Rereading the Armament of Igor in a time of war

Were it not seemly to us, brothers,
To begin in ancient diction
The tales of the toils of the army
Of Igor, Igor Svyatoslavič?

Or to begin this song
In accordance with the ballads of this time,
And not like the invention of Boyan?

One of the few stabs I’ve made at reading again so far this year has been a reread of The Tale of the Armament of Igor. This poetic lamentation of a failed attempt by a prince of Rus’, Igor Svyatoslavič, to stage a raid on the attacking Cumans is the earliest extant example of literature in the Old Russian language, dating to the late 1100s. In addition to the themes of heroism in hopeless battles, grief and exile, the Tale also spends a great deal of time exhorting the princes of Rus’ to put aside their personal ambitions and greed, and unite in the face of a common enemy.

I found a great deal more in it on this third read-through than on my first. The poem rises and falls in mood, between the high triumphant martial imagery of Igor’s exhortations to the defence of the Russian land, and the vast desolate lamentation of Yaroslavna on the walls of Putivl, and finally returning again to a tone of hope in the voice of the poet Boyan. There is much in this poem that is still obscure to me, and that may be owing to my poor Russian.

However, I am still struck by the beauty of the natural imagery of the poem. One can almost hear the cries of falcons, the calls of magpies and crows, in the verse itself. The rivers speak, especially the Donets River with whom Igor converses in his Cuman exile (and which is today still the site of tragic bloodletting and destruction between brothers). The poet invokes the sun and the aurora borealis. Yaroslavna invokes the wind and the sky in her lamentations.

For brother spake to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is also mine!’
And the princes began to pronounce of a paltry thing, ‘This is great,’
And themselves amongst them to forge feuds…

I have found myself unable to write, and increasingly unable to read productively, on account of the war. I am caught between a love of Russia which rebukes their paranoia, and a love of the Ukraine which reproaches their pride and greed, and to see them fall upon each other with this insane bloodlust—Ukrainians against the civilians of Seversky Donets; and Russians against the Ukrainians—breaks the heart. Once again, ‘Kiev groaned with mourning, and Černigov with disasters.’ I find that I resonate much more, given the state of current events, with the lamentations of Svyatoslav over the deaths of his sons, and that of Yaroslavna over the fate of Igor.

This is a conflict which would not have happened, if the Russian leadership had not, under the fear of a threat to its borders, been goaded into an attack by the provocations of the Western powers on the Black Sea. This is also, much more so, a conflict which would not have happened if the Ukrainian oligarchs who foisted the Maidan upon them in 2014 at the instigation of the same Western powers, had not said to the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, ‘this is mine, and that is also mine’—and then sent in the SBU and the fascist paramilitaries to destroy them. I hate that the people of the Donbass have been dying needlessly for the past eight years at the hands of their own government, and I hate more that Ukrainians are dying still in numbers equally great, at the hands of an attacking army. Most of all I hate the injustices and machinations and engineered policies of division and exploitation in Washington and London that brought all of this about.

Then in the time of Oleg, Boris wrought for evil: feuds were sown and grew apace.
The life of the scion of Dažbog was wasted,
In the factions of the princes and the generations of mankind were shortened.

What more can be said now? Perhaps the Russian band Aria said it already with their elegiac ‘Ballad of an Old Russian Warrior’:

Or perhaps the anonymous poet in the tradition of Boyan said it best: Далеко! Ночь меркнет.