheard-of heroic feats, powerful forces, know restraint, carry us the ancient songs sung by the people, so-called bylinas.
The people themselves composed these amazing song-tales about Russian heroes and knights of ancient, distant times. And these tales passed from mouth to mouth, from old people to children, artlessly conveying the ancient bylinas to each new generation. They were — because the people believe in the existence of heroes in the past, believe that everything told truly happened. In historical records and chronicles, much has survived indicating that some events that became bylinas indeed occurred, only the people reworked these tales in their own way, decorating and exaggerating them...
A bylina is the people themselves with all their dark and light sides; a bylina is the life of Rus itself, and this life is depicted in songs from all sides, with all details of the domestic, military, and court environment...
N. A. Nadezhdin
The collection includes selected bylinas from the books of O. I. Rogova (Shmidt-Moskvitinova) "Russian Heroes" (1912) and N. A. Nadezhdin "Heroes and Knights of Russian Land" (1911). The collection is adorned with 150 illustrations and design elements by artists N. A. Bogatov, P. Gilev, N. N. Karazin, E. K. Sokolovsky, A. Morozov, and others.
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