The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

other is the revelatory, didactic, transfigurative saint’s life. Its master plot is intercession and salvation. In between are various hybrids: oral legends, cautionary tales, and the folk epic [bylina] where the epic hero, or bogatyr, is part warrior, part saint, part superman, and at rare moments even partly a folk-tale fool.

All of these narratives – ecclesiastic and folk – could accommodate miracles and the supernatural. Russian medieval genres did not know the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, only between entertainment (profane stories) and edification (sacred stories). As in most pre-modern oral cultures, if a given legend did not seem true for its contemporary audience, this was no proof that it was “made up”; it had been true for grandparents or ancestors, who had witnessed it first hand or heard it from a trusted second party. All events, consciousnesses, and narratives were linked in a single, integrated continuity, told or experienced. Just as no person could stand alone, fully outside a clan or community (for every person at least has parents), so no literary work stood alone.

But integration did not mean homogenization or a dissolving of the one into the many. Just as every individual is born of two discrete parents but does not duplicate either of them, so was every medieval text perceived as indispensable to the integrity of the whole. No body was excluded from a community merely because it happened to be orphaned or deceased. Churches were understood also to be bodies – or more precisely, human faces with eyes, ears, and heads

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(onion domes rose up roundly on necks; oko [eye] gives rise to okno [window]).2 The Russian word for spiritual togetherness or communality, sobornost', is built off the word sobor, which means both a collective and a cathedral.

From this animated and integrated cosmos, we will discuss only a small number of text types: the saint’s life, the folk- or fairy tale, and two famous hybrids: the folk epic of Ilya Muromets, and the Russian Faust narrative The Tale ofSavva Grudtsyn.3 At chapter’s end, we review two important modes of causation operative in these traditional texts: miracle and magic.

Russian saintly prototypes originated in Byzantine Christianity but mutated while moving north. Reasons for this mutation have been found in Russia’s peculiar time-space. Her official conversion to Christianity was abrupt. It affected cities and towns but hardly registered in the countryside. As Christian stories and motifs spread slowly over the Russian plain, they blended with, rather than replaced, pagan worldviews. This fused belief system came to be known as dvoeverie or “dual faith.”4 Its hybrid hierarchy of demons, godlets, earth spirits, patron saints, the Holy Trinity and Mary Mother of God never experienced the astringent cleansings of a Renaissance or Reformation - two European cataclysms that did not reach Russia and whose echoes registered only much later, in altered form. The dark agents of dual faith went under the collective name of nechistaya sila, the “unclean force,” that which causes mischief or induces us to sin. The distinction between mischief and sin is important. In the Russian hagiographic tradition (the Christian side of dual faith), saints are radiant and singular; devils are small, devious, and many. Devils are always drawn to the challenge of bringing down a saint.5 Arguably more fundamental to the unclean force, however, were the archaic folk devils on the pagan side: nasty but not necessarily evil, possible to placate with the proper magic or bribe, often thought to possess creative power- and thus linked more with fear (or thrill) in the face of the unknown than with sinful behavior.6

East Slavic paganism was the product of a landlocked agricultural empire. Gods of sun, moon, stars, and wind did exist, but prayers were directed down to the life-giving black soil rather than up to celestial deities. Bodies did not “rise” after death but were reabsorbed into the womb of Mat'-syra-zemlya, Moist Mother Earth. The body was understood to be a seed; thus failure to bury a dead body was a grievous sin. The pagan Greek pantheon was not well known in Kievan or Muscovite Russia, and many of the central Greek gods had no equivalent in the Russian religious imagination. There was no aggressive god of war, for example, and no goddess of female beauty (only of grass, flowers, birch trees, ponds, lakes, rivers, and swamps). Mother Earth Herself had no discernible face.7 Russian “dual believers” would not have considered

62The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the anthropomorphized antics of Mount Olympus, fueled by rage, jealousy, revenge, rape, and meanness of spirit, either natural or normal - and certainly no model for human behavior. Kindness, fidelity, and the capacity to nurture were valued over freedom or valor.

The center of human life, the peasant house, was embedded in four elements, the same four known to the medieval West. Two were mythical-metaphysical, masculine in gender, intangible, and behaved “vertically” (that is, they “rose”): air [vozdukh] and fire [ogon']. Two were more material-physical, female in gender, solid, and behaved “horizontally” (they fell, filled up or flowed): land [zemlya] and water [voda]. Both pairs were obligatory, but their energies did not mix. Nor did they fundamentally change. The idea of progress was not part of the peasant worldview; the very word for “time,” vremya, is derived from the verb vertet'sya, “to revolve,” spin or spiral around. Since time was not progressive but cyclical, whatever change we see can only be superficial - the work of wizards, masks, or shape-shifters.

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