the needy, be they princes who required advice or the hungry poor. The advice, if need be, could become an admonition or even a denunciation. A number of St. Theodosius' writings on different subjects have been preserved. Following the lead and the organizational pattern of the Monastery of the Caves near Kiev, monasteries spread throughout the land, although in Kievan Russia, in contrast to later periods of Russian history, they clustered in and near towns.
At the end of the Kievan period the Russian Church, headed by the metropolitan in Kiev, encompassed sixteen dioceses, a doubling from St. Vladimir's original eight. Two of them had the status of archbishoprics. The Russian metropolitan and Church remained under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. In the days of Kiev only two metropolitans are known to have been Russians, Hilarion in the eleventh century and Clement in the twelfth; especially at first, many bishops also came from Byzantium. The link with Byzantium contributed to the strength and independence of the Russian Church in its relations with the State. But in general the period witnessed a remarkable co-operation, rather than conflict, between Church and State.
As already mentioned, the Church in Kievan Russia obtained vast holdings of land and pre-empted such fields as charity, healing the sick, and sheltering travelers, in addition to its specifically religious functions. Canon law extended not only to those connected with the ecclesiastical establishment but, especially on issues of morality and proper religious observance, to the people at large. The Church also occupied a central position, as we shall see, in Kievan education, literature, and the arts. The over-all impact of religion on Kievan society and life is much more difficult to determine. Kievan Christianity has been described, often in glowing terms, as peculiarly associated with a certain joyousness and affirmation of man and his works; as possessing a powerful cosmic sense and emphasizing the transfiguration of the entire universe, perhaps under the influence of the closeness to nature of the pagan East Slavs; or as expressing in particular the kenotic element in Christianity, that is, the belief in the humble Christ and His sacrifice, in contrast to the Byzantine stress on God the Father, the ruler of heaven and earth. Whatever the validity of these and other similar evaluations of Kievan Christianity - and they seem to contain some truth in spite of the complexity of the issues involved and the limited and at times biased nature of our sources - Christian principles did affect life in Kievan Russia. Their influence can be richly illustrated from Kievan literature and especially its ethical norms, such as the striking concept of the good prince which emerges from Vladimir Monomakh's Testament, the constant emphasis on almsgiving in the writings of the period, and the sweeping endorsement of Christian standards of behavior.
Language and Literature
The language of the Russians too was affected by their conversion to Christianity. The emergence among the Russians of a written language, using the Cyrillic alphabet, has been associated with the baptism of the country, the writing itself having been originally devised by St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, in the second half of the ninth century for the benefit of the Moravians. More precisely, the dominant view today is that St. Cyril invented the older Glagolithic alphabet and that the Cyrillic was a somewhat later development carried out by one of his disciples, probably in Bulgaria. While there exists some evidence, notably in the early treaties with Byzantium and in the fact that these treaties were translated into Slavic, that the Russians had been acquainted with writing before 988, the conversion firmly and permanently established the written language in Russia. To repeat, the liturgy itself, as well as the lesser services of the Church and its other activities, were conducted in Church Slavonic, readily understandable to the people, not in Greek, nor in Latin as in the West. A written literature based on the religious observances grew quickly and before long embraced other fields as well. The language of this Kievan written literature has traditionally been considered to be the same as Church Slavonic, a literary language based on an eastern South Slavic dialect which became the tongue of Slavic Christianity. Recently, however, certain scholars, and especially Obnorsky, advanced the highly questionable argument that the basic written, as well as spoken, language of Kievan society had been and remained essentially Russian, although it experienced strong Church Slavonic influences. Perhaps it would be best to say that many written works of the Kievan period were written in Church Slavonic, others in Russian - Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian, to be more exact - and still others in a mixture or blend of both. In any case, the Kievan Russians possessed a rather rich and well-developed literary language; one comparison of an eleventh-century Russian translation with the original Byzantine chronicle indicates that the Russian version had the exact equivalents of eighty per cent of the Greek vocabulary. The conversion to Christianity had meant not only an influx of Greek terms, dominant in the sphere of religion and present in many other areas, but also certain borrowings from the Balkan Slavs, notably the Bulgarians, who had accepted Christianity earlier and who helped its dissemination in Russia.
Kievan literature consisted of two sharply different categories: oral creations and written works linked to particular authors. Although it is highly probable that the great bulk of Kievan folklore has been lost, enough remains to demonstrate its richness and variety. That folklore had developed
largely in the immemorial past, and it expanded further to incorporate Kievan experiences. It has been noted, for example, that different Russian wedding songs reflect several distinct stages of social relations: marriage by kidnapping, marriage by purchase, and marriage by consent. Funeral dirges too go very far back in expressing the attitude of the East Slavs toward death. These and other kinds of Russian folk songs often possess outstanding lyrical and generally artistic qualities that have received recognition throughout the world. Kievan folklore also included sayings, proverbs, riddles, and fairy tales of different kinds.
But special interest attaches to the epic poems, the famous byliny. They represent one of the several great epic cycles of Western literature, comparable in many ways to the Homeric epic of the Greeks, or to the Serbian epic. The byliny narrate the activities of the bogatyri, the mighty warriors of ancient Russia, who can be divided into two categories: a few senior bogatyri and the more numerous junior ones. Members of the first group, concerning whom little information remains, belong to hoary antiquity, overlap with or even become part of mythology, and seem often to be associated with forces or phenomena of nature. The junior Kievan bogatyri, about whom we possess some four hundred epic songs, reflect Kievan history much better, although their deeds too usually belong to the realm of the fantastic and the miraculous. Typically, they form the entourage of St. Vladimir, at whose court many byliny begin and end, and they fight the deadly enemies of the Russian land. The Khazars, with their Hebrew faith, may appear in the guise of the legendary Zhidovin, the Jew; or Tugor Khan of the Polovtsy may become the dragon Tugarin. The junior bogatyri express the peculiarly Kievan mixture of a certain kind of knighthood, Christianity, and the unremitting struggle against the steppe peoples.