Avvakum Petrov: Bad Motherfucker
Just discovered an excellent piece by Daniel Kalder over at the Guardian — “Russians: the World’s Hardest Writers.”
Russian scribes were real men. The last hard men, perhaps. There were no Matt Taibbi or Max Blumenthal pipsqueaks among them. These guys were rough ducks who died in duels; fought in wars; languished in Siberian prison camps; laughed in the face of cancer.
But, Kalder singles out one ornery bastard in particular as the baddest of them all — Avvakum Petrov, a.k.a. Avvakum the Archpriest. Writes Kalder (emphasis mine):
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.
And the writing! This passage — a description of the Tsar burning in Hell — shits pungent flames all over today’s transgressive rhapsodists:
“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!”
Such perfect hostility…and venom…bring feelings of joy into my silly parts. Kalder hits all the right notes with his praise:
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 Thus his autobiography is far more than an obscure historical document – it is also a truthful account of life in the End Times as he experienced it.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.
Some day, someone will write like this again. But it will take hellish circumstances and some seriously hard times to imbue anyone’s prose with that kind of barbed wire. A final excerpt from Kalder:
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.”
If there is a man of God anywhere in the world with such devotion to the so-called divine, I wish to meet him ASAP. Atheism be damned!
