The Icon and the Axe

Maxim describes how in the midst of his travels he noticed a woman in black weeping by a deserted path and surrounded by wjld animals. He begs to learn her name, but she refuses, insisting that he is powerless to relieve her sorrow and would be happier to pass on in ignorance. Finally, she says that her real name is Vasiliia (from the Greek Basileia, "Empire"), and that she has been defiled by tyrants "unworthy of the title of Tsar" and aban-donedjjyherown children foQhe love of silver and sensual pleasure. Prophets have ceased to speak of her, and saints to protect her. "And thus I sit here like a widow by a desolate roadlh a cursed age."70

Here, liTessence, is the idea of "Holy Rus' ": humiliated and suffering, yet always compassionate'¦¦: a wife and mother faithful to her "husband" and /'children," the ruler and subjects of Russia, even when mistreated and deserted by them. Although the idea has been traced to Maxim's pupil Kurbsky,71 and shown to have first acquired broad popularity during the troubles of the early seventeenth century,72 the concept of "Holy Rus' " as an ideal opposed to the mechanical and unfeeling state finds its first expression in Maxim.

At the same time, Maxim linked the Hesychast ideal of continual prayer outside established worship services to the humanist ideal of a universal truth outside the historical truths of Christianity. He implored his readers to pray without ceasing that Russia would "put away all evil, all untrutrTTjind^embrace the truth."73 "Truth" (pravda) already carried for Maxim some of that dual meaning of philosophic certainty and social justice which the word carried for later Russian reformers. Like many of these figures, Maxim was frequently accused of sedition, and died a virtual prisoner^

After his death, Maxim (like Nil Sorsky before him) gradually came to be officially revered for the very pious intensity which the official church had feareu^^rKt^vTghrtcrdiseipline difring"bis lifetime?4 But his efforts to leaven the Muscovite ideology with riumanistic ideals failed. Archimandrite Artemius of the monastery of St. Sergius, who had been a learned follower of Nil and a devoted patron of Maxim, was banished to Solovetsk for heresy by the council of 1553-4. Artemius later fled to Poland like Maxim's pupil, Kurbsky-both of them remaining faithful to Orthodoxy, but despairing of any further attempt to blend humanist ideals with the Muscovite ideology.

Maxim_had£efused to participate in the church council of 1553-4, just as Nil hud opposed the condemHation ???^???????? of the Judaizers.

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When Maxim expired in 1556 in the monastery of St. Sergius, the last influentiai^advocate of a tolerant Christian humanism vanished from the Muscovite scene. A many-sided assault against foreign cultural influence ""was under way. A severe peftanee' wasTrnposed on»the Tsar's closest lay

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adviser, Ivan Viskovaty, for opposing a strict prohibition on alien influences in iconography. The brief fljcker of^ interest in Renaissance art shown by Ivan's priestly conffdant, Silvester (who had" ordered Pskovian artists to provide Moscow with copies of paintings by Cimabue and Perugino), was also extinguished.75 Interest in the ornate polyphonic music of Palestrina (which had been awakened by Maxim's friend and collaborator in Latin translations Dmitry Gerasimov, during his diplomatic visit to Rome in 1524-5) was also snuffed out by Ivan's decision to codify the prevailing system of church chant as the sole form of musical "right praising" for Russian churches.76 Finally^and most important, the work of reproducing . sacred texts was takeji_jiway fromJffitical and linguistically gifted figures like Maxim and put in the hands of more ignorant but dependable imperial servantsTThe Josephite monks around Ivan preferred vast compendia to a rational ordering of ideas. The objection to textual criticism extended even to the use of printing as a mean^for propagating the faith and reproducing holy books. The brief and unproductive effort to set up a state printing shop in Moscow under the White Russian Ivan Fedorov ended in disaster in ?5?5, when the press was destroyed by a mob and the printers fled to Lithuania.77 This was the year of Kurbsky's flight and the establishment of the"oprichnina. A new xenophobia was in the air, and the period of rela- – tively harmonious srnSFs^e*c^facTwtth the many-sided culture of Renais- | ^ sance Italy was giving way to the broader and more disturbing confronta- -J tioiTwhich began in the late years of Ivan's reign.