Or here is another definition (a pure noun) hyV,
which is used in direct opposition to fiction. To
some one's query, ' Is this a fib ?' you answer, ' No !
it is byl' V=N'et, hyV ! It is a thing which really
has been, has taken place ; hence, the name for the
ancient folk-epic is hyllny. The future tense in the
Old Slavonic of this verb is biid'e ; well, quaintly
enough, added to the beginning of a phrase it means
' in case if ' ; whilst its past tense, bylo, added to the
end of the same phrase, means ' was about to.'

Or here is still another noun from the same verb :
the byt. (The only difference in the spelling of
this word, from the same three letters representing
the infiBitive, consists in the letter t being hard
instead of soft.) We use this noun to define, en
masse, the manners of life, the code of existence



THE RUSSIANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE 37

of any class of people. We say — the hyt of pro-
vincial actors, the byt of courtiers, the byt of a
farmer, of a peasant, of students, of the soldiers
in the trenches — the general routine of their life,
as it were. This definition leads, in. its turn, to
the adjective hytovdy, which is applied to char-
acter roles, to character sketches, to national
features. Again, the future is called, in Eussian,
hiidushcheye, an adjective participle of the verb to
be. Thus the latter is interwoven in the Eussian
speech closely enough, but in quite a different way to
the purely grammatical and even the auxihary one
in which it runs through the Western languages.
