An approach to reconstruction of East-Slavic pagan religion by L. S. Klejn
Summary
Leaving aside conjectures, inferences by analogy, indirect considerations, and guess-work while addressing the original material, the sources, it appears that time and victorious Christianity have worked well at destroying the Slavic pagan religion: the information we obtained on Perun was very scarce and fragmented. The memory on Perun seems to remain only in some swearwords, in a couple of stories mentioned in the chronicles (on erecting and overthrowing of Perun's and other gods' idols in Kiev and Novgorod), as well as in oaths using the names of these gods in treaties with the Byzantines. The accusations levelled at the «apostates» in sermons by early Christian preachers contained little specific information. Similar names of pagan gods are known in some related Slavic languages. There is also some evidence on functions of these characters among several related peoples. This evidence concerns not so much their mythology, as the rituals associated with it. Myths of Perun have not been recorded.
Only from the time of the Renaissance and consequent study of classical mythology in Europe did the interest in domestic pre-Christian phenomena begin, particularly in the material that could be directly compared to similar classical examples. Addressing the mythology of some linguistically and culturally related peoples, two Polish authors of the 15th—16th centuries, A. D., J. Dlugosch and M. Srtryjkowski, retold (in a somewhat confused and tangled way) some data from the Russian chronicles, as well as cited what they themselves heard in the East. In the 17th century, further evidence on pagan beliefs was collected by the German, English and other European travelers to Russia.
In Russia itself, the studies of domestic paganism began only since the era of Peter the Great, i.e. the 18th century. Initially, the confused notions of Western scholarship of the time were borrowed wholesale. In the early 19th century, Russian scholars still based their approach on purely speculative considerations. They produced long lists of gods culled from enigmatic words in proverbs and songs (cf. A. S. Kaisarov, G. Glinka, a.o.). They strived to present the religion of their ancestors in a positive and idealized manner, not only as pre-eminent among the other pagan religions, but also as near to Christianity (cf. P. Stroev, M. Kastorsky, N. Kostomarov, S. M. Solovyev). The Slavophiles, however, did not support fully this approach; they advanced the idea of the original closeness of Slavic customs to orthodox monogamy and denied the existence of any developed pagan polytheism at any time. In their opinion, the pagan gods of the Chronicles were brought to Russia by the Varangians.