The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Each expanding border, greeted by a patriotic cheer, also brought an increased vulnerability. The traditional types of “survival heroism” sampled so far – that of Ilya Muromets, Alexander Nevsky with the Mongols, Boris and Gleb, even the gentle colonizing abbot Theodosius – developed primarily in response to the demands and threats of the northern, eastern, and southeastern frontier. In that arc of confrontation facing the Eurasian land mass, both Kievan and Muscovite Russians viewed themselves as civilized enlighten-ers against pagans and nomads. Our final exemplary hybrid text comes from another sector, the Catholic and Protestant West.

These heretics to the west – well-armed, educated, cultured, carriers of the European Renaissance – presented a very different threat to Russian integrity than did the Tatar khans, who taxedheavilybut in principle tolerated the Orthodox Church. The theological academies of Kiev were already important centers of Latin literacy at a time when books were being banned and musical instruments burned by more conservative Orthodox authorities in Muscovy further north. The Northwest–Southwest cultural border remained highly porous to all modes of entertainment and aesthetic expression. A century before Peter the Great, literate Russians had access to love poetry, Jesuit school drama, satires, popular histories, picaresque narratives, Faust tales, and chivalric romances in crude Russian versions. Bowdlerized adventure tales of European, Greek, or mid-Eastern origin were hawked in the towns in the form of woodcut prints [in Russian, lubok], primitive pocket-sized graphic novels with a minimal storyline text. The influence of all these genres is reflected in the final pre-Petrine narrative we will consider, a prose tale recorded in Muscovy in the seventeenth century, The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn (Z, pp. 452–74).

The Grudtsyn-Usovs were a well-known north Russian merchant family and the tale is precisely situated, historically and geographically. In 1606, during Russia’s inter-dynastic“TimeofTroubles,”theseniorGrudtsynmoved eastwith his wife and son to Kazan to escape the invading Poles. When Mikhail Romanov became tsar in 1613, Savva was twelve years old. His story is a quasi-secular – and sexually explicit – multiple hybrid, with components of documented history, witchcraft, Faust tale, adventure story, travelogue, jousting bout, and an Intervention of the Holy Virgin, all framed by the redemptive formulas of a Russian Orthodox saint’s life. Integrated into one biography, it is the life of a sinner whose courage during the drawn-out torments of his repentance permits the storyteller to reframe demonic experiences as a sacramental trial. Its plot divides into three phases.

74 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The first is the period of Savva’s seduction, fall, and pagan bewitchment. Apprenticed in the city of Oryol, Savva is befriended by a wealthy elderly citizen, Bazhen Vtory, who has a young beautiful wife. The wife seduces Savva so successfully, and he cooperates so enthusiastically, that the young man, startled at his own appetite, resolves to refrain from carnal activity (at least for the duration of one holy day) for the sake of his soul. The wife, enraged, devises exquisite punishment: having slipped him a magic love potion to increase his desire, she connives with her unknowing husband to expel him from their home. Savva grieves and begins to waste away.

The second phase begins when Savva summons up the devil: “If someone would do something so that I might again take sexual pleasure with this woman . . .” Suddenly a young man appears, offers to intervene, asks Savva to provide a brief written note renouncing Christ, and again Savva is welcome in Vtory’s house. The wife is not exactly in league with the devil. She is “incited” by him – and one of the fascinating aspects of the tale is its ambivalent, borderline treatment of human responsibility. The externalized medieval model of “an angel on one’s right shoulder, a devil on one’s left,” battling over possession of the helpless human soul, coexists with a more modern internal explanation: “Human nature knows how to lead the mind of a young man into iniquity” (p. 455). Is human nature the victim, the carrier, or the willful initiator of the vice? Is the body choosing to pursue its pleasure, or has the body itself been taken captive and thus deserves our sympathy? This archaic image of an outside “devil doing it to us” remained vital, deep into Russian literature’s maturity: in the art of Gogol and Dostoevsky, in the mystical poems and stories of the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), and in plays and novels by the Soviet-era Mikhail Bulgakov, all of which combine folk devils and grand Lucifers with astute human psychology and rigorous moral accounting.