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‘realism’ that ‘undermines the religious-symbolic basis of early Russian art’,
29
theiconographyconventionallyignoresthelaws oftime,spaceandperspective,
bringing together heaven and earth and architecture and holy men of different
epochs, presided over by an image of the twelfth-century Vladimir Mother of
God.
30
Notional likenesses of rulers and their families in poses of supplication
or prayer, as here, were in the Byzantine tradition. Another example is the
icon Honouring the Life-Giving Cross (1677–8), by another Armoury painter,
Ivan Saltanov, in which Constantine the Great and St Helena venerate the
cross together with Alexis, Mariia and Patriarch Nikon.
31
Clearly neither Ushakov nor Saltanov had any intention of depicting the
‘struggle between the secular and the religious’ detected by some modern
historians.
32
More recently Russian scholars have shifted the emphasis from
the novelty of Ushakov’s work to its traditional elements – Byzantine, Kievan
and Muscovite – categorising it as ‘late medieval’.
33
The painter Fedor Zubov
(d. 1689) copied some of his icons directly from foreign religious paintings,
for example, his Crucifixion of 1685, in which blood, usually omitted from the
Orthodox iconography of this subject, drips from Christ’s hands and sides. But
he also worked in a strictly Orthodox idiom. Icons such as Nativity of the Mother
of God (1688) are remarkable for their stylised ornamentation, intricate details
of architecture and landscapes and the application of highlights to fabrics.
34
Other leading painters of the era, such as Karp Zolotarev, Ivan Bezmin and
Kirill Ulanov, remained true to Orthodox iconography, while adopting certain
‘Italianate’ stylistic features.
35
But subjects such as landscapes and still life that
in Western art had long been treated independently in a secular context, in
Russia remained within the framework of icons and frescos.
29 E. S. Ovchinnikova, Portret v russkom iskusstve XVII veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955), p. 13.
Also I. E. Danilova and N. E. Mneva, ‘Zhivopis’ XVII veka’, in I. E. Grabar’ (ed.), Istoriia
russkogo iskusstva, 12 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1953–61), vol. iv (1959), p. 380.
30 Lindsey Hughes, ‘Simon Ushakov’s Icon “The Tree of the Muscovite State” Revisited’,
FOG 58 (2001): 223–34;Thyr
ˆ
et, Between God and Tsar,pp.70–8;K
¨
ampfer, Herrscherbild,
pp. 227–30.
31 Ibid., plate 138, and pp. 233–4.
32 Ovchinnikova, Portret,p.22. See Cracraft, Imagery,p.19, on the exaggeration of ‘the
degree to which such painting was “secular” in either subject or style’.
33 E. S. Smirnova, ‘Simon Ushakov—“Historicism” and “Byzantinism”: On the Interpre-
tation of Russian Painting from the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in Baron
and Kollmann (eds.), Religion and Culture,pp.170–83.
34 See V. G. Briusova, Fedor Zubov (Moscow: ‘Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo’, 1985), pp. 150–4.
35 A. A. Pavlenko,‘Karp Zolotarevi Moskovskiezhivopistsyposlednei treti XVII v.’, in Pami-
atniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytiia.1982 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), pp. 301–16; A.A. Pavlenko,
‘Evoliutsiia russkoi ikonopisi i zhivopisnoe masterstvo kak iavlenie perekhodnogo peri-
oda’, in Russkaia kul’tura v perekhodnyi period ot Srednevekov’ia k novomu vremeni (Moscow:
Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1992), pp. 103–8; Kostotchkina, ‘Baroque’, pp. 100–31.
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Soviet scholars attempted to identify distinct ‘schools’ of icon-painting
beyond Moscow, for example, in the Kostroma workshops of Gurii Nikitin,
36
but their studies were compromised by the ideologically motivated quest for
‘progressive’ features in ‘democratic’ art away from the oppressiveness of the
tsar’s court. Fine-quality icons were produced in Iaroslavl’, Ustiug, Vologda
and other regional centres. Small icons rich in miniaturised detail are often
attributed to the Stroganov school. The intricately decorative effects, lavish
application of gold and glowing colours that are hallmarks of seventeenth-
century icons had analogies in applied art. Coloured enamelling on gilded
silver (a speciality of Sol’vychegodsk),decorative leather workand fabrics sown
with gold and silver thread and seed pearls displayed a mixture of traditional
floral and Western motifs.
