Miller O Ilya Muromets and epic heroes of Kiev.

Miller O Ilya Muromets and epic heroes of Kiev.
St. Petersburg. Printing House Of N. N. Mikhailov. 1869 IV p., II p., XXVI p., 830 p., XXV p., [1] p. Solid combined semi-leather binding, enlarged format (19 x 26 cm). 

Satisfactory condition: the binding is worn, significant traces of moisture in the block, pencil marks, stamps.

Comparative and critical observations on the stratified composition of the Russian folk epic. Orestes Miller. The first edition of his lifetime.

[In 1869, the first and extremely controversial fundamental study of Orest Miller's Ilya Muromets and the Kievan bogatyrstvo was published, which initiated the scientific study of the image of the Central hero of the Russian epic.

Miller's doctoral dissertation, defended in 1869, embodied the ideal ideas about the foundations of Russian folk life. This work was an extensive study of the Russian past epic, which had no equal in terms of volume and mass of the collected material. The thesis was the first time in Russian literary studies that a comparative historical research method was widely used. Miller compared not only Russian epics with the poetry of other peoples, but also different versions and versions of each epic.

At the same time, in Wikipedia we read:

"In the early 1860s, Miller's range of activities changed dramatically. The collections of folk songs by Kireevsky and Rybnikov that were published at that time were a new revelation for him. He devoted himself to the study of folk literature for a long time, became an ardent apologist for it, and at the same time a convinced populist, for whom everything popular is sacred. This enthusiastic attitude of Miller to folk literature is in organic connection with the mythological interpretation of folk art that prevailed in the 1860s, when every detail of epics and songs was seen as the deepest secret symbolization. The ability to think critically and strictly scientifically had never been Miller's strong suit, and he felt extremely at ease in embracing a method of more poetic than scientific research, where the researcher's conjectures could unfold with complete freedom and where two or three convergences were enough to create very coherent, if equally arbitrary, explanations. Miller took the mythological school's passions to the last extremes; his huge doctoral dissertation "Ilya Muromets and the heroism of Kiev" (St. Petersburg, 1870), despite the mass of work invested in it, and the huge comparative material collected here for the first time, does not have any serious significance at present. The scientific value of the dissertation, no less than her passion for the sun-storm interpretation of folk poetry, was damaged by the author's desire to show the moral side of the epic epic. Not realizing the complete contradiction between the mythological interpretation, which rejects the origin of epics to the remotest, prehistoric antiquity, Miller gave the same epic a domestic interpretation, as an expression of Russian folk ideals in General. The same Ilya Muromets, whose battle with his son supposedly means that "God is a Thunderer, producing, that is, generating, clouds, on the other hand, destroys them", is at the same time an incomprehensible logical leap in Miller's personification of the depth of understanding of the essence of Christianity by the Russian people, as a religion of concern for one's neighbor and for truth. The dissertation was preceded by a textbook: "Experience of historical review of Russian literature" (2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1865), brought to the Mongol period, with a separate anthology to it (2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1866). For all its mythological extremes, "Experience" served a great service in that for the first time it introduced a detailed introduction to folk literature into teaching. In the late 70s, Miller vigorously polemicized with V.In Stasov on the question of the possible origin of epics.»]