The Life Written By Himself, by Archpriest Avvakum, translated by Kenneth N. Brostrom (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

AV VAKU M: THE FIR ST RUSSIAN MODERN WRITER ?

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Miguel de Cervantes (1547?–1616) were contemporaries whose works are powerful revelations of the early modern mind in European history. Albert Camus once observed (speaking of the post-Enlightenment era) that the didactic preoccupation with moral problems in the literature from the long historical past had been replaced more recently by philosophical problems. This formulation is overly succinct, but it identifies a current of thought that became widely and increasingly assertive in the expanding sea of literature produced in Europe after the Renaissance. The philosophical frame of reference has been called “problematic”; it often asks fundamental existential questions that would do much to erode, in the centuries following the careers of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the ontological certainties and resulting moral didacticism characteristic of the historical past. It is customary and reasonable to think of both geniuses as early modern writers and thinkers. Indeed, Alexander Introduction

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Pushkin (1799–1837) shared the opinion of many of his contemporaries in identifying Shakespeare as a Romantic (i.e., modern) writer.

Soon after the passing of these two literary greats, there emerged in Russia far to the east a writer who has also been called modern, Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620/21–1682).

Russia, essentially untouched by the Renaissance and generally isolated from Western Europe by political and fundamental religious barriers, was still marinating in the world of the medieval past. Avvakum was a pristine product of this world, conservative to the marrow of his bones and with an intellect almost always untroubled by ontological doubts and uncertainties. And yet it was his very religious conservatism that made him what can reasonably be called Russia’s first modern writer.

As one of the principal leaders of the Old Believers during the great schism (Raskol) in the Russian Orthodox Church (mid-seventeenth century), Avvakum was motivated by his religious calling and unshakable spiritual convictions to communicate with the common people who made up the majority of the Old Believers. The opening pages of his Life reflect his knowledge of the archaic literary language of the Russian Church (Church Slavic or Slavonic), but beyond portions of the liturgies of holy worship and popular biblical passages, this language would be poorly understood by common people.

Avvakum mentions occasionally in his writings his love of the Russian language, and he had undoubtably learned from his ministry that he could move people by speaking directly in the vernacular. (We know that he and his clerical allies often

preached in the vernacular.) Importantly, his autobiography bore a title with the Russian word often used for the life of a saint (zhitie); it emphasized the importance of the hagiographical message he wished to impart—teaching his understanding of the one true path to heaven and eternal salvation. Understanding him was essential, and this made him, inadvertently, a revolutionary as a writer.

Of course, to call Avvakum a modern writer depends on our contemporary historical and cultural frame of reference. We might understand his Life as a first-person narration wherein the narrator is biased and limited in what he knows and can possibly know, and with his own unique story to tell. His often stentorian voice, the range of his emotions, the enormity of his sufferings, the intensity of his love for his wife and others, the dark depths of his hatred for his clerical enemies, and his recognition at times of his own moral failings produce together a complex portrait not of a saint but of a man of intelligence, iron integrity, and unshakable faith, even in the face of a terrible death. Leo Tolstoy once said that he could not read the Life without weeping, and one supposes that he perhaps saw in Avvakum an ideal Russian with a Russian capacity to suffer and to remain steadfastly true to his understanding of the good. He is remembered among educated Russians not so much for the details of his medieval message but for the strength, integrity, and fearlessness of that voice. His fundamental duty in life was to remain obedient to his understanding of the commandments of the ancient Orthodox faith. First among them perhaps was “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God (Isaiah 41:10).

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THE HISTORIC AL CON TE XT It is one of the ironies of Russia’s ironic history that her secondgreatest religious crisis occurred during the seventeenth century as she entered an era shaped by forces moving her toward an increasingly secularized future. (The greatest crisis occurred during and after the Russian Revolution.) One need not be a Marxist, of course, to recognize that great crises frequently erupt during periods of historical transition: the moribund flares into new but ephemeral life, just as a dying star sometimes explodes into a supernova and then fades away forever. Old Muscovy had idealized the political and cultural isolation of her life during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: she was the “Third Rome,” the final repository, after Rome and Constantinople, of unsullied Orthodox Christianity, destined to lead a degenerate world to history’s culmination in the Second Coming. Significantly, however, this persistent idea never became official doctrine. As was often to be the case in the future, prophetic ardor regarding Russia’s historical destiny had to yield to political realities. Visions of the Apocalypse and world spiritual supremacy provided no useful guide to action as Russia began to seek her place among the peoples who were coalescing into modern Europe.