37
The most ‘democratic’ form of religious art were the single-sheet wood
block prints (lubki) of icon subjects, often with decorative borders of flowers
and geometric patterns, that circulated widely among all classes of the popula-
tion. A wholecollection of such prints makes up Vasilii Koren’s illustrated Bible
and Apocalypse (1692–6), fusing folk and Baroque motifs. Some served liturgi-
cal purposes, for example, printed antiminsy foruse at the altar, others featured
non-devotional topics, for example The Feast of the Pious and Impious and The
Mice Bury the Cat (see Plate 27).
38
The most sophisticated prints came from
Ukraine, where artists produced illustrations from wood and metal blocks
for religious books and also allegorical conclusiones, engraved programmes for
debates in the Kiev Academy.
39
In the 1680s these spread to Moscow. One of
the most ambitious official graphic projects was Karion Istomin’s illustrated
Alphabet (Bukvar’), which was first made in manuscript for the royal children,
then printed in 1694. Many of the illustrations for each letter of the Cyrillic
alphabet were copied from Western sources.
In the Armoury and other studios Russian artists worked alongside foreign
painters, including the Pole Stanisl
aw Loputskii and the Germans (or Dutch?)
Daniel Wuchters (in Russia 1663–7) and ‘master of perspective’ Peter Engels
(1670–80s).
40
Western artists introduced oil painting on canvas and new bib-
lical and historical subjects, including scenes from classical history, for the
36 V. G. Briusova, Gurii Nikitin (Moscow: ‘Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo’, 1982).
37 Anne Odom, Russian Enamels (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1996); Kostotchkina,
‘Baroque’, pp. 191–266.
38 See E. A. Mishina, Russkaia graviura na dereve XVII–XVIII vv. (St Petersburg: Dmitrii
Bulanin, 2000 [?]).
39 M. A. Alekseeva, ‘Zhanr konkliuzii v russkom iskusstve kontsa XVII – nachala XVIII v.’,
in T. V. Alekseeva (ed.), Russkoe iskusstvo barokko (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 7–29.
40 Cracraft, Imagery,pp.115–19.
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lindsey hughes
interiors of secular buildings. Unfortunately, too little of their work survives
to pass judgement on their skills or to define precisely their influence. Russian
artists’ receptiveness to the outside world and ability to work in a fully-fledged
Western style were limited by Orthodox artistic conventions, lack of travel
opportunities, inadequate technical knowledge and ignorance of classical his-
tory and mythology. As far as we know, there were no master works for them
to copy. Where the use of foreign models is well documented, for example,
simplified imitations of plates from Piscator’s illustrated Bible, they worked
mainly in a religious context.
41
In 1683 a separate Armoury workshop for non-religious art (zhivopisnaia
palata) was established under Ushakov’s directorship.
42
Armoury employment
rolls for 1687–8 record twenty-seven ikonopistsy and forty zhivopistsy, the latter
making maps and charts, prints, banners, theatrical scenery (for Tsar Alexis’s
short-lived theatre: see below) and decorating such items as furniture, Easter
eggs, chess sets and children’s toys. Icon painters diversified their skills. In a
petition of 1681, for example, Vasilii Poznanskii announced that he was adept
at both ikonopis’ and zhivopis’ and could do historical subjects, ‘perspective’
studies and portraits.
43
The introduction of the secular portrait (parsuna or persona, the term bor-
rowedfrom Latin via Polish)was a significant innovation.
44
Theearliest known
examples, posthumous images of Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuiskii and Tsar
Fedor Ivanovich (1630s?), were icon-like studies in tempera on wood.
45
Free-
standing likenesses of Russians painted in oils on canvas depicting persons
detached from an iconic composition or a dynastic cycle are extremely rare
before the 1680s. Although there is documentary evidence of parsuny being
painted in the 1650s–1660s, extant examples are elusive. Not one of Ushakov’s
portraits survives, for example. The first written reference to a Russian artist
doing a portrait from life is Fedor Iur’ev’s non-extant study of Tsar Alexis of
1671.
