Bylyna

The bylyna is a genre of Old Rus' heroic epic — an epic song about the bohatyrs (heroic warriors) and their exploits, formed in the era of Kyivan Rus' (10th–12th centuries) around the court of Prince Volodymyr. Bylynas have tonic, unrhymed verse, a slow chanting manner, hyperbole, fixed epithets, and formulas. Their central heroes are Illia Muromets, Dobrynia Mykytych, and Aliosha Popovych. The bylynas of the Kyiv cycle celebrate the defense of Rus' against the steppe peoples. Although the fullest corpus of bylynas survived in recordings from the imperial North, their historical nucleus arose in Kyiv, as Mykhailo Hrushevsky argued in his 'History of Ukrainian Literature.' Bylyna poetics were studied by Fedir Buslaiev and Vsevolod Miller; the echo of the bylyna epos is felt in the dumas.