Byliny (singular bylina) is the conventional name given to Russian oral heroic poems. The poems, known to those who recited them as stariny, meaning “old songs”, were firstly collected in Northern Russia, in the province of Olonets, in the 1860s and their collection continued on until the 1930s, in the regions near Lake Ladoga.
There are around 3,000 collected transcriptions of the byliny, of which only approximately 2,000 have been published. These 3,000 transcriptions do not correspond to 3,000 different poems, since many are fragmentary or correspond to different variants of the same poem, transcribed from different singers, or from the same singer at different times.
The byliny are poems usually of between 200 and 400 verses, or lines, long, although some of them can reach a thousand...
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Citation: Torres Prieto, Susana. "Byliny [Russian Heroic Poems]". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1643, accessed 05 December 2025.]
