Dobrynya Nikitich

Second Among the Bogatyrs

Dobrynya Nikitich appears throughout the bylina cycle as a nobly born bogatyr, more polished and diplomatically skilled than the peasant-born Ilya Muromets, and often sent by Prince Vladimir on delicate missions as much as violent ones. Different songs give him different family details, but the Ryazan region and a father named Nikita are the most common thread.

The Dragon at the Puchai River

Dobrynya's best-known bylina has him swim in the Puchai River against his mother's warning and encounter Zmey Gorynych, a fire-breathing, multi-headed dragon. In the version most often collected, the two fight to a standstill and swear an oath of peace; the dragon then breaks the truce by abducting Zabava Putyatichna, Prince Vladimir's niece. Dobrynya, called on to make good the dragon's broken word, returns to its lair, kills it, and frees Zabava and other captives the dragon had taken.

An Oral Tradition, Recorded and Repainted

Like the Ilya Muromets cycle, the Dobrynya byliny survive only from written collections beginning in the late eighteenth century. Kirsha Danilov's collection, compiled roughly in the 1780s-1804 and first published in 1804, is among the oldest written sources for the bylina tradition and preserves versions of the Dobrynya and dragon story. Nineteenth-century fieldwork collectors, again including Rybnikov and Hilferding, recorded further regional variants from singers in northern Russia. The now-famous grouping of Dobrynya with Ilya Muromets and a third bogatyr, Alyosha Popovich, as a fixed trio owes a great deal to Viktor Vasnetsov's 1898 painting Bogatyrs, a nineteenth-century artistic synthesis rather than a grouping fixed in the earliest recorded songs.