In fact, the topic is very interesting and rich in version and discussion. Once we even discussed the topic How the Russians began to be called “Russians”, and now I suggest you discuss the version of the very emergence of the Russian people.
Each Slavic people has legends about its origin, the emergence of power and state, about the founding of cities. The beginning of the separate existence of the people was associated, as a rule, with the mythical ancestor.
We meet these legends and myths on the pages of ancient chronicles - Czech, Polish, Russian.
The Slavic peoples remembered their ancient kinship, and there was a legend that they descended from three siblings - Lech, Cech and Rus. The Czech was the ancestor of the Czechs, Lech - the Poles, Rus - the Russians.
Czech, Lech and Rus are one of the most famous and widespread legends about three Slavic brothers, founders, Czech Republic, Poland and Russia. According to one version, the three brothers hunted together, but each of them decided to go his own way. Rus went east. The Czech moved westward to Mount Rjip, near Bohemia, while Lech went north until he met a huge white eagle guarding its nest. He founded the settlement of Gniezno and chose a white eagle as his coat of arms.
Krak and the foundation of Krakow
The name of the first king and the founding of the capital of the Poles are associated with the myth of the victory over the serpent. One of the descendants of Lech, the legendary prince Krak, lived on the banks of the Vistula. He was a good master and a successful warrior. In the same time immemorial, a terrible monster lived in the cave, which had to drive whole herds of cattle daily, otherwise it would rush at people. Krak could no longer bear such ruin. He decided to resort to cunning. Instead of cattle, the monster was planted with skins filled with burning sulfur. The snake swallowed these skins - and died.
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The winner of the serpent Krak was elected the first king by the Poles. And on the high bank of the Vistula, on a rock under which the monster once lived, the Poles founded the glorious city of Krakow.
Revenge of the Gods: The mice ate the king. Tradition says that one of the Polish kings was called Popel. He was a nasty man: greedy, lazy, cowardly. Most of all, he feared that his relatives would take away his royal power. Pretending to be terminally ill, he invited all his relatives and asked them to decide who would be king when he died. During the council, the king's wife gave the guests a drink with poison - and they all died. Popel was delighted that now he has no rivals, ordered to throw the bodies of his relatives unburied, supposedly sacrificing them to the gods.
But the gods did not accept the victim from the villain. The murder of visiting relatives should not be without revenge! Where the bodies of the poisoned lay, huge mice appeared. And it was impossible to escape from them either by fire or by a sword. Popel tried to escape from them into a high tower, but even there mice overtook and bitten him. So the king ended his shameful life.
The beginning of the Czech state
Another of the brothers - Cech - led his people to those fertile places where the large river Laba (Elbe) originates, where the beautiful Vltava flows into it. How wonderful this land was beyond the control of anyone! It was full of animals and birds. The air was pleasant and light, and the rivers abounded with fish. In gratitude for finding a beautiful homeland, the descendants named this land in honor of the progenitor Czechia.
At first, the Czech people were ruled by three wise sisters - Kazi, Aunt and Libuše. Kazi knew how to predict the future. The aunt taught the people to worship gods and spirits. Libuche wisely dealt with all disputes. She also possessed the gift of prophecy and was considered the main ruler of the Czechs. Libuche ruled the descendants of Cech meekly, mercifully and justly.
But some of the male warriors were unhappy that they were ruled by a woman. "Women have long hair, but short minds," they grumbled. I learned about this Libuše and said: "Choose your own master, and I will become his wife." And she named the place where the future prince is, and his name: after all, she knew how to prophesy.
Prince-plowman
The next day, the ambassadors took the princely clothes and a horse and went to the place that Libuše showed them. As she had predicted, they saw a peasant who, in peasant clothes, plowed the land on motley oxen. His name was Přemysl. The ambassadors bowed to him and said:
Hello, hello, our prince.
You are worthy of great glory!
Leave the oxen and clothes
And get on your dear horse.
