In July 1900, Mikhail Nesterovich Speransky (later an academician, a famous Slavist, who was repressed in the 1930s) recorded spiritual poems in the Rylsky district of the Kursk province (1). The blind man Grigory Artamonov sang him twelve traditional works, including one non-traditional, which Speransky in his publication entitled "About Alexander II" (Speransky M. Dukhovnye stikhi iz Kurskoi gubernii Spiritual poems from the Kursk province // Ethnographic review. 1901. N 3. P. 65). The fact that this song belongs to the category of spiritual poems was not indisputable for Speransky because of the unconventional content. Other collectors, having recorded it in other regions of Russia, designated the genre differently. But the very first, anonymous publication, which extracted a similar text from the investigative file ten years before Speransky's recording, reported that it was "one of the 'verses '" sung by the sectarian- 1 The name "spiritual verses", which belongs to their performers, was fixed in science for a multi-genre complex of common people's pious hymns, the themes of which were mainly taken from the Holy Scriptures. The lives of saints and works close to them in content, some of which the church did not recognize as true (these are the so-called apocrypha). page 89 mi in the Land of the Don Army (How Russia cried about its White Tsar) / / Russkaya starina. 1890. N 12. P. 689). And the last publication cited below, carried out in 1916 by a major folklorist Nikolai Yevgenyevich Onchukov (later also repressed), was entitled "A Verse about Alexander II" and was a recording from a blind man who sang for passengers of the 3rd class on a steamer traveling along the Kama River. In the Voronezh province, this song was recorded as a "psalm", which, according to the collector, "is sung in the villages to the tune of a long and sad one" (Ketrits B. E. "Psalm" about the Emperor Alexander II / / Historical Bulletin. 1898. N 3. P. 1126). Other publishers identified th ... Read more