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not only an important historical document but also an emotionally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.