Old habits of mind hold tenaciously to life, however, even among pragmatists. The collapse of Byzantium and the Tatar Golden Horde during the fifteenth century and Moscow’s astonishing rise to hegemony in the East Slavic area during the sixteenth had not created but simply reinvigorated much older dreams of Russia’s special destiny. In addition,

the chaotic historical hiatus Russia experienced between the death of the house of Rurik and the birth of the Romanov dynasty (the so-called Time of Troubles, 1598–1613) had taught Russians to distrust the Westerners who had repeatedly invaded Russia then, plundering and attempting to impose the “heretical Papist faith.” Despite growing admiration of things Western among the elite, this distrust along with the old visions of national grandeur led Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–1676) to perceive the natural arena for Russian leadership, within the European context, in the lands of the Greek Orthodox faith. But to assume this position of preeminence, Moscow had to harmonize her religious practices with those of the Greeks, who were willing to humor Muscovite aspirations to gain protection against their overlords, the Turks in particular. Patriarch Nikon’s ecclesiastical reforms, however, had implications far transcending the ambitious calculations that gave them birth. The old dream of a purely spiritual supremacy was abandoned for a new one; in order to establish Moscow as first among Orthodox nations, the reforms declared the Third Rome defunct by identifying “errors” in her ancient, sacrosanct, “unsullied” traditions. This revolution in Muscovy’s self-image provoked terrible antagonisms between those who would preserve the past inviolate and those equally committed to supremacy, who would achieve it without exclusive reliance on God’s national preferences. Avvakum was a mighty spokesman for the conservative opposition. His autobiography is not only an important historical document and a literary masterpiece but an imperishable portrait of the mind of an era torn apart Introduction

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by commitments that now seem bizarre and sometimes quaint, for all their tragic, hideous consequences.

Frequently encountered in Soviet historical accounts is the assertion that the ecclesiastical reforms reflected, to a considerable degree, internal developments in Russia, specifically the centralization of autocratic power in Moscow: a centralized church was a necessary ideological and institutional bulwark for the state. Certainly, the social system in Russia during the seventeenth century can be described as a centralized, hierarchical feudal order based on serfdom and a service gentry.

But this is not very helpful in understanding the reforms. For example, emphasis on the Church’s supporting role tends to ignore the fact that Patriarch Nikon’s attempt to elevate the Church over the state, thereby setting them against each other, was a manifestation of not only personal ambition but powerful theocratic impulses evident in the reformers. Even more to the point, the reforms did not strengthen but seriously weakened both Church and state. The Soviet historians were nevertheless correct in part: the reforms were a response to internal conditions in Russia. But there were no hidden, secular “class” motivations behind them at the outset; their purpose was not the centralization but the “churchification” (otserkovlenie) of Russia.

Here we are primarily concerned with the reform movement’s first phase, which proceeded not “from above,” as with Nikon’s calamitous innovations, but spontaneously “from below.” In this the early years of the reform movement were distinct from every effort to achieve a religious revival in the Russian past.

The destruction, social chaos, deaths, and humiliations visited on Russia during the Time of Troubles left many of the

devout in bitter confusion. What had happened to “Radiant Russia” (svetlaia Rus’), favored by God and destined for elevation above all the nations of the earth? Contemporary historical accounts predictably fall back on a traditional explanation for misfortune: Russia’s agony was punishment sent by God, just recompense for unrepented and proliferating sins. The ignominious depths of Russia’s suffering were thus a measure of God’s great wrath against his chosen people. What, then, must be done so that such punishment would never come again? This question became more urgent with the passage of time, for the religious fervor that accompanied the expulsion of foreign rulers from Moscow early in the century soon waned, and age-old abuses of piety returned with irrepressible vitality.

What is more, the premonitions of doomsday that had agitated Western Europe during the sixteenth century now began to stir in Russia, and the need for Russians to shoulder their eschatological responsibilities seemed even more pressing. Reports and rumors of repressions visited on Orthodox believers and churches by the Turks, Lithuanians, and Poles; the constantly shifting configurations of alien religious movements—Islam, Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, Unitarianism—in the regions along Russia’s periphery; continuing military weakness; and spreading internal unrest and sporadic revolts all contributed to the general unease and the belief that Russia was in desperate need of spiritual renewal.

The first stage of the reform movement is generally associated with the activities of a group of energetic spiritual leaders who emerged from the ranks of the married parish, “white” clergy (as opposed to the monastic “black” clergy); they are Introduction

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known as the Lovers of God (Bogoliubtsy) or the Zealots of the Ancient Piety (Revniteli starogo blagochestiia). Although certain prelates of the Church were interested in spiritual revival (Zenkovsky shows that publication of religious materials rose dramatically during the period 1631–501), it was primarily clerics active in the scattered villages and towns of the upper Volga area who sought to work a miracle, to bring the ideal and the real together, making of their land a genuine “Holy Russia,” the final earthly repository of undefiled heavenly Truth. Some, and perhaps many, of these stalwarts remain unknown to us. Avvakum mentions numbers of them in his Life, and we know others from other sources. The remainder were buried, literally and figuratively, by Nikon and his heirs, for almost without exception the Lovers of God found themselves in the camp of the Old Believers—those who later would not and could not accept Nikon’s innovations, even when the alternative was death.

The odds were against these zealous parish priests from the outset. The Russian episcopate had long been chosen exclusively from the monastic clergy, which had acquired and retained a virtual monopoly on ecclesiastical wealth and education during and after the era of the Tatar Yoke (thirteenth through fifteenth centuries). Not only did parish priests have little influence on an ecclesiastical hierarchy dominated by monks and a powerful contingent of lay administrators, but they were generally patronized and often disdained as the lesser of the brethren of the cloth: they were denizens of ten thousand derelict villages, ignorant, uncouth, and most likely drunken. The Lovers of God were possessed, however, of an

enormous ambition for Russia, which meant declaring all-out war on the status quo. They were thus caught between a selfinterested ecclesiastical bureaucracy, hoary with ancient prerogatives and privileges, and a secular, simply human world uninterested in heroic spiritual exercises. That they had any success at all is attributable in large measure to the combined efforts of three men: Archpriest Ivan Neronov (see annotation 55); the tsar’s confessor, Archpriest Stefan Vonifatiev (see annotation 54); and the himself, Alexei Mikhailovich.

Ivan Neronov was apparently born with the ardor of the prophet and reformer. But his life probably acquired its direction from the teachings of Dionysios, Archimandrite of the St. Sergius-Trinity Monastery (or “Lavra”), Russia’s greatest center of religious and cultural life in the early seventeenth century. Neronov arrived at the monastery in the early 1620s, and his piety and appealing personality immediately attracted Dionysios’s attention. Neronov lived in Dionysios’s cell, becoming his personal servant and devoted disciple. This venerable holy man had rendered his beloved Russia great service during the Time of Troubles, and from him Neronov undoubtedly heard much regarding her destiny. At the same time, his sense of the urgency of reform must have been sharpened by the tales told by the many pilgrims who were drawn to the monastery and who kept the monks alive to threats to the faith both within and outside Russia. In his teachings in response to these challenges, Dionysios drew heavily on the writings of St. John Chrysostum and Maxim Grek (“Maximus the Greek”), two writers who later became favorites among the reformers (see notes 39, 260). John Chrysostum’s reforming zeal and sermons Introduction

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in rebuke of human wickedness inspired the Zealots to great works, and Maxim Grek’s unwavering affirmation of faith against Rome’s systematically elaborated dogmatics and his extensive commentaries on the details of Russian life and faith recommended him to men who wished to remake their world.

Around 1630, Neronov left the St. Sergius-Trinity Monastery filled with Dionysios’s spirit of personal responsibility for the fate of the Russian land. In this he marked the way for later Zealots, who similarly eschewed the ancient anchoritic ideal of solitary piety. Not personal salvation alone but elevation of the spirit of Orthodoxy and its penetration into every corner of Russian life and into the life of every Russian was the vision that moved them.

Neronov began his work in Nizhny Novgorod and soon acquired a reputation as an outspoken moral pedagogue. In 1632, he was exiled to the far north by Patriarch Filaret for publicly criticizing preparations for war with Poland. Filaret’s death in 1633 brought Neronov back to Nizhny Novgorod, and in the years following, his fame as a preacher spread far beyond his city. In 1647, he was brought to Moscow, where he became a member of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s inner circle; this group included Stefan Vonifatiev, who was to become Neronov’s closest friend and associate. They and a few others, such as Fyodor Rtishchev, were soon deeply involved in ecclesiastical reform (see annotation 200).