The plowman stopped, stuck his stick into the ground - and a hazel bush grew out of it. Then he unharnessed the oxen and said to them, "Go where you came from." And the oxen immediately disappeared, as if they had never existed. The people who saw this were amazed. Přemysl invited the ambassadors to taste his peasant food - bread and water. And simple food seemed to them sweeter than any food.
After that, the plowman put on princely clothes, mounted a hot horse and rode accompanied by ambassadors to Libusha, who soon became his wife.
Together with Libuše, Přemysl established strict but wise laws that hardworking Czechs have since obeyed. At the same time, the city of Prague was founded on the banks of the Vltava - "Zlata Prague", as the Czechs fondly call their capital.
And so that the people would not forget that its first prince was a plowman, Přemysl's sandals woven from bast were kept for a long time in the royal palace. They reminded that the work of a plowman is the basis of life.
The legend about the founding of Kiev
On the high banks of the Dnieper, where a fertile field meets a forest teeming with animals and game, the Slavic tribe of Polyans lived. The glades were courageous and intelligent, distinguished by a kind disposition and meek customs. They did not kidnap their wives, but agreed on marriages in advance; did not kill each other in endless blood feud. And they had three brothers-princes: one was called Kiy, the other was Shchek, and the third was Horeb. And they had a sister named Lybid. Each of the princes ruled their own kind, and they lived in the neighborhood - on the mountains that towered over the Dnieper.
The most courageous and wise was the elder brother Kiy. With his retinue, he went on a campaign against Constantinople (as the capital of Byzantium, Constantinople, was called in ancient Russia). Frightened, the Byzantine emperor sent his ambassadors to Kiyu with great honor, gifted him with countless gifts. When Kiy returned to the bank of the Dnieper with a victory, the brothers built a city and named it by the name of his older brother - Kiev. And the river that flowed into the Dnieper, people began to call the Lybedya.
The Bohemian Chronicle by Kozma Prazhsky (early 12th century) tells about the arrival of a Slavic tribe in Bohemia, headed by the “forefather Czech”. Then Lech appeared in the Czech version of the legend, and Rus also appeared in the Polish version of the legend.
The legend is known from the “Wielkopolska Chronicle”: “In ancient books they write that Pannonia is the mother and progenitor of all Slavic peoples … from these Pannonians were born three brothers, the sons of Pan, the lords of the Pannonians, of whom the firstborn had the name Lech, the second - Rus, the third - Czech. These three, multiplied in the clan, owned three kingdoms: Lehites, Russians and Czechs, also called Bohemians."
It was in the Wielkopolska Chronicle that the legend appeared in its complete form in the XIV century, since in a manuscript written in 1295-1296. (from the library of Jan Godiyovsky), there is no fragment about the brothers. It is believed that the author of the version of the three brothers added Rus to the legend of a lech named Cech from the Croatian land, known from the Czech poetic chronicle of Dalimil Meziricsky, created in 1308-1314. Czech and Lech are featured in the Czech Chronicle by Jan Przybik from Pulkava (14th century), all three brothers by the Polish historian Jan Dlugosz (15th century).
The epic ancestor of the Russian people, Rus, is also known from the Persian Collection of Histories at the beginning of the 12th century.
The search for the biblical "ancestors" of the entire Slavs as a whole left aside questions related to the origin of individual Slavic peoples. This gave impetus to the search - already on a different level, of course - their ancestors. The idea itself seemed quite logical: after all, if we assume that in general all peoples descend from one biblical ancestor, then, consequently, every Slavic people can have their own ancestors.
Most of these ideas go back to archaic folklore - or they were the fruit of the personal creativity of chroniclers. Over time, they more and more penetrated the pages of the chronicles, acquiring new details. Naturally, in this case, the characters of the legends associated with peripheral (primarily in political and economic terms) Slavic centers received only temporary significance and were often forgotten later. On the contrary, the protagonists of the legends about the main centers of Slavism found themselves in a much more favorable position.
