Pavel Rybnikov and Alexander Hilferding publish multi-volume collections of Russian byliny (oral heroic epics) from peasant singers (skomorokhi) in Olonets province. These poems preserve Kievan Rus' legends (Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich), pre-Christian Slavic mythology, and fantastic folklore (kikimoras, rusalki), using distinctive free-rhythmic recitative. The collection captures vanishing oral traditions before railway modernization destroys rural culture.

The byliny collections fueled the 19th-century Russian folk revival, directly influencing Alexander Pushkin's fairy-tale poems (Ruslan and Ludmila) and Nikolai Nekrasov's folk-inspired long poems. Soviet poets (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam) drew on bylina imagery for resistance poetry against Stalinism, treating folklore as encrypted national memory. The collections remain foundational for ethnopoetics and oral-formulaic theory.