46
The largest surviving collection of portraits are the Russian and foreign
rulers in the Book of Titled Heads (Tituliarnik), a sort of dynastic reference work
produced for the Foreign Office by Armoury artists in 1672–3. The images are
highly stylised, identifying individuals by inscriptions and appropriate regalia.
41 For example, the Theatrum Biblicum, first published Amsterdam, 1643. See Hughes,
‘Moscow Armoury’, p. 212; Cracraft, Imagery,pp.94–6.
42 Hughes, ‘Moscow Armoury’, pp. 208–9.
43 Ovchinnikova, Portret,p.29.
44 See Lindsey Hughes, ‘Images of the Elite: A Reconsideration of the Portrait in
Seventeenth-Century Russia’, FOG 56 (2000): 167–85.
45 See K
¨
ampfer, Herrscherbild,pp.174–6; illustrations in Ovchinnikova, Portret,p.59.
46 Ibid., p. 27.
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Little distinguishes Tsar Alexis from twelfth-century Prince Vladimir Mono-
makh.
47
A key period in the evolution of the parsuna portrait was the short reign
of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich (1676–82), which saw the further spread of Polish
cultural influences. In 1677 Fedor ordered portraits for the tombs of Tsars
Michael and Alexis from Fedor Zubov and in 1682 two half-length portraits of
his father from Ivan Saltanov. Rare ‘naive’ equestrian studies of Michael and
Alexis, painted in tempera on canvas but with gold icon-like backgrounds, also
date from Fedor’s reign.
48
In 1678 Ivan Bezmin went to the palace to paint the
tsar (pisal gosudarskuiu personu).
49
The best-known surviving oil painting of Tsar Alexis may date from this
time. This stiff and stylised Byzantine image of the tsar in his regalia suggests
some development towards three-dimensionality in the background and in the
moulding of the face. Both it and a posthumous portrait on a wooden panel
of Fedor himself, made for placing by his tomb, are reminiscent of similarly
static and decorative panel portraits of Tudor kings and queens painted in
England more than a century earlier, with attention devoted to sumptuous
fabrics, gems and regalia.
50
From the 1680s boyars, too, appear in easel portraits modelled on the stiffly
formal ‘Sarmatian’ portraits of nobles in Poland-Lithuania and Ukraine.
51
An
image engraved from a painting of Prince Vasilii Vasil’evich Golitsyn (c. 1687),
attributed to the Ukrainian Leontii Tarasevich, with its coat of arms and
heraldic verses, is wholly in this Polish-Ukrainian manner.
52
Golitsyn, one of
the few Russians to know Latin, also owned ‘German’ prints, maps, musi-
cal instruments, foreign books, clocks, furniture and mirrors. He amassed a
portrait gallery, as did another boyar, Artamon Matveev. Matveev, who had a
Scottish wife, also staged home theatricals and hired a foreign tutor to teach
his son Latin and Greek.
53
47 See V. Kostsova, ‘Tituliarnik sobraniia Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha’, Trudy Gosu-
darstvennogo Ermitazha 3 (1959): 16–40; Cracraft, Imagery,pp.68–70; Kostotchkina,
‘Baroque’, pp. 82–4.
48 Ovchinnikova, Portret,pp.27–8; Danilova and Mneva, ‘Zhivopis’’, p. 457.
49 A. E. Viktorov, Opisanie zapisnykh knig i bumag starinnykh dvortsovykh prikazov, 1584–1725
g., 2 vols. (Moscow: Arkhipov, 1883), vol. ii,p.446.
50 Hughes, ‘Images’, 177;K
¨
ampfer, Herrscherbild,pp.214, 242; Briusova, Russkaia zhivopis’,
plate 36.
51 See L. I. Tananaeva, ‘Portretnye formy v Pol’she i v Rossii v XVII v. Nekotorye sviazi
i paralleli’, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie ’81 (1982), pp. 85–125; Cracraft, Imagery,pp.190–1;
Hughes, ‘Images’, 172–3.
52 Lindsey Hughes, Sophia Regent of Russia 1657–1704 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990), pp. 144–5.
