Avvakum Petrovich

Russian religious leader

• Born: November 25, 1620
• Birthplace: Grigorovo, Russia
• Died: April 14, 1682
• Place of death: Pustozersk, Russia

Avvakum, a major leader of the Old Believer sect in Russia, was exiled twice, imprisoned, and then burned at the stake for resisting attempts to reform Russian Orthodoxy. His autobiography, an expression of Russian nationalism in the face of foreign influences, is considered the first classic of Russian literature and also a classic document of faith.

Early Life

The information about the early life of Avvakum Petrovich (ahv-VAH-kihm pyih-TROHV-yihch) comes from his own autobiography. By his account, he was the son of a drunken village priest named Pëtr and a devout mother named Marija. His mother spent much of her time in fasting and prayer and gave the young Avvakum a religious upbringing. In his autobiography, Zhitiye protopopa Avvakuma (1672-1673; The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself, 1924), he reports that sometime in his youth he had a spiritual awakening upon seeing a dead ox (or cow) on his neighbor’s property. That night, he looked at the icons, or portraits of saints, in his own home and cried, realizing that he too would die. From that time on, according to the autobiography, he prayed every night.

At some point after seeing the ox, Avvakum’s father died, and Avvakum and his mother were put out of their home by their relatives. Avvakum was apparently in late adolescence when this happened. His mother soon decided that he should marry a pious young woman in the same village who had also lost her father, a formerly rich blacksmith named Marko, who had wasted his wealth. Avvakum’s mother became a nun after he had married Anastasia.

Avvakum wrote that he was driven out of the village of Grigorovo by some kind of unspecified persecution. In about 1640, he became a deacon, and two years later he became a priest. Around 1650, the Russian Orthodox bishops raised him to the rank of archpriest. He spent most of his life from the time he became a priest until 1652 preaching in various Russian communities.

Life’s Work

Avvakum’s eagerness to enforce religious morality led him into conflict with others. This was probably the source of the persecutions he wrote about in his autobiography. In 1652, the people of his parish in Iurevets, near the Volga River, had violently driven him out. Apparently, he had attempted to force the local population to give up drunkenness, loose sexual behavior, gambling, and nonreligious musical performances. Also, he may have tried to make the people of the village conform to tithing, the donating of funds to the church.

After leaving Iurevets, he reported to the Kremlin in Moscow, where the archpriest was unemployed for a time. He soon found a role as an outspoken opponent of a new current of reform in the Russian Church. Nikon, the metropolitan of Novgorod, had been part of a circle of religious figures who gathered around the czar’s confessor, Stephen Vonifatiev. Avvakum also was connected to Vonifatiev. With the help of the Vonifatiev circle and the support of the czar, Nikon became patriarch of Moscow in 1652, the most important leader of the Russian Church. Once Nikon achieved this position, though, he began to bring about changes that angered Avvakum and some of his other associates.

Through the centuries since the Russians had been converted to Christianity from contact with the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Russian Church had developed rituals, texts, and practices that differed from those of the Greeks. Patriarch Nikon and other reformers hoped to bring Russian Christians back to what they saw as the original and correct expressions of religious faith. Nikon brought in Greek and western Russian scholars. On their advice, he concluded that many Russian books and rites had fallen away from the correct standards, and that some of the actions of the Vonifatiev circle had introduced more corruptions. In particular, Nikon and his Greek reformers replaced the Russian method of crossing oneself with two fingers by a three-fingered crossing, they ordered that hallelujahs be sung in threes rather than in the customary twos, and they changed the prescribed manner for bowing in church. In 1654, Nikon called a council of clergy to begin making changes in the liturgy. His agents even began going into churches and homes and taking out icons that they believed were painted according to incorrect models.

