he talks with the river
Don as he fords it, and when the bandits follow him, the woodpeckers
tell them the way with their tapping. The poem, which contains much
lamentation over the quarrels of the Princes and the injury ensuing
from them to the Russian people, ends in the major key. Igor is
restored to his native soil, he goes to Kiev to give thanks in the
Church, and the people acclaim the old Princes and then the young
Princes with song.

A transcript of the poem, made probably at the end of the fourteenth
century, was first discovered in 1795 by Count Musin-Pushkin, and
first published in 1800, when it made the same kind of impression as
the publication of the _Songs of Ossian_. It was not, however, open to
Dr. Johnson's objection--"Show me the originals"--for the fourteenth
century transcript of the original then existed and was inspected and
considered unmistakably genuine by Karamzin and others, but was
unfortunately burnt in the fire of Moscow.[1] The poem has been
translated into English, French and German, and has given rise to a
whole literature of commentaries.

Up to the twelfth century, Russian life was concentrated in the
splendid and prosperous centre of Kiev; but in the thirteenth century
came a crushing blow which was destined to set back the clock of
Russian culture for three hundred years, namely, the Tartar invasion.
Kiev was destroyed in 1240. After this, the South was abandoned;
Lithuania and Poland became entirely separated from the East; the
Eastern principalities centred round Moscow; the Metropolitan of Kiev
transferred his see to Moscow in 1328; and by the fourteenth century
Moscow had taken the place of Kiev, and had become the kernel of
Russian life and culture. Russia under the dominion of the Tartar yoke
was intellectually stagnant. The Church alone retained its
independence, and when Constantinople fell, Moscow declared itself to
be the third and last Rome: but the independence of the Church,
although it kept national feeling alive under the Tartar yoke, made
for stagnation rather than progress, and the barrier between Russia
and the culture of the West was now solid and visible.

From the fourteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Russian literature, instead of being a panorama of various
and equally splendid periods of production, such as the Elizabethan
epoch, the Jacobean epoch, and the Georgian epoch, or, as in France,
the Renaissance, the _Grand Siecle_,