Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 6

Kievan Culture.

It is equally beyond doubt that there was a real culture in Kievan Russia; in comparison, the Moscow period may even be regarded as a decline. Here, too, the initiative came from above, from the prince and the hierarchy. Although Vladimir was illiterate, he built schools, and his sons were examples of fully educated men, especially Yaroslav the Wise, in whose reign Kiev became one of the centers of European culture. A whole workshop of translators labored in his reign, and he selected children for the schools and himself read day and night, according to tradition.
His son Sviatoslav of Chernigov had “storerooms full of books,” and the writings of another son, Vladimir Monomakh, bear witness to the author’s undoubted firsthand acquaintance with Byzantine literature. In Kiev we may sense a deliberate effort to create a culture and to master completely the Christian and Hellenic heritage.

Basically, of course, this was a borrowed, translated culture, but original creative work was running dry in Byzantium; moreover, this period of discipleship is inevitable in the history of any culture. The important thing was that the Russians were good students. Golubinsky, himself a wholesale detractor of Russia’s past,[49] has called Metropolitan Hilarion of Kiev “not a rhetorician of the worst period of Greek oratory but a real orator of the period when it flourished.” The sermons of Cyril of Turov retain to this day their value as literature and not only as historical documents. The early chronicles are filled not only with facts, but with a whole general outlook.
Their authors were “people with a definite and sensitive view of life, not at all naive simpletons. In the development of the Russian chronicle we always sense a definite religious and historical idea.”[50] Indeed, the era in which the Lay of Igor’s Campaign made its appearance can hardly be termed barely literate.

 

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