The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

(onion domes rose up roundly on necks; oko [eye] gives rise to okno [window]).2 The Russian word for spiritual togetherness or communality, sobornost', is built off the word sobor, which means both a collective and a cathedral.

From this animated and integrated cosmos, we will discuss only a small number of text types: the saint’s life, the folk- or fairy tale, and two famous hybrids: the folk epic of Ilya Muromets, and the Russian Faust narrative The Tale ofSavva Grudtsyn.3 At chapter’s end, we review two important modes of causation operative in these traditional texts: miracle and magic.

Russian saintly prototypes originated in Byzantine Christianity but mutated while moving north. Reasons for this mutation have been found in Russia’s peculiar time-space. Her official conversion to Christianity was abrupt. It affected cities and towns but hardly registered in the countryside. As Christian stories and motifs spread slowly over the Russian plain, they blended with, rather than replaced, pagan worldviews. This fused belief system came to be known as dvoeverie or “dual faith.”4 Its hybrid hierarchy of demons, godlets, earth spirits, patron saints, the Holy Trinity and Mary Mother of God never experienced the astringent cleansings of a Renaissance or Reformation - two European cataclysms that did not reach Russia and whose echoes registered only much later, in altered form. The dark agents of dual faith went under the collective name of nechistaya sila, the “unclean force,” that which causes mischief or induces us to sin. The distinction between mischief and sin is important. In the Russian hagiographic tradition (the Christian side of dual faith), saints are radiant and singular; devils are small, devious, and many. Devils are always drawn to the challenge of bringing down a saint.5 Arguably more fundamental to the unclean force, however, were the archaic folk devils on the pagan side: nasty but not necessarily evil, possible to placate with the proper magic or bribe, often thought to possess creative power- and thus linked more with fear (or thrill) in the face of the unknown than with sinful behavior.6

East Slavic paganism was the product of a landlocked agricultural empire. Gods of sun, moon, stars, and wind did exist, but prayers were directed down to the life-giving black soil rather than up to celestial deities. Bodies did not “rise” after death but were reabsorbed into the womb of Mat'-syra-zemlya, Moist Mother Earth. The body was understood to be a seed; thus failure to bury a dead body was a grievous sin. The pagan Greek pantheon was not well known in Kievan or Muscovite Russia, and many of the central Greek gods had no equivalent in the Russian religious imagination. There was no aggressive god of war, for example, and no goddess of female beauty (only of grass, flowers, birch trees, ponds, lakes, rivers, and swamps). Mother Earth Herself had no discernible face.7 Russian “dual believers” would not have considered

62The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the anthropomorphized antics of Mount Olympus, fueled by rage, jealousy, revenge, rape, and meanness of spirit, either natural or normal - and certainly no model for human behavior. Kindness, fidelity, and the capacity to nurture were valued over freedom or valor.

The center of human life, the peasant house, was embedded in four elements, the same four known to the medieval West. Two were mythical-metaphysical, masculine in gender, intangible, and behaved “vertically” (that is, they “rose”): air [vozdukh] and fire [ogon']. Two were more material-physical, female in gender, solid, and behaved “horizontally” (they fell, filled up or flowed): land [zemlya] and water [voda]. Both pairs were obligatory, but their energies did not mix. Nor did they fundamentally change. The idea of progress was not part of the peasant worldview; the very word for “time,” vremya, is derived from the verb vertet'sya, “to revolve,” spin or spiral around. Since time was not progressive but cyclical, whatever change we see can only be superficial - the work of wizards, masks, or shape-shifters.