high prices; though folk art in form, in execution they are works of high art.
Colorfully painted nesting dolls are essential souvenirs from a trip to Russia. PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN D. ROCK. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
MAXIM THE GREEK, ST.
See also: FOLKLORE
Hilton, Alison. (1995). Russian Folk Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(1625-1682), military officer, diplomat, courtier, boyar.
The son of a non-noble bureaucrat, Artamon Matveyev began his career at the age of thirteen as a court page and companion to the future Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. He soon became colonel of a musketeer regiment and traveled much of Russia and its borderlands on military and diplomatic missions. He helped negotiate the union of Ukraine with Russia in 1654, defended the tsar in the Copper Riots of 1662, and guarded many foreign embassies, including the clerics arriving to judge Patriarch Nikon in 1666 and 1667. By 1669, although still a musketeer colonel, he had become a stolnik (table attendant, a high court rank), namest-nik (honorary governor-general) of Serpukhov, and head of the Ukrainian Chancellery (Malorossysky Prikaz).
Soon his fortunes rose even higher. After the death of Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya, the tsar is said to have visited Matveyev’s home and met the family’s foster daughter Natalia Naryshkina, whom he married. This made Matveyev the tsar’s de facto father-in-law, traditionally a very powerful position in Muscovite politics. He quickly added leadership of the Department of Foreign Affairs or Posolsky Prikaz (in effect becoming Russia’s prime minister), several other diplomatic or regional departments, and the State Pharmacy to his Ukrainian Chancellery post. He skillfully formulated foreign policy and dealt with governments as diverse as England, Poland, the Vatican, Persia, China, and Bukhara. He also improved Russia’s medical facilities, headed publishing, mining, and industrial ventures for the tsar, and organized the creation of a Western-style court theater.
Foreign visitors noted his diverse responsibilities. They often referred to him as “factotum,” the man who does everything. They also remarked on his knowledge of and interest in their societies. A patron of education and the arts, he kept musicians in his home, had his son taught Latin, and collected foreign books, clocks, paintings, and furniture. He remained close to the tsar, although he rose slowly through the higher ranks. At the birth of the future Peter the Great in 1672, he was made okol-nichy (majordomo), and in 1674 he received the highest Muscovite court rank, boyar.
With the sudden death of Tsar Alexei in 1676, things changed. The succession of sickly fourteen-year-old Tsar Fyodor brought the Miloslavsky family back into power. Matveyev immediately began to lose posts, prominence, and respect. During his journey into “honorable exile”-provincial governorship in Siberia-he was convicted of sorcery. He was stripped of rank and possessions and exiled, first to the prison town of Pustozersk and later to Mezen. Tsar Fyodor’s death and Peter’s accession in 1682 brought Matveyev back to Moscow in triumph, but only days later he was killed when pro-Miloslavsky rioters surged through the capital.
Because of his decades of service, his prominence, fall, and dramatic death, and a collection of autobiographical letters from exile, Matveyev received frequent and generally favorable attention from Russian writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their works ranged from scholarly biographies and articles to poems, plays, and children’s books. He became less visible in the twentieth century, when Soviet historians lost interest in supporters of the old regime. To date there has been only fragmentary treatment of his life in English. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; BOYAR; COPPER RIOTS; NARYSHKINA, NATALIA KIRILLOVNA; NIKON, PATRIARCH; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(c. 1475-1556), Greek monk canonized in the Orthodox Church.
A learned Greek monk, translator, and writer resident in Muscovy who was imprisoned by Muscovite authorities and never allowed to return
home, Maxim had great moral and intellectual authority with contemporaries and posterity and was canonized in 1988. Born Michael Trivolis (Triboles) in the Greek city of Arta some twenty years after the Turkish capture of Constantinople, he went to Italy as a young man, where he was in contact with many prominent Renaissance figures. Under the influence of Savonarola he became a monk in the San Marco Dominican Monastery (1502), but two years later he returned to Greece, entering the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos under the monastic name of Maximos, rejecting Roman Catholicism and the humanist world of his youth, and concentrating upon the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition. In 1516 he was sent to Moscow to correct Russian ecclesiastical books. There he fell into disfavor with Grand Prince Vasily and Metropolitan Daniel, the head of the Russian Church, was twice convicted of treason and heresy (1525, 1531), and eventually died in Muscovy without being exonerated or regaining his freedom. During much of this time he translated biblical and Byzantine texts into Russian, and authored original compositions, including critical, historical, liturgical, philological, and exegetical works, demonstrations of his own orthodoxy and innocence, descriptions of the world (he was the first to mention Columbus’s discovery of the New World), explication of the ideals and practice of monasticism, and a great deal else. He instructed Russian pupils in Greek, and inspired the study of lexicography and grammar.
Despite his official disgrace, Maxim’s voluminous compositions were greatly revered and very influential in Old Russia; his biography and writings have been the subject of thousands of scholarly books and articles. See also: DANIEL, METROPOLITAN; MUSCOVY; MONASTI-CISM; ORTHODOXY; POSSESSORS AND NON-POSSESSORS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haney, Jack V. (1973). From Italy to Muscovy: The Life and Works of Maxim the Greek Munich: W. Fink. Obolensky, Dimitri. (1981). “Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: the Three Worlds of Maximos the Greek (c. 1470- 1556).” Proceedings of the British Academy 67:143-161. Olmsted, Hugh M. (1987). “A Learned Greek Monk in Muscovite Exile: Maksim Grek and the Old Testament Prophets.” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 3:1-73. Sevcenko, Ihor. (1997). “On the Greek Poetic Output of Maksim Grek [revised version].” Byzantinoslavica 78:1-70. Taube, Moshe, and Olmsted, Hugh M. (1988). “Povest’ o Esfiri: The Ostroh Bible and Maksim Grek’s Translation of the Book of Esther.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 11(1/2):100-117.
(1893-1930), poet, playwright.
Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia (later renamed Mayakovsky in his honor). His father’s death of tetanus in 1906 devastated the family emotionally and financially, and the themes of death, abandonment, and infection recurred in many of Mayakovsky’s poems. As a student, Mayakovsky became an ardent revolutionary; he was arrested and served eleven months for his Bolshevik activities in 1909. In 1911 he was accepted into the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he met David Burlyuk, who was beginning to gather the Hylaean group of artists and poets: Nikolai and Vladimir Burlyuk, Alexandra Exter, Viktor (Velemir) Khleb-nikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Benedikt Livshits. In 1912 the group issued its first manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” the highly charged rhetoric that created a scandalous sensation announcing the arrival of Futurism in the artistic culture of Russia. The poets and artists of Hylaea, Mayakovsky in particular, were associated in the popular press with social disruption, hooliganism, and anarchist politics.
Mayakovsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution; much of his artistic effort was devoted to propaganda for the state. He wrote agitational poems and, combining his considerable artistic skill with his ability to write short, didactic poems, constructed large posters that hung in the windows of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). He also wrote and staged at the Moscow State Circus a satirical play, Mystery Bouffe, which skewered bourgeois culture and the church. His most political poems, “150,000,000” (1919) and “Vladimir Ilich
