who adapted gypsy motifs to popular romances-were blended by star performers such as Stesha (Stepanida Sidorovna Soldatova, 1784-1822) and her successors. Tsy-ganshchina’s attraction rested on lyrics, music, and performance style. Song lyrics represented gypsies as hot-blooded, wild in love, cruel in hatred, and enamored of freedom and the open road. The music was marked by sharp contrasts and sudden changes of tempo. The critic Apollon Grig-orev wrote in 1847: “If you seek sounds, if you seek expression for those undefined, incomprehensible, sorrowful ‘blues’ (khandra), you make off to the Gypsies, immerse yourself in the hurricane of these wild, passionate, oppressively passionate songs.” An English visitor to a Moscow cafe during the 1850s described the performance of a gypsy choir wearing expensive and gaudy garments. They sat or lay on the floor; the soloist was joined by the company who drank and smoked as they strolled from table to table, stamping their feet. As cafes, restaurants, and phonograph records proliferated during the early twentieth century, gypsymania launched the careers of a half dozen superstars of the era who often emulated in life the emotional turbulence of their songs. Most Russians found them irresistible.
Critics accepted both the traditional music of the Roma, because it bore a folkish spirit, and the stylizations of composers at play like Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The middle range, by far the most popular, invited rancor: the local vernacular adorned with gypsy devices of rhythm, sonority, instrumentation, and phrasing. In Russia, songs composed in the gypsy manner, such as “Two Guitars” and “Dark Eyes,” evoked repugnance among some critics. Ironically, genuine gypsies when playing Roma music also borrowed from local styles, and this habit accounts for the huge variety among the various authentic gypsy styles from Spain to Finland. Under Bolshevism, hostility to tsyganshchina took on a political edge. During the 1920s, classical musicians lamented its vulgarity, and proletarian composers charged the music with inciting decadence, bourgeois values, and miscreant sexuality. The gypsy genre disappeared during the Cultural Revolution (1928- 1931), and a form of gypsy music was partially
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revived, in a sanitized form, with the founding of See also: FOLK MUSIC; GYPSY; PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER the Teatr Romen in 1931 where something like SERGEYEVICH genuine Roma performances were mounted. Recordings by other Soviet singers of selected gypsy songs were released under the watchful eye BIBLIOGRAPHY of the censors. With the coming of glasnost under Stites, Richard. (1992). Russian Popular Culture: EnterMikhail Gorbachev, every kind of previously taboo tainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge, UK: gypsy songs resurfaced, only to be drowned out Cambridge University Press. soon by Western rock and hip-hop. RICHARD STITES
Various types of narratives with documentary and commemorative functions for the Orthodox Church are also regarded as important literary works in the medieval Russian canon. Sacred biographies (vitae) were written about persons who had followed Christ’s example in life and shown evidence of powers after death to intercede for believers, attributes that qualified them for sainthood. A short summary of the saint’s life was read initially at the ceremonial inauguration of the feast day and thereafter to honor the saint’s memory. Longer vitae circulated in religious anthologies of devotional readings. Eulogistic biographies of rulers, initially written for the funeral service, were recorded in chronicles, then revised for hagiographical anthologies. Tales from the Patericon record episodes from the lives of holy monks, their teachings, or the history of a monastic community. The vitae also include extended accounts of miracles worked by icons, some of which are viewed as local or national symbols, as well as tales of individual miracles.
When the Kievans converted to Christianity during the reign of Vladimir I (d. 1015), they received Greek Orthodox protocols for the recognition and veneration of saints, as well as a corpus of hagiographical texts. Beginning in the eleventh century, Kievan monks produced their own records of native saints. Veneration for the appanage princes Boris and Gleb, murdered in the internecine struggles following the death of their father Vladimir, inspired three extended lives that are regarded as literary classics. Also influential was the life of Theodosius (d. 1074), who became a monk and helped to found the renowned Kiev Cave Monastery. His biography, together with stories of the monastery’s miraculous founding and of its monks, was anthologized in the Kiev Cave Monastery Patericon. The earliest hagiographical works from the city-state of Novgorod, surviving in thirteenth-century copies, focus on the bishops and abbots of important cloisters. Lives of Suz-dalian saints, such as the Rostov bishops Leontius, Isaiah, and Ignatius, and the holy monk Abraham, preserve collective memories of clerics who converted the people of the area to Christianity.