53 On Golitsyn: Lindsey Hughes, Russia and the West, the Life of a Seventeenth-Century West-
ernizer, Prince V. V. Golitsyn (1643–1714) (Newtonville, Mass.: ORP, 1984); A. Smith, ‘The
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Both these men were exceptional. Even allowing for high rates of destruc-
tionof noblepropertyover the centuries,the meagreevidence of portraitsfrom
the seventeenth century undermines attempts to demonstrate their ‘wide dis-
tribution...notonlyinthecapital but also in the provinces’.
54
James Cracraft
describes Muscovite parsuny as ‘exceedingly provincial and even regressive by
contemporary Western European standards’.
55
We should add, however, that
‘Western European standards’ were by no means uniformly professional and
that ‘naive’ portraits painted by semi-trained or untaught provincial artists
remained the norm outside court circles all over Europe. The point is that in
Russia portraits were still a novelty whereas in much of Western Europe they
were commonplace.
The gap between Russia and the West was at its widest in respect of female
portraits. Recent studies argue that Muscovite royal women were empowered
byreligious symbolism and rhetoric; for example,the murals in their reception
chamber in the Kremlin featured images of strong female rulers from the Bible
and Byzantium.
56
But likenesses of living women remained a rarity as long as
elite women werekept in semi-seclusion. The first knownfree-standing female
portraits in Muscovy depict the exceptional figure of Tsarevna Sophia, regent
1682–9. A version engraved in Amsterdam was even surrounded by seven
allegorical Virtues and verses in Latin (see Plate 28). All Sophia’s portraits
emphasised traditional attributes of rulership, as symbolised by regalia in the
setting of a double eagle.
57
Celebrations of female beauty and sexuality were
out of the question in Russia and remained so for some time. While late
seventeenth-century England enjoyed the ‘age of the pin-up’, with prints of
royal mistresses and assorted actresses (sometimes nude) widely available
for sale, most Muscovite women remained faceless.
58
The few known oil
Brilliant Career of Prince Golitsyn’, HUS 19 (1995): 639–54; Richard Hellie, The Economy
and Material Culture of Russia 1600–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
pp. 571–627. Robert O. Crummey writes: ‘Only one boyar . . . Golitsyn, could claim to
be a whole-hearted devotee of the new cultural standards’: Aristocrats and Servitors: The
Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 161.On
Matveev, Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great. The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43–79.
54 Ovchinnikova, Portret,p.101.
55 Cracraft, Imagery,p.192.
56 See Thyr
ˆ
et, Between God and Tsar; Lindsey Hughes, ‘Women and the Arts at the Russian
Court from the 16th to the 18th Century’, in J. Pomeroy and R. Gray (eds.), An Imperial
Collection. Women Artists from the State Hermitage (Washington, DC: National Museum of
Women in the Arts, 2003), pp. 19–49.
57 See Hughes, Sophia,pp.139–44, and her ‘Sophia, “Autocrat of All the Russias”: Titles,
Ritual and Eulogy in the Regency of Sophia Alekseevna (1682–89)’, Canadian Slavonic
Papers 28 (1986): 266–86.
58 David Piper, The English Face (London: National Gallery, 1978), pp. 103–4.
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paintings of seventeenth-century women, for example, Tsar Fedor’s widow
Martha, in modest Muscovite robe and headdress, and PeterI’s mother Natalia
Naryshkina, her hair hidden by a severe black scarf like a nun’s veil, date from
the 1690s.
59
Theatre and music
In October 1672 Alexis sat down at Preobrazhenskoe outside Moscow to watch
a company of German amateur actors directed by a Lutheran pastor perform
the ‘Playof Ahasuerus and Esther’, the firstsuch spectacle to be staged at court.
The tsar was aware of fellow monarchs’ enthusiasm for theatre and a decade
earlier had instructed the agent John Hebdon to bring players to Moscow.
He was persuaded to revive this unfulfilled plan by Artamon Matveev, a pio-
neer of amateur dramatics, who staged a production of the ballet Orpheo at
Shrovetide 1672.
