Consequently, the quality of epic literature is determined to a great extent by the quality of the narration. On the whole, however, narration predominates, binding together everything that is depicted in a given work. Epic narration may be self-contained-that is, it may temporarily dispense with direct speech on the part of the characters-or, by letting the characters speak in their own voice, it may become permeated with their spirit it may function as a framework for the protagonists’ spoken utterances or it may, on the contrary, be reduced to a minimum or be temporarily absent. The narrative layer of an epic work is connected in a natural manner to the protagonists’ dialogues and monologues. The narrator (either the author himself or the teller of the tale) relates the events and detailed circumstances as though recalling them from the past, falling back along the way to describe the setting in which the action takes place and the characters’ physical appearance or, occasionally, to express his own thoughts. A specific trait of epic literature, however, is the organizing role played by narration. The characteristic feature of epic literature, as of drama, is the representation of an action unfolding in space and time-the course of events in the lives of the characters. Epic literature includes various genres, such as the folktale ( skazka), traditional account ( predanie), varieties of the heroic epic, epopee, epic poem, novella ( povest’), tale ( rass-kaz), short story ( novella), novel ( roman), and literary sketch ( ocherk). (Russian epos), one of the three classes, or types, into which literature is divided, the others being poetry and drama.
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