An extensive introduction provides basic information about Russian epics, their historical background, their poetics, the history of their collection, their performance context, and their main interpretations. In addition, their is a short introduction to each song, explaining its plot, allusions, and interpretations. A glossary of common terms and a selected bibliography of studies about the Russian epic in English and Russian are also included in the volume.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Profiles the careers of Russian authors, scholars, and critics and discusses the history of the Russian treatment of literary genres such as drama, fiction, and essays

Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose. The aesthetic appeal of poetry is often linked to the potential for this process to seem mysterious or almost magical, not to mention the interplay of particular expressions with forms and expectations. The dynamics of versification thus draw a general interest for everyone, from enthusiasts of poetry or forms of verbal art to researchers of folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, literature, philology, and more. The authors of the works in the present volume explore versification from a variety of angles and in diverse cultural milieus. The focus is on metrics in practice, meaning that the authors concentrate not so much on the analysis of the metrical systems per se as on the ways that metres are used and varied in performance by individual poets and in relationship to language.

From the contents: A propos de la genese du sens specifique des verbes perfectifs en Russe (Andries Breunis). - A note on Stang's law in Moscow accentology (Pepijn Hendriks). - Notes on intonation and voice in modern Russian (Cornelia E. Keijsper). - Early dialectal diversity in South Slavic II (Frederik Kortlandt). - Bad theory, wrong conclusions: M. Halle on Slavic accentuation (Frederik Kortlandt). - Description and transcription of Russian intonation (ToRI) (Cecilia Ode). - The use of the supine in lower Sorbian (Han Steenwijk)."