The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Since native Russian paganism had no established priesthood and Russian villages no temples, it was easily “conquered” by Christianity. But the pagan cosmos was pragmatic and overall tolerant. It made room for the officially new and then re-coalesced around the well, the barn, the hearth. Up through the eighteenth century, Church and state authorities in the cities attempted to stamp out pagan “survivals” in Russian rural culture - much as the Bolsheviks attempted to stamp out Christian “survivals” in the first half of the twentieth. But in the nineteenth century, the authorities gave up trying. Precisely that century witnessed the phenomenal flowering of a Russian literature that freely integrated motifs of paganism, Christian monotheism, and modernization. All of Dostoevsky’s great novels must be read in these three dimensions at once.

Saints’ lives: sacrificial, holy-foolish, administrative, warrior

The first type of Russian Orthodox vita or saint’s life [in Russian, zhitie] is that of the “passion-sufferer” [strastoterpets], an innocent martyr, often a child. In imitation of Christ, this innocent sacrifices its life - but for the sake of national unity or domestic peace, not for the salvation of all humanity. The concept of original sin is not central to Russian Orthodoxy; its punitive aspects are not obsessively dwelt upon. The Fall is less a story of sexual guilt than of prideful autonomy. The founding text for this meek type of Christian biography -doubled in two siblings, focused on family loyalty - was recorded in the

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eleventh-century Kievan Primary Chronicle as “The Martyrdom of Boris and Gleb” (in Z, pp. 101–05). Boris and Gleb, two teenaged sons of the Kievan Prince Vladimir, Baptizer of Russia, were slain in 1015 by their elder brother Svyatopolk (later knownas“theAccursed”)inapreemptivesuccessionstruggle. Both brothers had armed retainers and thus the power to defend themselves; they chose not to do so, which is essential to the potency and pathos of their story. When Svyatopolk’s men arrived to commit the deed, Boris chanted the Psalter and prayed that this sin not be held against his eldest brother. Gleb, when informed of the murder of Boris, burst into tears and resolved also not to resist the assassin’s knife. These two youthful martyrs – who had accomplished nothing for the faith except to assent unresistingly to death – were soon venerated as “interceders for the new Christian nation.” Their submissive act freed the fledgling and vulnerable Kievan state from threat of civil war.

This non-violent, self-negating response to evil has nothing of the masochistic or epic-heroic about it. The boys did not wish to die. To seek suffering or to glorify it would have been a prideful sin. But undeserved death by another’s hand, which generates compassion rather than glory, caught the imagination of the Russian Christians. Russia’s steady secularization begun by Peter the Great did not obstruct the growth of a cult of martyred tsars (Paul I, murdered in 1801; Alexander II, assassinated in 1881; Nicholas II, shot in 1918). No matter how immature their royal persons or how flawed their reigns, a violent, passively received death ennobled them. The Boris-and-Gleb model of sacrifice resonates behind the most atheistic of patriotic Soviet fictions. In her classic study of the Stalinist novel, Katerina Clark notes that martyrs remained the privileged means by which History moved toward its preordained end.8

The second saintly prototype is the canonized holy fool or Fool in Christ, the yurodivy. In Chapter 2 we introduced this type as the most spiritualized in Russia’s rich trove of national fools; here we emphasize the religious dimension of their illogical or extra-logical speech, physical handicaps, indifference to comfort, and unpredictable politics. One of the earliest and most beloved of these figures was a monk from Klopsko near the northern city of Novgorod in the first half of the fifteenth century, canonized in “The Life of St. Michael, A Fool in Christ” (in Z, pp. 300–10). Michael occupied a cell in the monastery for forty years, living on bread and water, sleeping on the bare earth, and facilitating a series of miracles during local famines and droughts. Two details are worth noting about his holy-foolish career.

At this time Moscow was “gathering together” (that is, subduing in geno-cidal campaigns) the scattered Russian lands, including Novgorod. Michael advised his city to sue for peace. Holy fools intervened “illogically” in politics – but not always in defiance of the crueler, more powerful side. Sometimes, as

64 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature