Fools
Russian culture produced three types of fool. None coincides precisely with fools further west. In common with Western Europe, Russia has the fool of the folk tale, the durak (in Russian Ivanushka-durak, Ivan the Fool, the youngest, laziest, bumbling yet lucky third son). Old Russia also knew medieval jesters, the trickster or shut (pronounced shoot), and a wandering minstrel-acrobat-actor, the skomorokh. All were associated with pagan magic and the demonic. Finally there is that peculiar Russian variant on a Byzantine saint, which has amazed European visitors ever since the sixteenth century: the yurodivy (fool in Christ, holy fool) or blazhenny (blessed one).
If in Europe the fool tended to be a dunce or a rogue, laughed at and held in low esteem, then Russians displayed both a reverence for folly and a tolerance for the physically grotesque and mentally deranged.6 Under Peter I (r. 1682–1725), moronic or grotesque dwarfs did enjoy a brief vogue, but far more commonly, powers of clairvoyance and prophecy were bestowed upon the eccentric or dim-witted. The tradition of the cleverly spoken fool, the fool as sidekick, confidant, or court buffoon to the king, was weakly developed in Russia, enjoying a brief stage life only in the imitative eighteenth century. For many reasons Leo Tolstoy despised Shakespeare and in particular the tragedy King Lear, but he took special offense at the Bard’s punning, pontificating Fool.
Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–97), Modernist prose writer, dissident, and e?migre? professor at the Sorbonne, drew an engaging portrait of fools and jesters in his lectures from the late 1970s, published as Ivan Durak [Ivan the Fool].7 Well into adolescence, the Fool lies “on the stove” (the warm sleeping-shelves to either side of the large bricked peasant chimney), doing nothing but blowing his nose or catching flies. If unable to avoid a task set by his older and smarter brothers, he does it stupidly, without forethought, to further his own comfort (not, note, out of kindness or passivity: Ivan the Fool can punch, kill, lie, sew up innocent people in sacks and dump them into the icy river without a second thought). Central to his nature is an openness to many paths, living for his pleasure in
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the present, and seizing opportunity on the fly. Setting out, he doesn’t know his destination – but various miracles always come to his aid. To be called a durak is usually an insult, but the fool, typically, is open to that possibility too: if he notices the offense, he doesn’t care.
Sinyavsky’s own irreverent writings, for which he suffered a prison term before emigrating to France in 1973, often feature a durak. Equally prominent in them, however, is the folk-tale thief and shut-skomorokh. Like the folk fool, the jesting, pilfering thief travels light and lives in a perpetual present. He robs, but since he never accumulates wealth for himself – he either loses it, or gambles or drinks it away – openness and a sort of honesty adhere in him too. Skomorokhi, the Russian wandering minstrel-mummers, constituted a more established profession, almost a guild. Hired as professional merrymakers to perform at feasts, weddings, and funeral ceremonies, they plied their trade even at the tsarist court. Such regal employment was controversial, however, because the hugely popular skomorokhi, a blend of Eastern mimes and Spielma?nner (itinerant medieval singers of Central Europe), were associated with pagan – and thus demonic – activities: instrumental music, theatre, dance and acrobatics, juggling, sorcery, the training of bears, obscene or blasphemous storytelling. As part of a more general ban on public levity, the Orthodox Church outlawed them in 1648. Many practitioners masked their activities and went underground. In a strange conflation, skomorokhi became associated in some areas with the act of writing and the art of bookmaking. Psalters have been found dating from fourteenth-century Novgorod, for example, where the initial letters are illuminated by skomorokh figures dancing, playing stringed instruments, or wrapped around the letters of the alphabet in lithe acrobatic pose.8 This infiltration of pagan energy into holy writ must have lent an exciting, sinister cast to the very act of writing, which also tapped supernatural powers. Skomorokh speech, too, was creative and potentially poetic – full of elastic triple rhymes and deceptively sly double meanings. In his drama Boris Godunov (1825), Pushkin creates a dissolute wandering monk, Varlaam, who, when a little drunk, starts speaking in triple rhymes. In a later scene the playwright has his own ancestor, Gavrila Pushkin, remark that in Russia a poet is treated no better than a skomorokh. By the time the play passed the censor (1830), that naughty line had been edited out.
The jester/clown or shut often overlapped with the rogue. But a shut was more self-consciously costumed and theatrical. His links to Italian commedia dell’arte and to the Petrushka of itinerant puppet shows made him a key figure for Symbolist theatre and Russian Modernism.9 Prior to that renaissance, Russia’s richest repertory of jesters had been created by Dostoevsky – whose greatest creation in this genre is the dissolute, sly, self-deprecating, repulsive,
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and irritably vain Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Significantly, the noun shut also means “joker,” one who tells a joke [shutka], and is a common euphemism for the devil. Devils played jokes as well as told them; “mocking laughter could often be heard as man was led astray.”10 Russian cautionary proverbs frequently rhyme smekh [laughter] with grekh [sin]. But pagan devil-jesters and ecclesiastical (church-recognized) devils tended to laugh for different reasons. Sinyavsky notes that in Russia, even holiness often had a “shut-like” quality about it (p. 59). This enigmatic comment brings us to the most curious of the Russian fools, the yurodivy or “holy fool.”
Holy foolishness originated in Byzantium but was greeted with increasing reverence as it moved north. The yurodivy was a wanderer, an ascetic, a renouncer of goods, home, family, social standing, even the resources of reason. If a holy fool did seek temporary residence, his peasant host was honored as a pravednik. The yurodivy went around barefoot, winter and summer, dressed in rags and often bruised across the back, shoulders, and loins by heavy chains. He was foolish (or feigned madness) not for his own benefit, and not always even for the sake of some concrete good, but in order to stimulate others toward a moral reassessment of their actions or attitudes. Not all holy-foolishness was perceived as yurodstvo Khrista radi, “folly for the sake of Christ.” But in all cases it attested to one’s liberation from the immediate environment and its confining perspectives. The holy fool lived in another time-space and had access to its truths.
For this reason the fool’s utterances, even the most incoherent, were presumed to carry prophetic meaning. A yurodivy could speak the truth to tsars without fear of reprisal. In addition to its sly skomorokh-monks, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov also contains a holy fool who confronts Tsar Boris with his crime (the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry) publicly on Red Square and emerges unscathed, even after refusing to pray for the “Herod-tsar.” The yurodivy’s role is paradoxical. He must live in permanent insecurity and homelessness, despising all hierarchy, fixing his focus not on this world but on the other world, yet he is not a hermit or recluse. He is a social and public figure. It is difficult to represent this type in a psychological novel, because the author (and the reader) cannot get inside its consciousness. There is no coherent, mappable inside. Holy foolishness is entirely performative, symbolic, and specular.
The type fascinated Dostoevsky. At one point in his confession to Sonya, Raskolnikov – wondering what sustains her in the squalid, beggarly underworld of Petersburg – calls her a yurodivaya. He fears that further contact with her will cost him his reason and perhaps even turn him into a holy fool himself. In the novel Demons, the grotesque fool, wanderer, and “prophet” Semyon Yakovlevich becomes a popular tourist attraction for bored young people of the
