The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

did Michael, they saw reality more sensibly than the politicians. And second: Michael’s unexpected appearance at the Klopsko monastery was marked by what would become a characteristic exchange. Upon seeing this strange monk, the abbot inquired: “Who are you, my son, a man or a devil? Why did you come to us? Where are you from?” And the as-yet-unnamed Michael responded: “Are you a man or a devil? Who are you? Why did you come to us? Where are you from?” (Z, p. 302). This mirror or echo-dialogue is an instructive example of holy-foolish discourse, which, dressed up in more literary garb, will become the verbal dynamic of carnival, of certain types of dissident speech, of avant-garde poetry and the Russian Absurd. The interrogator asks a question confidently because he (unlike, he presumes, his interlocutor) is in his right place, a stable and recognized identity. The interrogated party responds by casting back the question unchanged, thus turning a hierarchical inquiry into a horizontal pan-human one, the litso [face] of the interrogator into a potential lichina [mask]. Ushering from another world, “foolish” words radically equalize all parties.

Not all observers of “foolish” behavior responded positively to it. We provide here only one post-medieval example. In Chapter 5 of his quasi-autobiographical Childhood (1852) Leo Tolstoy describes, from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy, the visit of the yurodivy Grishka to a Westernized aristocratic estate. Entering the house, Grishka strikes the floor with his staff, breaks into a grotesque laugh, and begins to mutter incoherently. The father of the family expresses (in French) his keen distaste “for fellows like this” who, he insists, deceive honest educated people, refuse to work, and should be put under arrest. The mother (whom Tolstoy eventually immortalizes as the meek, pious Princess Marya Bolkonskaya in War and Peace) answers him in Russian. She expected this skepticism and parries it. “I find it difficult to believe” – she sighs – “that a man, despite being sixty years old, who goes barefoot winter and summer and under his clothes wears chains weighing over seventy pounds, which he never takes off, and who more than once has refused offers of a quiet life with everything taken care of – it is difficult to believe that such a man does all this out of laziness.”

No nation can live by sacrificial martyrs and holy fools alone. Our remaining two saintly types are more survival-oriented and pragmatic. Saint Theo-dosius, who founded the Caves (or Crypt) Monastery in Kiev in 1074 and then became its abbot, represents the monk-administrator. He was an essential figure in Moscow’s steady expansion east and northward across a vast continent. The monastic complex, Russia’s omni-purpose civilizing and colonizing structure, served at various times as military fortress, place of worship, and prison. The task of its administrators was not to jolt or confound society – the

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duty of the confrontational fool – but the opposite: to organize, discipline, and inspire it to prayerful and productive labor. With his own monks, Theodosius proved himself a gentle and patient advisor. His Life, written by the chronicler Nestor (Z, pp. 116–34), portrays him as an astute psychologist who counseled monastic residents on the virtues of self-control and self-reliance. To his enemies, however, Theodosius could be uncompromisingly severe. In his youth, those enemies included his own possessive mother, who fought tenaciously to keep him within the biological family fold, beating him without mercy when she discovered he had girded his loins with iron chains. He escapes her, of course, for his vocation is preordained. When his mother tracks him down, she discovers that she will have access to him only if she enters a convent. Her love drives her to it – and eventually she provides the chronicler Nestor with her son’s story. This model of a working male community under threat at the edge of the civilized world, led by a spiritual ideologue who must overcome (among much else) the protective and procreative instincts of the family, will combine with the traditional Russian epic hero (bogatyr) to inspire the Soviet construction novel. In Chapter 8 we discuss its prototype, Fyodor Gladkov’s 1922–24 novel Cement, the saga of a ruined factory restored after the Civil War under the charismatic leadership of a returned soldier-engineer named Gleb.