The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Sinyavsky’s own irreverent writings, for which he suffered a prison term before emigrating to France in 1973, often feature a durak. Equally prominent in them, however, is the folk-tale thief and shut-skomorokh. Like the folk fool, the jesting, pilfering thief travels light and lives in a perpetual present. He robs, but since he never accumulates wealth for himself – he either loses it, or gambles or drinks it away – openness and a sort of honesty adhere in him too. Skomorokhi, the Russian wandering minstrel-mummers, constituted a more established profession, almost a guild. Hired as professional merrymakers to perform at feasts, weddings, and funeral ceremonies, they plied their trade even at the tsarist court. Such regal employment was controversial, however, because the hugely popular skomorokhi, a blend of Eastern mimes and Spielma¨nner (itinerant medieval singers of Central Europe), were associated with pagan – and thus demonic – activities: instrumental music, theatre, dance and acrobatics, juggling, sorcery, the training of bears, obscene or blasphemous storytelling. As part of a more general ban on public levity, the Orthodox Church outlawed them in 1648. Many practitioners masked their activities and went underground. In a strange conflation, skomorokhi became associated in some areas with the act of writing and the art of bookmaking. Psalters have been found dating from fourteenth-century Novgorod, for example, where the initial letters are illuminated by skomorokh figures dancing, playing stringed instruments, or wrapped around the letters of the alphabet in lithe acrobatic pose.8 This infiltration of pagan energy into holy writ must have lent an exciting, sinister cast to the very act of writing, which also tapped supernatural powers. Skomorokh speech, too, was creative and potentially poetic – full of elastic triple rhymes and deceptively sly double meanings. In his drama Boris Godunov (1825), Pushkin creates a dissolute wandering monk, Varlaam, who, when a little drunk, starts speaking in triple rhymes. In a later scene the playwright has his own ancestor, Gavrila Pushkin, remark that in Russia a poet is treated no better than a skomorokh. By the time the play passed the censor (1830), that naughty line had been edited out.

The jester/clown or shut often overlapped with the rogue. But a shut was more self-consciously costumed and theatrical. His links to Italian commedia dell’arte and to the Petrushka of itinerant puppet shows made him a key figure for Symbolist theatre and Russian Modernism.9 Prior to that renaissance, Russia’s richest repertory of jesters had been created by Dostoevsky – whose greatest creation in this genre is the dissolute, sly, self-deprecating, repulsive,

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and irritably vain Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Significantly, the noun shut also means “joker,” one who tells a joke [shutka], and is a common euphemism for the devil. Devils played jokes as well as told them; “mocking laughter could often be heard as man was led astray.”10 Russian cautionary proverbs frequently rhyme smekh [laughter] with grekh [sin]. But pagan devil-jesters and ecclesiastical (church-recognized) devils tended to laugh for different reasons. Sinyavsky notes that in Russia, even holiness often had a “shut-like” quality about it (p. 59). This enigmatic comment brings us to the most curious of the Russian fools, the yurodivy or “holy fool.”

Holy foolishness originated in Byzantium but was greeted with increasing reverence as it moved north. The yurodivy was a wanderer, an ascetic, a renouncer of goods, home, family, social standing, even the resources of reason. If a holy fool did seek temporary residence, his peasant host was honored as a pravednik. The yurodivy went around barefoot, winter and summer, dressed in rags and often bruised across the back, shoulders, and loins by heavy chains. He was foolish (or feigned madness) not for his own benefit, and not always even for the sake of some concrete good, but in order to stimulate others toward a moral reassessment of their actions or attitudes. Not all holy-foolishness was perceived as yurodstvo Khrista radi, “folly for the sake of Christ.” But in all cases it attested to one’s liberation from the immediate environment and its confining perspectives. The holy fool lived in another time-space and had access to its truths.