Fire of Piety
The Life of Archpriest Avvakum and the End of the Ritual Era
Sergey Tashevsky
In mid-April 1682, Archpriest Avvakum was executed in the Arctic, in the now-vanished town of Pustozersk. He was executed brutally—he and two companions were burned alive in a wooden frame. However, cruel executions and torture were hardly surprising in Russia at the time. Those who fell into disfavor had their tongues cut out, lead poured into their mouths, and were subjected to stakes and racks. And the archpriest himself, while in power, dealt with opponents of piety without ceremony. He beat drunkards, pulled careless priests by the beards, and set the people on buffoons... He himself recalled, not without pride, how once, when "dancing bears with tambourines and domras" came to the monastery village, he "in zeal for Christ, drove them out, and broke one of many tambourines, and took two large bears—bruising one... and releasing the other into the field." In other words, there was no hint of humility in his actions from his youth. But that was the norm back then: it was believed that the surest way to prove one's case, even in spiritual matters, was to demonstrate one's strength. Even if it was with bears.
Today, it seems surprising that in that rather crudely structured world (after all, it had hardly changed since the time depicted by Tarkovsky in Andrei Rublev), so much depended on the subtlest nuances. And the story of the schism, symbolized by Avvakum, arose precisely from these nuances.
Soon after the accession of Alexei Mikhailovich (the same "Quiet One" who enslaved the Russian peasants) in 1645, a circle of "zealots of piety" arose around the young tsar. This circle included several priests concerned with the purity of the Orthodox faith. "Purity" was understood as the "correctness" of rituals and the "accuracy" of church books. It would seem, what difference does it make whether one crosses oneself with two fingers or, like the Greeks, with three? Does it really matter whether one leads the procession clockwise ("solid," or sunward) or vice versa? But for the Tsar and the Church as a state institution, these were matters of principle. After all, the Russian Church proclaimed itself the heir to Byzantium, the "Second Rome," and preserved the rituals it had inherited. However, between the baptism of Rus' and the fall of Byzantium, much in the Byzantine rites had changed, and the Greek Church that succeeded them and its Ecumenical Patriarchs deviated even further from the previous traditions. At the same time, in the Slavic church books, which (as elsewhere in the world) were copied by hand, minor errors multiplied year after year, century after century. This problem was easily solved: from time to time, all the books (the Gospels, the Psalter, and others) were "compared" with the ancient models, corrected, or destroyed. But what should serve as a model? Ancient Slavic translations, or Greek "originals," which, incidentally, also passed through dozens of scribes? But then the church rites should also correspond to these books! The Russian Church was faced with a choice.
So much has been written and said about the meaning of this choice and the schism itself that a brief summary here would inevitably be inaccurate. It is one of those Russian tragedies that is still being pondered. But, one way or another, both Alexei Mikhailovich and Nikon, who became patriarch under him, decided to turn to Greek "primary sources" and adopt Greek rites in order to strengthen their ties with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Soon, Nikon went further, declaring all previous rites that did not align with current Greek tradition "heretical." He even claimed the role of not only a church reformer but also the first person in the state. Catherine II later wrote of Nikon:
"Nikon is a figure who disgusts me. I would be happier if I hadn't heard his name... Nikon also tried to subjugate the Tsar: he wanted to become Pope... Nikon brought discord and division into our Church, which had been peaceful and integrally united before him. The Greeks imposed the three-fingered sign of the cross on us through curses, torture, and executions... Nikon turned Tsar Alexei into a tyrant and a torturer of his people."
Catherine, of course, exaggerated a bit about the "peaceful and integral Church" before Nikon (the conflict between the Josephites and the Non-Possessors alone was worth a lot!), but a century later she quite accurately expressed the attitude toward Nikon that was held by many of his contemporaries, including, among others, Archpriest Avvakum.
In fact, Avvakum Petrov, the son of a simple parish priest named Peter, who rose to the rank of archpriest of the town of Yuryev-Polsky, was one of the first members of the circle of "zealots of piety" under the tsar, a close friend of Alexei Mikhailovich, and—at first—an acquaintance of Nikon. However, as often happens, the friends turned into implacable enemies. The archpriest firmly advocated the correction of church books according to Old Russian Orthodox manuscripts and the preservation of ancient rituals. He wrote petitions to the tsar about this—for which, at Nikon's insistence, he was thrown into the basement of the Andronikov Monastery in 1653. And so, as they say, things took off.
