Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a distinctly apocalyptic feel. An outbreak of the plague killed half the population. A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the sky, causing panic. And a religious reform movement intended to purify spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Orthodox Church in two. The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum-a leader of the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms-provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure at their center.
Written in the 1660s and '70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar, Avvakum's autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment. It is also a salvo in a contest about whether to follow the old Russian Orthodox liturgy or import Greek rites and practices. These concerns touched every stratum of Russian society-and for Avvakum, represented an urgent struggle between good and evil.
Avvakum's autobiography has been a cornerstone of Russian literature since it first circulated among religious dissidents. One of the first Russian-language autobiographies and works of any sort to make use of colloquial Russian, its language and style served as a model for writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky. The Life Written by Himself is not only an important historical document but also an emotionally charged and surprisingly conversational self-portrait of a crucial figure in a tumultuous time.
Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a distinctly apocalyptic feel. An outbreak of the plague killed half the population. A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the sky, causing panic. And a religious reform movement intended to purify spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Orthodox Church in two. The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum-a leader of the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms-provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure at their center.
Written in the 1660s and '70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar, Avvakum's autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment. It is also a salvo in a contest about whether to follow the old Russian Orthodox liturgy or import Greek rites and practices. These concerns touched every stratum of Russian society-and for Avvakum, represented an urgent struggle between good and evil.
Avvakum's autobiography has been a cornerstone of Russian literature since it first circulated among religious dissidents. One of the first Russian-language autobiographies and works of any sort to make use of colloquial Russian, its language and style served as a model for writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky. The Life Written by Himself is not only an important historical document but also an emotionally charged and surprisingly conversational self-portrait of a crucial figure in a tumultuous time.
Preface
Introduction by Kenneth N. Brostrom
The Life Written by Himself
Notes
References
Avvakum Petrovich (1620/1–1682) was born near Nizhny Novgorod to a
priest and a nun. He became a leader in the Old Believers movement.
He wrote the earliest version of his autobiography between 1669 and
1672 while imprisoned in Pustozersk, and was burned as a heretic in
1682.
Kenneth N. Brostrom (1939–2020) was associate professor of Russian
at Wayne State University.
Brostrom does a good job of representing this stern, intransigent
yet oddly vulnerable writer to an anglophone reader, and of
conveying his stylistic innovations. Part travelogue, part
invective, part autobiography, part auto-hagiography (complete with
miracles of healing), The Life Written by Himself fits no generic
convention.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[Brostrom’s] translation is exceptionally well done, re-creating .
. . the rhythms, stylistic alternations, and vernacular intonations
of the original.
*Priscilla Hunt, Slavic Review*
Avvakum's combination of ecclesiastical and colloquial language
transposed into writing the pathos of his oral rhetoric, and has
remained a source of inspiration to modern Russian literature ever
since the Life was published.
*Jostein Børtnes, The Cambridge History of Russian
Literature*
The daring originality of Avvakum's venture cannot be
overestimated, and the use he made of his Russian places him in the
very first rank of Russian writers: no one has since excelled him
in vigor and raciness and in the skillful command of all the
expressive means of everyday language for the most striking
literary effects.
*Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky, A History of Russian
Literature*
Reading The Life Written by Himself is like meeting a Dostoyevsky
or Chekhov character come to life – but Avvakum was alive and
kicking long before Russian literature could invent him.
*Russian Life*
While even Russians struggle to read this story, written in an
archaic language, English readers are lucky to be able to read it
more easily in the beautiful translation by Kenneth N.
Brostrom.
*Russia Beyond*
Avvakum’s text [has] authorial individuality and originality in
buckets. In other words, the unyieldingly conservative priest was
an innovator in his writing.
*Literary Hub*
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