Neronov’s previous labor as a reformer was certainly a major reason for his transfer to Moscow. His sermons were a minor revolution in themselves, as the practice of preaching had virtually disappeared in the Russian Church despite the

great preachers in her past. Neronov’s sermons consisted of readings from Holy Writ followed by a commentary, not in ecclesiastical but in simple, moving vernacular language; their impact was measured by his spreading fame and perhaps by the subsequent popularity of preaching among the Lovers of God. In his sermons Neronov persistently summoned his brothers of the cloth to a lifestyle that would edify rather than vex or entertain their flocks. Like St. John Chrysostum, he preached and practiced a social Gospel, urging clergy and laity alike to labor for the welfare of the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden. He himself established a hospital and a refectory for the needy in Nizhny Novgorod, and a school as well, and during the entirety of his career, he devoted substantial energy to such charitable activities. No one, including the lords of the realm— the boyars—was beyond the reach of his blunt denunciations and the prescriptive urgency of his summons to renewal.

With regard to liturgical matters, nothing was more vital to Neronov than the principle of edinoglasie, or “chanting in a single voice.” The Russian Orthodox service was lengthy, in some instances lasting six hours or more. This was a grueling experience for those whose zeal and piety were insufficient to sustain them so long in a standing position (there were no pews). Consequently, the Church had shortened the service by permitting mnogoglasie, or “chanting in many voices”; that is, various portions of the liturgy, sometimes as many as six or even more, were performed simultaneously. The ensuing cacophony provided a suitable backdrop for the shuffling congregation’s conversations, wisecracks, arguments, and jokes. In 1636, a group of militant priests from Nizhny Novgorod led by Introduction

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Neronov submitted a document to Patriarch Joseph (Ioasaf or Joasaphus I) in which they decried mnogoglasie and the spiritual lethargy of most clergy. Existing conditions could only perpetuate the religious ignorance and indifference of the people.

The priests described the atmosphere of levity characteristic of worship services and the cursing, drunkenness, and depravity often encountered in Russian villages, the male inhabitants of which often celebrated religious holidays by organizing mass fistfights in which “many die without repenting.”

Patriarch Joseph was not unsympathetic to this appeal, and he soon issued an instruction that directed the clergy to chant in two, or not more than three, voices. This was not the end of the matter, however, for the militants from Nizhny Novgorod had reopened a troublesome question. Their desire to enforce edinoglasie reflected not so much a concern for liturgical style and coherence as it did their conception of the nature and purpose of divine worship. In Eastern Orthodox thought, the liturgy was understood as a majestic procession toward a genuine, mystical communion of the earthly and heavenly congregations. Just as men encountering a deep ravine will build a bridge over it, so they span the gulf between heaven and earth through the liturgy, completing that solemn task during the triumphal celebration of the Eucharist. In accord with this, the Kingdom of God was viewed metaphorically as an Eternal Eucharist, in which the Elect (the “Pure Bride”) commune with the Heavenly Bridegroom by sharing the bread and wine at a joyful wedding feast. Divine worship thus granted erring men a real foretaste of Christ’s Second Coming, provided they were in a properly elevated spiritual state.

“[Kenneth N. Brostrom’s] translation is exceptionally well done, re-creating . . . the rhythms, stylistic alternations, and vernacular intonations of the original.”

— P R IS C I L L A H UN T, Slavic Review

PR AISE FOR THE LIFE WRITTEN

BY HIMSELF

“Avvakum’s combination of ecclesiastical and colloquial language transposed into writing the pathos of his oral rhetoric and has remained a source of inspiration to modern Russian literature ever since the Life was published.”

— J O S T E I N B ØR TN ES , The Cambridge History of Russian Literature “The daring originality of Avvakum’s venture cannot be overestimated, and the use he made of his Russian places him in the very first rank of Russian writers: no one has since excelled him in vigor and raciness and in the skillful command of all the expressive means of everyday language for the most striking literary effects.”

— P R I N C E DM I T RY SVYATOP OL K M I RS KY, A History of Russian Literature

Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-231-19808-0