The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Some of the earliest mythological byliny reflect a struggle between the bogatyr, the male hero-warrior mounted on a swift steed, and the immobile, invincible depths of Mother Earth. In one widespread variant, Earth gives birth to a hero, “Svyatogor” [Sacred Mountain], so huge that she cannot bear the weight of her son. Svyatogor is a swaggerer, a braggart, who tosses his mace to the sky and never fails to catch it on the way down. Among his claims is the curiously Archimedean boast, provocative considering the person of his Mother, that he could lift the entire earth if only he could find a point of support. One day, riding through the steppe, he finds a small skomorokh’s [minstrel’s] bag in the open field. It is too heavy to pick up from the saddle. Svyatogor dismounts, but still he cannot lift the bag; instead, he sinks up to his knees in the earth. In some variants his horse hauls him out, but at other times the giant bogatyr interprets this failure to attach a pouch (a womb) to his own belt as the beginning of his death.

72 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

With the collapse of the Kievan state by the middle of the thirteenth century, these early heroic songs migrated to central and northern Russia. To their familiar repertory of enemies (nomads or heathens from the eastern steppe) the Kievan epic heroes then added villains of the darkened forest and swamp. One such foe was the highway bandit Solovey [“the Nightingale”], who lived in a huge tree and whose very whistle could deafen or kill a passerby. North or south, the defense of Russia remained the bogatyr’s primary task. The most famous saga of all is the dual-faith tale of Ilya Muromets, Ilya of Murom on the Oka River, halfway between Moscow and the Urals city of Kazan.

Ilya was a poor peasant’s son, born a cripple. Or in other versions, Ilya, like the folk hero Ivan-durak, faked his disability, preferring to warm himself on the stove rather than work. For thirty (in some versions, thirty-three) years Ilya lies on the stove. One day, while the rest of his family is in the fields, several wandering beggars (in the Christianized variant, three wise men) drop in on him and command him to rise from his bunk. He protests; they insist: “Get thee up and give us to drink!” Ilya rises and finds that his strength is boundless. His visitors tell him what to avoid, whom to appease, what to attack, and how to equip himself with a horse. Taking leave of his astonished parents and tying a clod of soil around his neck (a talisman of the moist Earth that bore him), he sets off to Kiev to serve Prince Vladimir. Along the way he liberates the city of Chernigov from the Mongols and captures the bandit Solovey. In one variant, Ilya encounters the huge Svyatogor, challenges him to a duel, but the giant only plucks Ilya up and puts him in his pocket. The two become friends. However, when they stumble across an enormous coffin on the road “destined for the person who fits it,” Ilya is unable to protect his fellow bogatyr from the death pre-measured for him.

Motifs from the life of Ilya of Murom pervade Russian culture – inverted, parodied, or stylized, depending on which phase of his career is highlighted. For his Brothers Karamazov, a strikingly “male” novel of fathers, sons, rivals, merchants, monks, lawyers, and adolescent boys, Dostoevsky chooses the name Ilya for Captain Snegiryov’s young son, the brooding boy who dies mysteriously of a crippling ailment; the novel ends on Alyosha’s injunction to Ilya’s grieving schoolboy friends to remember “his face, his clothes, his poor boots, and how he bravely rose up for his sinful, unfortunate father.” In a comic vein, the eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1859), famous for a sloth so profound that he cannot get out of bed (and then unwillingly) until the middle of Chapter 8, is named Ilya Ilyich [Ilya son of Ilya]. Immobility can be comic, but elevated to the status of nation, it displays its epic and implacable side. The world’s first mass-produced bomber aircraft, the “Ilya Muromets,” was a huge four-engine biplane designed in Riga in 1913 and adopted by the

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Imperial Russian Army in August 1914. The heroic Muromets squadron flew 400 sorties between 1914 and 1918, until its designer Igor Sikorsky abandoned it for a more manageable aircraft to be called the “Alexander Nevsky.”