SPLIT IN THE CHURCH—MEMOIRS OF AVVAKÚM

The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A few years later a printing office was established at Moscow, and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evidently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different reasons this revision became the source of a widely spread discontent, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a formidable split (raskól) took place in the Church. It hardly need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology, nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century when the Moscow Church had attained a formidable power in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch Níkon, was, moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur and luxury—which meant, of course, heavy impositions upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drifting into “Latinism”; so that the split between the people and the clergy—especially the higher clergy—took the character of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek Church.

Most of the Non-conformist writings of the time are purely scholastic in character and consequently offer no literary interest. But the memoirs of a Non-conformist priest, Avvakúm (died 1681), who was exiled to Siberia and made his way on foot, with Cossack parties, as far as the banks of the Amúr, deserve to be mentioned. By their simplicity, their sincerity, and absence of all sensationalism, they have remained the prototype of Russian memoirs, down to the present day. Here are a few quotations from this remarkable work:

“When I came to Yeniséisk,” Avvakúm wrote, “another order came from Moscow to send me to Daúria, 2,000 miles from Moscow, and to place me under the orders of Páshkoff. He had with him sixty men, and in punishment of my sins he proved to be a terrible man. Continually he burnt, and tortured, and flogged his men, and I had often spoken to him, remonstrating that what he did was not good, and now I fell myself into his hands. When we went along the Angará river he ordered me, ‘Get out of your boat, you are a heretic, that is why the boats don’t get along. Go you on foot, across the mountains.’ It was hard to do. Mountains high, forests impenetrable, stony cliffs rising like walls—and we had to cross them, going about with wild beasts and birds; and I wrote him a little letter which began thus: ‘Man, be afraid of God. Even the heavenly forces and all animals and men are afraid of Him. Thou alone carest nought about Him.’ Much more was written in this letter, and I sent it to him. Presently I saw fifty men coming to me, and they took me before him. He had his sword in his hand and shook with fury. He asked me: ‘Art thou a priest, or a priest degraded?’ I answered, ‘I am Avvakúm, a priest, what dost thou want from me?’ And he began to beat me on the head and he threw me on the ground, and continued to beat me while I was lying on the ground, and then ordered them to give me seventy-two lashes with the knout, and I replied: ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, help me!’ and he was only the more angered that I did not ask for mercy. Then they brought me to a small fort, and put me in a dungeon, giving me some straw, and all the winter I was kept in that tower, without fire. And the winter there is terribly cold; but God supported me, even though I had no furs. I lay there as a dog on the straw. One day they would feed me, another not. Rats were swarming all around. I used to kill them with my cap—the poor fools would not even give me a stick.”

Later on Avvakúm was taken to the Amúr, and when he and his wife had to march, in the winter, over the ice of the great river, she would often fall down from sheer exhaustion. “Then I came,” Avvakúm writes, “to lift her up, and she exclaimed in despair: ‘How long, priest, how long will these sufferings continue?’ And I replied to her: ‘Until death even’; and then she would get up saying: ‘Well, then, priest; let us march on.’” No sufferings could vanquish this great man. From the Amúr he was recalled to Moscow, and once more made the whole journey on foot. There he was accused of resistance to Church and State, and was burned at the stake in 1681.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The violent reforms of Peter I., who created a military European State out of the semi-Byzantine and semi-Tartar State which Russia had been under his predecessors, gave a new turn to literature. It would be out of place to appreciate here the historical significance of the reforms of Peter I., but it must be mentioned that in Russian literature one finds, at least, two forerunners of Peter’s work.

One of them was Kotoshíkhin (1630-1667), an historian.[4] He ran away from Moscow to Sweden, and wrote there, fifty years before Peter became Tsar, a history of Russia, in which he strenuously criticised the condition of ignorance prevailing at Moscow, and advocated wide reforms. His manuscript was unknown till the nineteenth century, when it was discovered at Upsala. Another writer, imbued with the same ideas, was a South Slavonian, Kryzhánitch, who was called to Moscow in 1659, in order to revise the Holy Books, and wrote a most remarkable work, in which he also preached the necessity of thorough reforms. He was exiled two years later to Siberia, where he died.

Peter I., who fully realised the importance of literature, and was working hard to introduce European learning amongst his countrymen, understood that the old Slavonian tongue, which was then in use among Russian writers, but was no longer the current language of the nation, could only hamper the development of literature and learning. Its forms, its expressions, and grammar were already quite strange to the Russians. It could be used still in religious writings, but a book on geometry, or algebra, or military art, written in the Biblical Old Slavonian, would have been simply ridiculous. Consequently, Peter removed the difficulty in his usual trenchant way. He established a new alphabet, to aid in the introduction into literature of the spoken but hitherto unwritten language. This alphabet, partly borrowed from the Old Slavonian, but very much simplified, is the one now in use.

Literature proper little interested Peter I.: he looked upon printed matter from the strictly utilitarian point of view, and his chief aim was to familiarise the Russians with the first elements of the exact sciences, as well as with the arts of navigation, warfare, and fortification. Accordingly, the writers of his time offer but little interest from the literary point of view, and I need mention but a very few of them.