The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

wandering beggars (in the Christianized variant, three wise men) drop in on him and command him to rise from his bunk. He protests; they insist: “Get thee up and give us to drink!” Ilya rises and finds that his strength is boundless. His visitors tell him what to avoid, whom to appease, what to attack, and how to equip himself with a horse. Taking leave of his astonished parents and tying a clod of soil around his neck (a talisman of the moist Earth that bore him), he sets off to Kiev to serve Prince Vladimir. Along the way he liberates the city of Chernigov from the Mongols and captures the bandit Solovey. In one variant, Ilya encounters the huge Svyatogor, challenges him to a duel, but the giant only plucks Ilya up and puts him in his pocket. The two become friends. However, when they stumble across an enormous coffin on the road “destined for the person who fits it,” Ilya is unable to protect his fellow bogatyr from the death pre-measured for him.

Motifs from the life of Ilya of Murom pervade Russian culture – inverted, parodied, or stylized, depending on which phase of his career is highlighted. For his Brothers Karamazov, a strikingly “male” novel of fathers, sons, rivals, merchants, monks, lawyers, and adolescent boys, Dostoevsky chooses the name Ilya for Captain Snegiryov’s young son, the brooding boy who dies mysteriously of a crippling ailment; the novel ends on Alyosha’s injunction to Ilya’s grieving schoolboy friends to remember “his face, his clothes, his poor boots, and how he bravely rose up for his sinful, unfortunate father.” In a comic vein, the eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1859), famous for a sloth so profound that he cannot get out of bed (and then unwillingly) until the middle of Chapter 8, is named Ilya Ilyich [Ilya son of Ilya]. Immobility can be comic, but elevated to the status of nation, it displays its epic and implacable side. The world’s first mass-produced bomber aircraft, the “Ilya Muromets,” was a huge four-engine biplane designed in Riga in 1913 and adopted by the

Traditional narratives 73

Imperial Russian Army in August 1914. The heroic Muromets squadron flew 400 sorties between 1914 and 1918, until its designer Igor Sikorsky abandoned it for a more manageable aircraft to be called the “Alexander Nevsky.”

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.

The two “brothers,” Savva and his false friend, become inseparable. They travel to the friend’s home – which is Hell, of course, but on the horizon of earth, a city of gold – to present Satan with the God-rejecting letter. At this point the tale veers off to the west, much as the leaner Grimm tale, “Faithful John,” had opened up to absorb a Koshchey-the-Deathless subplot when that famous German folk tale moved east. Savva Grudtsyn incorporates Muscovite military history as well as a Polish chivalric subplot. The two brothers join the tsar’s mercenaries fighting to recapture Smolensk from thePoles (an historically documented battle from the early 1630s). Savva jousts with three giant Polish knights, defeating them (although not without some wounds) with the devil’s help. Then Savva falls ill. The final phase begins.

Several aspects of this remarkable final segment prefigure the later, great moral Realists, most notably Leo Tolstoy, whose 1890 story “The Devil” begins

Traditional narratives 75

with a similar psychological dynamic. Savva both knows, and does not wish to know, the true identity of his patron. His dilemma is at the core of traditional Russian religious thought, which values self-discipline and believes in the transfiguration, rather than the condemnation, of the human body. The devil depends for his effectiveness on a mix of outer stimulation and inner inclination. We know that evil has triumphed within us when we lose control, when our desire cannot be satisfied, when it becomes insatiable and thus unstable. This is the truth that the gentle Russian ascetics such as Abbot Theo-dosius (and Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima) speak to the fanatics among their flock. The devil exploits the bad habits of the undisciplined body, but it is still our body and we still must answer for it. This lesson, which became central to the Russian psychological novel, registers in lapidary fashion on the body of Savva Grudtsyn.

Savva has fallen ill, and he is persuaded by a “wise, God-fearing woman” to take confession. The devil-