‘St George and Egorius the Brave’ is a work by philologist Aleksander Ivanovich Kirpichnikov (1845-1903), publ. in the magazine Zhurnal of the Ministry of People’s Education in 1878-1879; it was also the Doctor thesis by K.
The subtitle is ‘Research in the Literary History of a Christian Legend’. The author calls for the Eastern and Greek tradition to interpret legends on St George. He studied more than 200 manuscript copies and compared the known texts and fragments about St George, building the scheme of textual history. The author supposed that European, Moslem, and Ethiopic texts about St George could be traced back to the eldest Syrian legend, created in the fourth or fifth century, when Greek language had been wide-spread in Syria, even more than Syrian itself – so, the personal names in the legend were Greek. Then, the author gave various sources of the plot of the apocrypha Life of St George, trying to find the common elements in other apocrypha and tales of martyrs.
The second chapter, ‘An attempt to explain the basis of the legend’, contains consideration on several theories. The historical theory, which connected the legend to historical reality, on the evaluation of K., was the most feeble. The other theories offered the links of St George to god Mitra, Tammuz, Horus and other mythological figures; the author rejected all of them. In the chapter ‘The Battle of St George and Dragon’ the author criticized the mythological school, Schwartz, for instance. But the author did not demy a possibility of translation some traits of classical mythology at the figure of the saint; for instance, he noted that Pegasus was transformed into the horse of St George.
In the third chapter, the author described the problems of double-beliefs and complicated mixture of various beliefs, considering the issue of assimilation old beliefs with new ones; on the base of customs and songs of Slavic peoples the author tried to reconstruct the figure of George prototype – Egorius or Yury. He analyzed spring rituals connected with the Day of Yury and came to the conclusion, that Yury was a protector of cattle-breeding and arable farming.
The fourth chapter contains the analysis of spiritual verses on Egorius, and the attempts to restore the initial poem. The biggest interest of the author was in details of the spiritual verses, which had no literary sources. It gave a chance to understand the reasons of dissemination of these or those plots, though such reasoning was not scholarly one.
The work ‘St George and Egorius the Brave’ was rather popular among his contemporaries; it was cited by V. F. Miller, A. N. Veselovsky, and others. And M. C. Azadovsky said, that K. could be taken for the founder of the theory of self-shaping, and it had much in common with ideas of A. Lang.