{short description of image}  
 

RUSSIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE
THROUGH THE CENTURIES

 
 

Boyarina Morozova

 
 

Avvakum was indefatigable in his defense of Russian Church traditions and in his accusations against "Heretical" innovators. Besides the simple people and the conservative clergy, he had followers among the nobility, many of whom paid with their lives for their fidelity to old rituals. The Tsarina Maria strongly sympathized with Avvakum for a time, but Boyarina Morozova and her younger sister, Princess Urusova, relatives of the Tsarina were the most faithful to him. They were also close relatives of F.M. Rtishchev. The two sisters went through awful tortures and died imprisoned in 1675. The famous painting "Boyarina Morozova" by V.I. Surikov, who shows her chained and taken on a sled across the Red Square, on her way from the Kremlin, where she was interrogated by the Patriarch Ioakim and invited to renounce Avvakum, at the Percheskii Monastery. Tsar Aleksei himself tried unsuccessfully to bring Morozova back to the traditional Church. On the occasion in 1671 of his second marriage with Natalia Kirrilovna Narishkina, the future mother of Peter the Great, hi invited Morozova to his wedding, but she refused. The Tsar knew that the pain in her legs, which she gave as an excuse, was not the real reason.
Morozova's biography was written after her death; she was considered a saintly woman by the traditionalists. Many of them in the northern provinces mourned her death by immolating themselves, and the self-sacrificing reached large numbers after the execution of Avvakum.
Avvakum was exiled to Siberia. He was incarcerated for most of the time in the town of Pustozersk, but he also spent a short time in the jail of the newly founded town of Tarsk, on the river Angara, where the Soviet Union now has one of her most celebrated dams. Bratsk was another name for the local Buriat tribesmen who resisted the Kozaks' conquest of Eastern Siberia. The last attempt to conciliate Avvakum with the official Church was made in 1666-1667 when he was invited to a Church Council which took place in Moscow. He took the opportunity to denounce the contemporary Greek Church and severely chid the present patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, who also represented the patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, the same who, in Krizhanich's words, "Were ready a thousand times to sell Jesus Christ, whom the Jew Judas sold only once!" Back in Pustozersk, Avvakum continued to write his epistles denouncing Church prelates and defending his ideals. In 1682 he wrote to the Tsar Fedor Alekseyevich, telling him that his father was in Hell, and that he would go there too unless he chased Nikon's followers out of the Church. Almost two centuries after Savonarola, Avvakum was burned alive at the stake for "Slandering the House of the Tsar." Mass suicide by burning followed his death. Then for a time it looked as if the resistance of the traditionalists only increased with the severity of their persecution. As a Regent after the death of her father, Tsar Aleksei, Sofia considered that the ukhaz of 1667 declaring them heretics and excommunicating them was not sufficient, and in 1684 she issued another ukaz decreeing that the traditionalists who did not repent would be burned at the stake. There are no records of how many perished in flames, but the figure at the end of the 17th century was in the thousands. Many of those who survived were exiled to Siberia or the northern provinces. They became known as "Raskoniki" - dissenters, and "Staroobriadtsi" - old-ritualists, and they continued to live and believe their own way. What originally was a petty detail in the Church ritual, whether the sign of the cross should be made with two or three fingers, - became the "Raskol," schism, and caused a strong nationalistic movement primarily among illiterate peasants, which refused to accept anything that was foreign including art and architecture. Cruel repressive measures by the government put an end to the movement, opening the way to the Russians to gradually break with their sacrosanct cultural traditions and imitate western customs, education and art.

 
 

GO BACK
NEXT

 

Return to Xenophon. Return to Ruscity. Return to Rushistory. Return to Ukraine.