Slavic

The Slavic tradition spans the Eastern Slavic peoples (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), the Western Slavs (Polish, Czech, Slovak), and the South Slavs of the Balkans (Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian). It is a linguistic family before it is anything else — the Slavic languages remained mutually intelligible later than most of the Indo-European tree — and a cultural family bound together by a shared early-medieval Christianisation, divided between Orthodox and Catholic spheres after the schism of 1054.

What the tradition produced is substantial and often under-translated in the English-speaking world. The cathedral architecture of Kievan Rus’ and the icon tradition that descended from Byzantium through Andrei Rublev. The literature of nineteenth-century Russia, Poland, and Bohemia, which gave the modern novel three of its strongest voices in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Sienkiewicz. The folk music and dance traditions of the Carpathians, the Balkans, and the Russian North. The philosophical and theological work of the Slavophile and Russian religious renaissance.

We cover early medieval Slavic culture, the divided Christian inheritance, the literary and artistic peaks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the folk traditions, and the contemporary cultural life of the Slavic countries.