Avvakum was a leader of those who opposed Nikon’s changes. He and his followers believed that the reformers were the ones corrupting pure religious practices by introducing foreign practices. Since the Greeks had agreed to a union with the Roman Catholic Church in 1439 in an attempt to preserve the remains of their empire from the Turks, Avvakum and others believed that the Russians had become the standard-bearers of the true faith. Those who opposed the new reforms became known as the Old Believers or Old Ritualists (starovery or staroobriadtsy). In 1653, even before Nikon called the council to revise the liturgy, Avvakum was exiled to Siberia with his family for his outspoken criticisms at the beginning of the reforms.

Patriarch Nikon lost the favor of the czar and the church hierarchy because of his personal arrogance and his insistence on the supremacy of the church over the state. However, Russian Church councils adopted the new texts and practices in 1666 and 1667, and the opponents of reform were persecuted by church and state. Avvakum was recalled to Moscow from Siberia in 1660 and arrived back in that city in 1664. Although he had the opportunity to meet with Czar Alexis several times to defend his views, he was put on trial at the council of 1666. There, according to his autobiography, he not only refused to give up his beliefs but also told the high officials of the church that all of the problems of the Russian Church came from Western influences and new books. Greek models, in his view, were unreliable because they had been corrupted by the Roman Catholics and only traditional Russian practices could be regarded as Orthodox Christianity. He was again exiled, this time to Pustozersk, in the far north.

During this last period of his life, he kept in touch with his followers through his writings. Some time in the 1670’s, he also wrote his autobiography, which is considered the first classic of literature in the Russian language. When the Russian novel developed in the early nineteenth century, even nonreligious writers looked back to Avvakum. His autobiography is considered an expression of Russian nationalism in the face of foreign influences, as well as the depiction of a courageous and influential life.

In 1682, Patriarch Ioakim issued a spiritual decree, which condemned the “old belief.” In that same year, under Ioakim’s guidance, the church completed a new council, which had begun in 1681. The council laid down a new set of measures designed to combat those who did not follow the revised rites. Avvakum was sentenced to death, part of the new effort by authorities to combat the Old Belief. He was burned at the stake in Pustozersk while making the old-style sign of the cross.

Significance

Avvakum was one of the most significant leaders of those who sought to maintain the old practices of Russian religion. The Old Believers rejected the currents of change and Westernization that began during the reign of Czar Alexis and that intensified during the rule of Alexis’s son, Peter the Great. Old Believers continue to practice into the twenty-first century.

Avvakum did not intend to create great literature when he wrote his autobiography, which was intended as propaganda in religious conflict and was meant to justify his own actions. Nevertheless, it is considered one of the great Russian literary works, indeed, one of the great documents in any faith, and it was the first-known Russian book to be written in colloquial Russian rather than in the formal Slavonic language of the church.

Bibliography

Avvakum Petrovich. Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself. Translated by Kenneth Bostrop. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979. An English translation of Avvakum’s autobiography Zhitiye protopopa Avvakum, which includes translator’s annotations, commentary, and historical introduction.

Bushkovitch, Paul. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bushkovitch explains the fundamental changes that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church, describing how these changes were influenced by Western European ideas and how they eventually led to Peter the Great’s secularization of Russia.

Kliuchevsky, V. O. A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century. Translated by Natalie Duddington. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. A translation of a classic work by one of Russia’s most eminent historians. Chapter 15 examines Nikon, Avvakum, and the church schism.

Kotilaine, Jarmo, and Marshall Poe, eds. Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth Century Russia. New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004. A collection of articles that provides an encyclopedic account of politics, society, and religion in Russia during the seventeenth century. Includes useful references in footnotes of each article and an index.

Michels, Georg Bernhard. At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth Century Russia. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. A study of the religious dissenters, including Avvakum, involved in the schism of the Russian Church. Attempts to reconstruct popular culture to understand the behavior and thought of the dissenters.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. A History of Russia. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Avvakum is discussed in a section on the relationship between Muscovite religion and culture. Maps, bibliography, appendices, index.