(The Burning of Avvakum (1897), by Grigoriy Myasoyedov)
by author Daniel Kalder
Many years ago a friend made one of the most perceptive comments I have ever heard about Russian writers. "Yeah," he said, "they're profound and all that. But they're also incredibly hard. I mean, there's Pushkin: died in a duel. Lermontov: died in a duel. Tolstoy: fought in the Caucasus. Dostoevsky: sentenced to death, exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Solzhenitsyn: fought in the second world war, sent to the Gulag, survived cancer, defied the USSR …"
"Don't forget Griboyedov," I added. "Torn to pieces by angry Persians after he tried to save an Armenian eunuch. And Varlam Shalamov: Seventeen years in the Gulag."
"Yeah – and what have English authors done? Dickens? Who did he fight?"
I still think this assessment stands. And recently I discovered possibly the hardest Russian of them all: Avvakum the Archpriest, author of both the first classic autobiography in Russian literature and the first eyewitness account of Siberia and its peoples.
Allow me to explain. In Russia in 1666-67 there was a schism in the church which arose from a dispute over aspects of ritual, such as how many fingers to use when crossing oneself. Avvakum led the Old Believers who insisted on using two (traditional for Russia) instead of three (a Greek custom enforced by a reformist church hierarchy). For his pains, he was flogged, exiled to Siberia, imprisoned for 14 years in a hole in the ground in the Arctic Circle and finally burnt at the stake. And yet Avvakum never recanted his beliefs. His faith was that strong. He was that hard.
Of course, there's more to him than that. He was also a fantastic writer: visceral, funny, moving, colourful and joyously obscene. Consider the following passages cited in Ivan the Fool, Andrei Sinyavsky's excellent history of Russian folk belief. Here Avvakum describes the Tsar languishing in hell:
"Are your eunuchs fanning you to keep the flies from biting the great sovereign? And when you shit, do you wipe your bottom with that hellfire? The Holy Spirit tells me … there's no need to shit away what you've eaten since the worms are slowly eating the great sovereign himself … into the bowels of the earth with you, son of a bitch!"
Here he advises his followers not to fear martyrdom:
"In that fire you won't have long to suffer, in the blink of an eye your soul will take flight! Don't you see? Are you afraid of that furnace? Take heart, spit on it, don't be afraid! You may feel afraid, but as soon as you go into the furnace, you will forget everything."
This is the kind of priestly writing I can admire. You see, Avvakum and his fellow Old Believers thought that Russia had succumbed to the Antichrist and that the world was about to end. Millions fled into the forests, and thousands incinerated themselves to escape the trials described in Revelation. Thus his autobiography is far more than an obscure historical document – it is also a truthful account of life in the End Times as he experienced it. Avvakum's goal was to demonstrate via his own miserable life story how to endure the Last Days with faith in Christ. His book is an epic tale of ferocious resistance against evil.
Avvakum's extraordinary Life circulated exclusively among the persecuted Old Believers for nearly 200 years until it was "discovered" by the Russian intelligentsia in the 19th century. Since then it has wielded a great influence over numerous of Russia's literary titans. Dostoevsky drew deep inspiration from Avvakum's memoir, and Solzhenitsyn found in him a model of principled resistance to the state. Forget about your Turgenev and your Chekhov, it's the Archpriest you need to be reading if you want to understand Russia. Even in English, it has a fascinating if little known pedigree: the first translation was a collaborative effort between Jane Harrison – Britain's first female career academic – and Hope Mirrlees, a friend of Virginia Woolf whose modernist works are currently enjoying a renaissance.
Of course, all this would have meant nothing to Avvakum: his eyes were resolutely fixed on the next world. In 1971, nearly 300 years after he was burned alive, the Orthodox Church admitted that he wasn't a heretic after all and the whole torture and execution thing had been a tad excessive. And yet, so hard was Avvakum that I think he would have told them where to shove their pardon – for the Orthodox Church not only still advocated crossing yourself with three fingers instead of two, but was now collaborating with the God-hating Soviet state. In Avvakum's eyes they would have been ultra-Antichrists and he would have fought them to the death. Like the man said: "I would gladly die and come back to life to die again for Christ, our Lord."
And of course although it is not necessary to be hard to be a great author, it certainly helps. Because those writers who fight and endure, and who go further in their suffering and personal wars, will always experience things the rest of us can't begin to imagine, and thus expand our knowledge of the world. And that, surely, is what writing is all about – and why Russian literature in particular is so deeply rewarding.
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