The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

the Russian Christians. Russia’s steady secularization begun by Peter the Great did not obstruct the growth of a cult of martyred tsars (Paul I, murdered in 1801; Alexander II, assassinated in 1881; Nicholas II, shot in 1918). No matter how immature their royal persons or how flawed their reigns, a violent, passively received death ennobled them. The Boris-and-Gleb model of sacrifice resonates behind the most atheistic of patriotic Soviet fictions. In her classic study of the Stalinist novel, Katerina Clark notes that martyrs remained the privileged means by which History moved toward its preordained end.8

The second saintly prototype is the canonized holy fool or Fool in Christ, the yurodivy. In Chapter 2 we introduced this type as the most spiritualized in Russia’s rich trove of national fools; here we emphasize the religious dimension of their illogical or extra-logical speech, physical handicaps, indifference to comfort, and unpredictable politics. One of the earliest and most beloved of these figures was a monk from Klopsko near the northern city of Novgorod in the first half of the fifteenth century, canonized in “The Life of St. Michael, A Fool in Christ” (in Z, pp. 300–10). Michael occupied a cell in the monastery for forty years, living on bread and water, sleeping on the bare earth, and facilitating a series of miracles during local famines and droughts. Two details are worth noting about his holy-foolish career.

At this time Moscow was “gathering together” (that is, subduing in geno-cidal campaigns) the scattered Russian lands, including Novgorod. Michael advised his city to sue for peace. Holy fools intervened “illogically” in politics – but not always in defiance of the crueler, more powerful side. Sometimes, as

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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.

Our final exemplary saint’s life, that of the first Russian warrior saint, also had a revival during the Stalinist period. Alexander (1220–63), later called Nevsky because of his 1240 victory over the Swedes on the Neva River, became Prince of Novgorod in 1236. Two years later, Mongols were at his doorstep, but a miracle of spring flooding made the swamps impassable and kept the fierce horsemen at bay. Alexander reigned for sixteen years, fending off the attacks of Swedes, Lithuanians, and Teutonic knights from the west while buying off the Mongol overlords with tribute to the south and east. His Life, composed around 1280, is the first hagiography of a secular prince and military leader. It is titled “Tale of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander” (Z, pp. 224–36). Wherein lies the courage?

In the Russian context of exposed borders and the nightmare of an all-front war, courage for a virtuous state-builder meant knowing when to subdue one’s pride in theinterests of national survival.Against the well-armed, highly aggressive Catholic nations to the west, Alexander fought lightning-swift, strategically brilliant battles. In such maneuvers, pursuit of glory was possible and appropriate. (Before one such battle, recalling the partisan gods in ancient Greek warfare, Saints Boris and Gleb appeared in a vision to one of Alexander’s allies – less as martyrs of non-resistance than as heroes of national unity.) But a very different strategy was required to fight Khan Batu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, whose “Golden Horde” came to occupy most of Eurasia after the fall of Kiev

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in the 1220s. The steppe frontier was endless and could not be defended. Thus the Church blessed Prince Alexander in his journeys of taxpaying tribute to the Mongol capital on the Volga River. Two centuries later, when internal rivalries fractured the Horde, Muscovite tsars pitted one khanate against another and reunited the Russian lands.

In the Stalinist period, Saint Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated. Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film Alexander Nevsky, released in 1938 with Prokofiev’s stirring score, became propaganda art in the Party’s campaign to replace proletarian internationalism with Russo-centric heroes in the shadow of Hitler’s growing might. As Eisenstein had intended, enthusiastic moviegoers saw in the “Germanic” Teutonic knights close relatives of the contemporary fascists. When Stalin and Hitler concluded their non-aggression pact in August 1939, Alexander Nevsky was immediately withdrawn from the movie houses, to be just as rapidly reinstated in June 1941 after the Nazi surprise attack.