As already mentioned, the archpriest had a fiery temper, and his "petitions" to his former friend and near-disciple, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, grew increasingly harsh. In them, he compared Nikon's reforms to "Roman fornication," that is, Catholicism (which, at that time, was considered almost the cardinal sin in the Orthodox Church). In general, Avvakum's choice of metaphors in his letters was striking. Against the backdrop of the usual "official" and dull "church" writings, these petitions were striking in their expressiveness and lively language. At times, incidentally, they were even obscene—the archpriest easily and naturally inserted what we would now call "obscene language" into his letters. The result was funny, malicious, and apt. All this contributed significantly to his popularity—petitions circulated in copies, and Avvakum's circle of supporters grew.
It's no surprise that they tried to get rid of the archpriest, sending him and his family into exile in Tobolsk. There, however, he was initially greeted quite warmly: in Tobolsk, most of the clergy were also preoccupied with Nikon's reform plans. But the implacable Avvakum, with his fervent sermons and intolerance of violators of piety, almost instantly, like Christ turning water into wine, turned his potential friends into enemies. While preaching and condemning the townspeople's overly liberal morals, he immediately fell out with the archbishop and other clergy and lay leaders—practically everyone he came into contact with. Unsurprisingly, denunciations began pouring into Moscow, addressed to the Tsar and the Patriarch, and the archpriest, his wife, and children were sent further east, to the uncharted reaches of Siberia: to Yeniseisk and Transbaikalia.
A detachment led by the voivode Afanasy Pashkov was just setting out there on an expedition to collect yasak (a tax on local hunters who harvested sable pelts) and conquer new lands. The archpriest and his entire family were assigned to this expedition.
Of course, the arrival of some strange priest, his wife, and eight children (the archpriest was prolific!) in the detachment left Pashkov dumbfounded. But not only were these new additions, now to be fed, a nuisance, as the saying goes, but the archpriest himself turned out to be a prickly man. He immediately began lecturing and commanding, not only the soldiers but Pashkov himself! The commander couldn't stand this. By the third day of the "expedition," the archpriest's entire family was disembarked and following a plank boat (doshchnik) drifting downstream, barely catching up at rest stops. Three days later, Pashkov took pity on the archpriest and allowed him back on board, but he began preaching and lecturing again—and this time, he fell into the water while still underway. Having swum with difficulty to the shore, Avvakum again went on foot after the ship...
This repeated itself countless times. The "expedition" proceeded slowly, stopping for long rest stops and wintering camps, but Avvakum did not give up and continued to denounce the ill-fated commander's "untruths," infuriating him. More than once, Pashkov beat him with a whip and threw him into a pit, but the archpriest behaved in a biblical manner, like Job: he praised the Lord and rejoiced in the trials He sent to strengthen him in his faith.
Of course, Avvakum's family suffered alongside him. They barely found room in the anterooms of their hastily built huts; they froze and starved, walking behind sleds in waist-deep snow, falling, getting up, and then walking again. It took six long years to reach Lake Baikal and beyond. His two youngest children died along the way, and the survivors suffered from illness, midges, and frostbite, almost begging for a quick death. In his "Life," the archpriest later wrote of his wife's torment (perhaps the most famous phrase from his literary legacy, which has become almost an aphorism): "... she blames me, poor thing, saying, 'How long will this torment continue, Archpriest?' And I say, 'Markovna, until death itself!'"
But no, all this torment ended abruptly in 1663, when word reached the detachment that Avvakum had been ordered returned to Moscow. Nikon, whose patriarchal career had been on the rise all these years (he even managed to have "Great Sovereign" added to his title of Patriarch), had finally irritated the boyars, and they convinced Alexei Mikhailovich to punish the upstart patriarch and remove him from sight. The archpriest's main enemy had been defeated—and now he was returning to the capital almost triumphantly, preaching along the way in various towns and forts and denouncing the "godless flattery"—that is, Nikon and his reforms. However, upon reaching Moscow, Avvakum was surprised to learn that, although Nikon had indeed been defrocked as a simple monk, the tsar had not abandoned his reforms at all. The three-fingered sign of the cross and life according to Greek church books—all continued as usual.
And Avvakum began the struggle again. At first, it seemed like luck was on his side. The Tsar ordered him to live in the Kremlin courtyard, occasionally asking for his blessing, and his old friends and students gathered around him. But the trouble was that for Alexei Mikhailovich, reform was not a spiritual issue, as it was for Avvakum, but a political one. And he was unwilling to stop. So it's no surprise that relations between them quickly deteriorated, and within months they became openly hostile.
