Nicholas Kotar - Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia

Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...23

Stranger than Fiction

Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia

Nicholas Kotar

Copyright 2019 by Nicholas Kotar

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Created with Vellum

Contents

Foreword

We stand on the shoulders of giants. Shame on us that we dont know more about them.

As a child of immigrants, I was raised on stories of a glorious Holy Russia that I knew better than the San Francisco of my childhood. That land was filled with heroes who gave their lives for God, Tsar, and country and who left legacies that all of us children aspired to.

Of course, so much of that was legend, a lifeline for immigrants who had lost everything, and who preferred to remember a semi-fictional history that left out some of the more disturbing details.

As I grew up and learned the more nuanced truth, I only became more fascinated. Because what I found was this: despite the almost universal darkness of the human condition, you still have bright lights appearing in unexpected placesheroes and heroines whose lives read like adventure tales, whose fates are sometimes stranger than fiction.

As a writer of speculative fiction, I find inspiration in these stories and often mine them for my novels and short stories. Over the past few years, all the research Ive done for my Raven Son series has turned up a wealth of fascinating accounts from Russian history that make for interesting reading all on its own.

This little book is a glimpse into the world of my Russia a world filled with complex characters living out difficult lives in sometimes impossible circumstances. And their stories are worthy of being retold again and again.

Welcome to the story-world of Russian historya world truly stranger than fiction

(Note: I dont actually recount the story of Boyarinia Morozova (cover image) in this book. However, the evocative nature of the scene and the questions it raises seemed perfect for the theme and style of this book.)

1

The Prince who was Killed by His Favorite Horse

T he early years of ancient Russias history are so steeped in legend that its perhaps more correct to categorize them as strange as fiction not stranger than fiction. But there are good reasons for that.

The boundary between history and legend used to be malleable. People were not always so in love with facts as we moderns seem to be. And, frankly, that made historical accounts and chronicles a lot more interesting to read. Who cares if some of what we read is legendary? Thats not a bad word in my book.

One of the most famous examples of such a half-legendary, half-historical hero from old Rus is Prince Oleg the Seer.

OLEG: THE PRINCE WHO WAS KILLED BY HIS FAVORITE HORSE

Prince Oleg the Seer is one of the most mysterious figures in early Russian history. He was either related to Riurik, the half-mythical Varengian who unified Rus, or his main general. But he did much more than Riurik to unify Rus. While Riuriks son Igor was still a child, Oleg seized Smolensk and Liubech, both important cities. He also tricked and killed the princes of Kiev, Askold and Dir, and made their city the cultural and political center of Rus under his control.

All the disparate tribes of Slavs eventually came to accept his sovereignty as Grand Prince of Rus.

He also had major successes in foreign affairs. For two hundred years before Oleg, the Khaganate of the Khazars had successfully demanded tribute from the Eastern Slavic lands. Oleg was the first to fight them openly, and he was almost always successful. He even managed to make Byzantium sit up and take notice. During his reign, Russian merchants received the rightunique for the timeof duty-free trade with Constantinople. The Greeks also gave the Russians nearly unlimited materials and artisans to repair their boats. For free!

For these reasons, some historian prefer to consider Oleg, not Riurik, as the true unifier of Rus. However, if that list of achievements sounds too good to be true, it might be.

THE INVASION THAT NEVER WAS

Oleg is popularly most known for attacking Constantinople, after which he received his nickname the Seer. According to the Chronicles, the Prince gathered two thousand ships, each one of which was able to carry forty warriors. The emperor at the time, Leo VI the Philosopher, was so afraid at the mere sight of such an army that he closed the inner gates of the city, leaving the outskirts of his empire open to looting.

However, instead of attacking, Oleg chose trickery. As the Chronicle says,

He ordered his men to make wheels and to place his ships on those wheels. And when a favorable wind blew, they raised sails and sailed to the city on dry land.

After this, the Greeks, scared to death, offered Oleg tribute and peace. According to this peace treaty of 907, Russian merchants received the right to duty-free trade. However, although basically every Russian medieval source mentions this invasion, most historians believe it to be no more than legend. First of all, no Byzantine source mentions it, even though similar invasions on the part of Slavs were recorded in both 860 and 941. The peace treaty of 907 also raises more questions. It seems to be a compilation of several other treaties, including one from 911, when Oleg apparently sent an embassy to Constantinople to confirm the peace.

More than that, the exact description of the Russians return with booty sounds like it was copied from previous accounts. For one, their sails were supposed to have been made from gold silk, a detail that is found in the same Chronicles account of Prince Vladimirs return from Constantinople after his baptism. A similar description can also be found in a 12th century saga about King Olaf of Norways return from a successful war:

It was said that after a certain victory he returned home, and his ships were so magnificent and majestic that their sails were sewed from precious silks, as were their pavilions.

WHAT ABOUT THE SNAKE?

Olegs other claim to fame comes from a popular folk song that describes an episode, also found in the Chronicle. According to this tale, a pagan priest predicted that Oleg would be killed by his favorite horse. Heartbroken at this prophecy, Oleg ordered that his horse be taken away. He only remembered the prophecy much later, years after his favorite horse had died.

Laughing at the priests, Oleg went to see the place where his horses bones lay. When he put his foot on the horses skull, he said, Is this what I should fear? At that very moment, a poisonous snake came out of the skull and bit him.

This is clearly a legenda legendary death for a semi-legendary warrior-prince. This was actually a popular literary trope for sagas of the time. Such deaths gave more importance to the lives of great heroes. Thus, for example, the Icelandic sagas tell of a certain Viking named rvard-Oddr. According to Wikipedia, when he was an infant, a druid predicted that he would be killed by his own horse Faxi, at the place where he was born, at the age of 300.

Next page

1234567...23

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia»

Look at similar books to Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Nicholas Mosley

Time at War

Willy Reese

A Stranger to Myself

Mark Twain

The Mysterious Stranger

S.L. Kotar

Yellow Fever: A Worldwide History

Anne Olsen (editor)

Stranger West: Paranormal true stories from western United states

Chuck Palahniuk

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories

Empress consort of Nicholas II Emperor of Russia Alexandra

Nicholas and Alexandra: the fall of the Romanov dynasty

Emperor of Russia Nicholas II

The last days of the Romanovs: tragedy at Ekaterinburg

Grand Duchess daughter of Nicholas II Emperor of Russia

The diary of Olga Romanov: royal witness to the Russian Revolution, with excerpts from family letters and memoirs of the period

Robert Service

The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution

Palahniuk

Stranger than fiction : true stories

Roy R. Male

Enter, Mysterious Stranger: American Cloistral Fiction

Discussion, reviews of the book Stranger than Fiction: Mysterious, Inspiring, and Sublime Stories from Old Russia and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.