In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Russian monks fled the cities, moving into wilderness areas to live as hermits, then founded monasteries to house their disciples. The writings produced in these monastery scriptoria promoted
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asceticism as the highest model to which a Christian could aspire. Biographies of saints were supplemented with long prefaces, prayers, laments, and digressive praises employing the poetic imagery and complex syntactic structures characteristic of hymnography. An introductory commonplace, declaring the writer’s wish to write an account that will be a fitting crown or garland of praise for the saint, has inspired some scholars to group these lives into a hagiographical school whose trademark is “word-weaving” (pletenie sloves). The most prominent writers of this school include Metropolitan Cyprian (c. 1330-1406), identified by some as a Bulgarian and others as a Serb, who wrote a revised life of the holy Metropolitan Peter in 1381; Epiphanius the Wise (second half of the fourteenth century to the first quarter of the fifteenth century), author of the first life of St. Sergius of Radonezh and St. Stephen of Perm (1390s); and Pachomius the Logothete, an Athonian monk sometimes identified as a Serb, who was commissioned to rewrite the lives of widely venerated holy men from Novgorod, Moscow, and leading monasteries between 1429 and 1484.
Sixteenth-century Muscovite hagiographers composed expansive narratives celebrating saints and icons viewed as protectors of the Russian tsar-dom. The most influential promoter of the Muscovite school was Macarius. While serving as archbishop of Novgorod (1537-1542), Macarius ordered the collection of saints’ lives and icon legends, as well as other translated and original religious texts, for a twelve-volume anthology known as the Great Menology (Velikie Minei Chetii). The first “Sophia” version was donated to the Novgorod Cathedral of Holy Wisdom in 1541. During his tenure as metropolitan of Moscow (1542-1563), Macarius commissioned additional lives of saints who were recognized as national patrons at the Church Councils of 1547 and 1549, for a second expanded version of this anthology, which he donated to the Kremlin Cathedral of the Dormition in 1552. A third fair copy was prepared between 1550 and 1554 for presentation to Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Between 1556 and 1563, expanded sacred biographies of Kievan rulers Olga and Vladimir I, appanage princes and princesses and four Moscow metropolitans, as well as an ornate narrative about the miracles of the nationally venerated icon Our Lady of Vladimir, were composed for Macarius’s Book of Degrees. These lives stressed the unity of the Russian metropolitan see and the theme that the line of Moscow princes had prospered because they followed the guidance of the Church. In the seventeenth century, two twelve-volume hagiographical anthologies were produced by clerics affiliated with the Trinity-Sergius Monastery: the Trinity monk German Tulupov and the priest Ioann Milyutin. Their still unpublished menologies preserve lives of native Russian saints and legends of local wonder-working icons not included in earlier collections. In 1684 the Kiev Cave Monastery monk Dmitry (Daniel Savvich Tuptalo), who would be consecrated metropolitan of Rostov and Yaroslavl in 1702, began to research Muscovite, Western, and Greek hagiographical sources. Dmitry’s goal was to retell the lives of saints and legends of wonder-working icons in a form accessible to a broad audience of Orthodox readers. The first version of his reading menology was printed in 1705 at the Kiev Cave Monastery. In 1759, a corrected edition printed in Moscow became the authorized collection of hagiography for the Russian Orthodox Church. Also noteworthy as sources on the spirituality of the seventeenth century are the lives of Old Believer martyrs (Archpriest Avvakum, burned as a heretic on April 1, 1682, and Lady Theodosia Morozova who died in prison on November 2, 1675) and the life of the charitable lay-woman Yulianya Osorina, written by her son Kallistrat, district elder (gubnaya starosta) of Murom between 1610 and 1640. See also: KIEVAN CAVES PATERICON; ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bosley, Richard. (1997). “The Changing Profile of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovy’s Formative Years.” In