One of the most famous and widespread myths of this kind is the legend of the three Slavic brothers Chekh, Lech and Ruse, whose names clearly arose from the names of ethnic communities, the "founders" of which the three brothers allegedly were.
The origins of the legend go back to the "Bohemian Chronicle" of Kozma of Prague (early 12th century), which, in particular, reports on the arrival of a Slavic tribe in Bohemia, headed by the "forefather Czech". The wise Krok also directly contacted him: in some texts he was called a descendant, in others - a companion and close friend of Cech. Krok's daughter - the prophetic Libuše - was the mythical ruler of the whole country, and the plowman Przemysl, whom she chose as her husband, laid the foundation for the Czech dynasty. (According to another, later version, Krok was the son of the “Pole” Lech. It was he who defeated the dragon and founded the glorious city of Krakow on the Wawel Hill, which for five centuries was the capital of the Polish state).
Written in the 18th century, that is, six centuries after the Czech Chronicle, the Great Universal Lexicon by the German researcher I. Zedler says that by his origin Cech was a Sklavonian prince and lived in the Croatian castle Krapina until then, until he took the life of a Roman prefect named Avreol. After the perfect atrocity, Cech was forced to leave the castle and go to reign in Bohemia (either at the invitation of the Slavs, or out of personal motives - to settle and become a sovereign in a land depopulated due to wars and epidemics). The same newcomers from distant and unfamiliar lands were Lech in Poland and Rus in the Moscow state.
The evolution of the legend is obvious: new characters are added (brothers Lech and Rus) and the myth is based on the idea of the linguistic and superethnic community of Slavs, which is correct in its basis, when it is divided into several related branches. The very backbone of the legend was formed approximately by the turn of the XIV-XV centuries: it is interesting that in one of the anonymous works of a certain Krakow author, written at that time, Rus has an alternative name - Mech. It could arise either as a rethinking of the name of the already mentioned biblical character Mosoch / Meshech, or it was associated with the Polish common name mech (moss), by analogy: as Czech Republic and Czech - from thickets, and Poland - from fields, so Fur - from mossy and marshy areas.
Over time, the plot of the legend was more and more developed. The main differences in numerous versions of this legend boiled down to the following. Were its protagonists descended from biblical characters - or not? For example, in the writings of the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, who lived in the 10th century, a legend is mentioned about the origin of Russians from “Rus, son of Japheth and grandson of Noah” … How many brothers were - one (Czech, according to Kozma Prazhsky), two (Czech and Lech, mentioned in the Czech version of the legend), three (Czech, Lech and Rus, according to the Polish version) or even more? The Dalimilov Chronicle dating back to the XIV century, for example, speaks of six of his brothers leaving Croatia together with Cech - thus the sacred number seven appears in the legend, the ancient Indo-European symbolism of which was clearly manifested in mythology and rituals …
Which of the Slavic brothers - Cech or Lech - should still be considered the elder? Where were the brothers from (Croatia, Slavonia, Illyria, Macedonia)? Finally, can legendary events in principle be considered genuine - or not? Interestingly, the tendency to regard legendary events and characters as real has persisted for quite some time. The understanding of each of the versions of the mythologeme (their acceptance - or, on the contrary, rejection) was practically constantly changing. For example, Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov did not doubt the reality of the events described in the legend. The story of Chech, Lech and Rousse was familiar to him from the works of Polish authors, and in the "Ancient Russian History" he wrote that "in the half of the sixth century" Chech and Lech ruled a large Slavic people. True, a character named Rus caused distrust in the scientist,and he considered it fictional. At the same time, in the "History of the Russian" V. N. Tatishchev directly speaks of the fiction: "The Czechs and Poles invented three brothers: Cech, Lech and Rus …" According to the scientist, this legend was nothing more than a myth that made it difficult to perceive the real historical processes.
Finally, the belief in the historicity of the three legendary brothers-Slavs dried up thanks to the very process of the development of historical thought, which led to the demythologization of the picture of the origin of both the Slavs as a whole and its individual branches.