And so the persecution began anew. In 1664, Avvakum was exiled to Mezen (where he continued to preach and send letters to like-minded people). In 1666 (when the end of the world was once again expected throughout Europe), he was forcibly brought to Moscow for a church council, where a new patriarch was to be elected and the course of reforms discussed. There, the archpriest staged his own personal apocalypse: he publicly cursed the bishops and leaders of the council, was beaten within an inch of his life, and sent to Borovsk Monastery, where he was imprisoned "in irons." Sympathetic boyars tried to appease the tsar's wrath, seeking new meetings between the archpriest and the tsar (and Alexei Mikhailovich, who had been friends with Avvakum since childhood, likely desired a reconciliation himself—he was also trying to appear pious), but all was in vain. Even worse, these meetings most likely only added fuel to the fire, and in the end the enmity between them became irreconcilable.
By that time, Alexei Mikhailovich was no longer the gentle youth he had been when he ascended the throne. Many tortures and executions had been carried out under his direct orders. Yet, "The Quietest One" did not dare sentence his old friend to death or mutilation. On his orders, the archpriest was "merely" flogged—and in 1677, exiled "for eternity" along with two other preachers of the "Old Rite" to the Pustozersky prison on the Pechora River. The only mercy shown to Avvakum was that, unlike his fellow prisoners in the earthen pit, the priest Lazar and the Solovetsky monk Epiphanius, his tongue was not cut out.
However, talking would only have distracted him. Avvakum spent his long years in an earthen prison, by the light of smoldering torches, on the main work of his life—composing texts, including his own "Life." It was this that brought him immortality.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the fight against the Old Believers had become a full-blown war: those who adhered to the two-fingered sign of the cross were killed, quartered, and burned alive. In 1674, Avvakum's spiritual daughter, the noblewoman Morozova, was executed on the rack; in 1676, the Solovetsky Monastery was stormed, and over 400 Old Believers were killed there. And so on, and so on... When Feodor Alekseevich ascended the throne, he continued his father's work with even greater ferocity. But nothing connected him to Avvakum anymore, and nothing prevented him from ordering the destruction of this "main symbol" of all Old Believers. Which is what was done in April 1682.
There, in the former Pustozersk, an Old Believer cross now stands at the supposed execution site—it was erected in the 90s. No further memory of the archpriest and his comrades remains. Nor would any texts have remained if the "Pustozersk archive" containing the prisoners' manuscripts and letters had not been taken away by the widow of Priest Lazar immediately after the execution. She took it to the Kerzhenets River, where the first secret Old Believer villages had already sprung up (some of which still exist today).
The archpriest's widow (her actual name was Nastasya Markovna, and she was three years younger than Avvakum) could not participate in saving her husband's manuscripts. However, she did save his family. After Avvakum's final arrest, they were thrown into an underground prison in Mezen, where she and her children remained for over ten years. Amazingly, she survived, and ultimately proved that she and her children were "not enemies of the church." In 1692, Nastasya and her sons were freed and moved in with relatives in Moscow. A woman of iron constitution, she managed, against all odds, to live to the age of 86, outliving not only her husband but also most of his tormentors.
As for Avvakum himself, he was virtually forgotten for a century, while his "Life" (his major work, and essentially the first autobiography in Russian) circulated in copies among Old Believers, a kind of "samizdat" of the era. The authorities' attitude toward the Old Believers softened only in the late 18th century, but even then, "The Life of Archpriest Avvakum" remained a marginal text, known only to church historians. It was only when one of the copies came into the hands of the publisher Dmitry Kozhanchikov in 1861 that a real sensation ensued. "Here it is, living Muscovite speech!" Turgenev marveled. Dostoevsky called the published "Life" an example of "rich, comprehensive, and all-encompassing Russian material," and Tolstoy characterized Avvakum as a "superb stylist."
Not only Avvakum's "Life" but his very figure became iconic. It even reached the point that, already in the 20th century, the poet Klyuev compared the frantic archpriest to none other than the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Lenin (something Klyuev's investigators may have recalled before his execution in 1937). And already in the 21st century, "our medieval contemporary," the philosopher Alexander Dugin, called the archpriest "the last man of Holy Rus'." But Dugin himself would likely have happily sent people to the rack for their lack of piety, or burned them alive, so his nostalgia for bygone days is understandable. Perhaps there are many who would like to return to that era with him. But in a sense, it ended just thirty years after the archpriest's death.
It ended when his younger contemporary, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, wrote and published Gulliver, which, incidentally, included a parable about the bloody Lilliputian war between the "pointed" and "blunt" people over the question of which end to crack an egg. And after that, even for the most pious yet thoughtful person, the attitude toward ritual could never be the same.