resisted. Ordinary Russians saw Muscovy as the suffering servant of God and looked to the monasteries for the righteous remnant.
The historical writings of the early seventeenth century were filled with introspective lamentations and revivalist exhortations, which shattered the dignity of the chronicling tradition without pointing the way toward serious social analysis. Abraham Palitsyn of the Monastery of St. Sergius bemoaned the 'senseless silence of all the world'8 in the face of Russian humiliation; Ivan Timofeev of Novgorod decried the tendency to 'tear ourselves away from our bonds of love toward one another . . . some looking to the East, others to the West':9 and the semi-official 'new chronicler' of the Romanovs bequeathed to Pushkin and Musorgsky their moralistic view that the troubles of Russia were divine retribution for Boris' alleged murder of the infant Dmitry.10
The deliverance of Russia was uniformly seen as an act of God. The subsequent growth in Russian wealth provided new resources for discharging the debt Russians felt to God, but at the same time new temptations to turn away altogether. Ivan Khvorostinin, courtier of two tsars, became a convert to Socinianism, ceased to keep fasts or revere icons, and wrote elegant syllabic verse well before anyone else in Muscovy. Andrew Palitsyn, cousin of the monastic chronicler and governor of a newly colonized Siberian province, introduced smoking, studied sorcery, and preached the irrelevance of the clergy within his realm.11 Far more common, however, was the widespread reassertion of traditional faith which predominated in the early seventeenth century and caught the imagination of later Russian poets and historians. Even the tolerant, pre-Revolutionary historian who saw in Khvorostinin 'the first swallow of a cultural springtime' felt obliged to add that, in general, 'there was nothing principled or ideological (ideiny)' in the impulse to look West.12 The defenders of the old beliefs were nothing if not 'principled and ideological,' with their implausible but psychologically compelling loyalty to 'true Tsars' and 'old rituals.' Paradoxical as it may seem, the determination of later radical intellectuals to take 'principled and ideological' positions may originate in this early dedication of conservative anti-intellectuals to a very different set of principles.
The most dramatic event of the seventeenth century was not any direct confrontation of East and West, nor indeed the action of any tsar, reformer, or writer-though there were remarkable examples of each. The central event was rather the dramatic confrontation of two 'straightforward muzhiks' from the upper Volga region: Patriarch Nikon and Archpriest Avvakum. These two rough-hewn priests were the key antagonists in the schism within the Russian Church. Each viewed himself as unalterably opposed to khitrost': to all forms of corruption, guile, and foreign innova-
tion. Each began his rise to fame through membership in a circle known as the 'lovers of God' (Bogoliubtsy) and the 'zealots of the old devotion' (revniteli drevnego blagochestiia). They fell from grace simultaneously in 1667, returning as prisoners to the frozen northlands whence they had come. Their disappearance was the decisive moment in the waning of Old Muscovy and marked the beginning of the slow and progressive banishment of the 'old devotion' and the 'love of God' from the new civilization of Imperial Russia.
To understand the rise and fall of these two powerful personalities one must consider first the general resurgence of religious concern in early-seventeenth-century Russia. Hand in hand with the political success of the new dynasty and the 'formation of a national market' went the unifying power of a religious revival. At the center of it stood the monastic community, which-unlike merchants, boyars, and even tsars-had actually gained stature during the Time of Troubles. Almost alone of the major fortresses near Moscow, the Monastery of St. Sergius never fell to foreign hands. From behind its walls, moreover, came ringing appeals to rise up against the foreign invaders. The monastic community as a whole withheld from both Wladyslaw of Poland and Charles Philip of Sweden the aura of sanctification that would have been needed to sustain their claims to the Russian throne. All the surviving Russian contenders for power had fled to monasteries by the late years of the interregnum; and they were joined by increasing numbers of military deserters and dispossessed people seeking alms and shelter around these great national shrines.13 The two best and most famous short stories to appear in the primitive, moralistic literature of the seventeenth century (the tales of Savva Grudtsyn and Gore-/Aochastie) both end with the spiritual purgation of the hero and his entry into a monastery.14 A popular woodcut of the period shows a monk being crucified in monastic garb by figures representing the various evils of the day.15
Bequests and pilgrimages to monasteries increased steadily; and new cloisters, retreats, and churches were built in large numbers. Particularly remarkable were the 'one-day churches' (obydennye tserkvi) fashioned OUt of the virgin forests as a penitential offering in times of suffering. A chronicle of the Vologda region tells a typical story of how people reacted to the plague in 1654 with neither blasphemous anger nor medical prudence, but rather gathered together at sunset to build 'a temple to our God even as King David commanded.' Working by candlelight through the night while women held icons and chanted akathistoi to the Mother of God, they completed the church in time to celebrate the Eucharist inside before sundown of the following day. They prayed, 'Take, ? Lord, the plague from
Israel,' and asked for the strength not to curse their 'man-loving and long-tolerant God.'16
There were, however, unreal and unhealthy aspects to the rapid growth of religious institutions. The monasteries were burdened with far greater wealth than at the time of the controversy over monastic property- without having acquired the strict discipline on which the original 'possessors' had based their case. The monasteries were becoming preoccupied with their role of feudal landowner at precisely the time when serfdom was becoming most oppressive. Bequests were, moreover, increasingly tainted by the institution of 'pledging' (zakladnichestvo): a form of tax evasion in which property was nominally donated to a monastery, but the old owner continued to use and profit from it in return for a nominal service charge.
There was so much activity in and around churches that one might have had the impression of an unprecedented blossoming of religious ardor. In truth, however, it represented more the sagging overgrowth of Indian Summer than the freshness of springtime. The ornate brick churches with Dutch and Persian features, which sprang up at the rate of better than one every two years in Yaroslavl,17 appear today as a kind of unreal interlude between the Byzantine and baroque styles: heavy fruit languishing in the hazy warmth of October, unaware that the stem linking them with the earth had withered and that the killing frost was about to descend. Innumerable icons of local prophets and saints clustered on the lower tier of the iconostases, rather like overripe grapes begging to be picked; and the rapid simultaneous singing of paid memorial services (of which the sorokoust or forty successive services for the dead are the best-known survival) resembled the agitated murmur of autumn flies just before their death.
The crowds that built and worshipped in the brick and wooden churches of the late Muscovite period were animated by a curious mixture of spirituality and xenophobia. Holy Russia was viewed not simply as suffering purity, but as the ravished victim of 'wolf-like Poles' and their accomplices the 'pagan Lithuanians' and 'unclean Jews.' Thus, the political revival and physical expansion of Russia were made possible not only by a common faith, but by an oppressive sense of common enemies. Mounting violence and suppressed self-hatred fed the traditional Byzantine impulse toward apocalypticism. Some of the new wooden churches beyond the Volga became funeral pyres for entire congregations, who sought to greet the purifying flames of the Last Judgment with many of the same hymns that their parents had sung while building these churches. To understand both the tragic end of Russia's 'second religiousness' and its subtle links with the religious controversies of the West, one must turn to the two prin-
cipal factions within the Russian religious revival: the theocratic and the fundamentalist. Each faction answered in a different way one common, central question: How can religion be kept at the center of Russian life in the radically changing conditions of the seventeenth century?
The Theocratic Answer