60
The repertoire of Alexis’s theatre was largely religious and
moralising, with biblical stories providing the plots; but contemporary refer-
ences and slapstick humour were built in. All plays, regardless of content, had
spectacular lighting effects, ‘perspective’ scenery and colourful costumes. The
Comedy of Bacchus even featured drunkards, maidens and performing bears.
61
Staged within the confines of royal palaces before restricted audiences, these
performances were extensions of courtly spectacle. The theatre was in opera-
tion only until the tsar’s death, after which it was closed under pressure from
the patriarch. There is no basis for the legend that Tsarevna Sophia wrote and
performed plays.
62
The first public theatre in Russia opened in Moscow in 1701,
but was not a great success.
The tsar’s theatre accelerated the importation of Western instruments and
musical scores, previously virtually unknown. It also featured traditional vocal
music, which in the course of the century assimilated a number of ‘novel-
ties’ via Ukraine, including linear (five-line) notation and the increased use
59 Cracraft, Imagery,pp.206–8; Hughes, ‘Women’ and her ‘Images of Greatness: Portraits
of Peter I’, in Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives, ed. L. Hughes (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000), pp. 250–70.
60 Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1985). Documents on this topic were published in S. K.
Bogoiavlenskii, Moskovskii teatr pri tsariakh Aleksee i Petre (Moscow: Russkaia starina,
1914).
61 For texts see O. A. Derzhavina et al. (eds.), Ranniaia russkaia dramaturgiia XVII – per-
vaia polovina XVIII v., 5 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1972–6). Also L. A. Sofronova, Poetika
slavianskogo teatra XVII – XVIII vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1981).
62 Hughes, Sophia,pp.173–5.
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of polyphonic (part-singing) compositions. The two most prestigious church
choirs belonged to the tsar and the patriarch. They and smaller ensembles
maintained by monasteries and private individuals performed not only litur-
gical music, but also ‘interludes’ (kontserty) in church and spiritual chants
(dukhovnye kanty), which could be sung at home. One of the most prolific
composers in the medium of sacred music was the singer Vasilii Titov, who
set Simeon Polotskii’s rhymed Psalter to music.
63
Another composer, Nikolai
Diletskii, a Ukrainian who studied in Vilna, produced Ideia grammatiki musiki-
iskoi, the first treatise on music to be translated into Russian. Many vocal scores
from the period await analysis and publication.
Instrumental music was restricted by the Church, which permitted only
vocal music during the liturgy. A campaign spearheaded early in Alexis’s
reign by the Zealots of Piety prompted an edict of 1645: ‘Take great care
that nowhere should there be shameful spectacles and games, and no wander-
ing minstrels with tambourines and flutes either in the town or the villages.’
Tambourines, flutes and horns were to be smashed ‘without exception’. A
foreign witness reported that about five cartloads of instruments were confis-
cated and burnt.
64
The Zealots’ targets were pagan entertainers, but ‘seemly’
musical entertainments were permissible at court functions and diplomatic
receptions.In 1664, for example, musicians from the suite of the English ambas-
sador Charles Howard gave some private performances. Tsar Alexis employed
a Polish organist, Simeon Gutkovskii. Organs, pipes and drums were played at
the tsar’s wedding to Natalia Naryshkina in 1671.
65
Even so, Alexis was at first
hesitant about permitting instrumental music in his new theatre ‘as being new
and in some ways pagan, but when the players pleaded with him that without
music it was impossible to put together a chorus, just as it was impossible
for dancers to dance without legs, then he, a little unwillingly, left everything
to the discretion of the actors themselves’. Foreign musicians supplied the
accompaniment, some specially hired from abroad.
66
The entry of the Dutch
embassy of Konraad van Klenk into Moscow in 1676 was greeted by ‘the con-
tinual and unceasing sounds of trumpets and percussion’, as well as pipes and
63 See Olga Dolskaya, ‘Choral Music in the Petrine Era’, in A. G. Cross (ed.), Russia in the
Reign of Peter the Great: Old and New Perspectives (Cambridge: Study Group on 18th-century
Russia, 1998), pp. 173–4; and her ‘Vasilii Titov and the “Moscow Baroque” ’, Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 118 (1993): 203–22.
64 Adam Olearius, The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, ed. and trans. S.
Baron (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 262–3.
65 See C. R. Jensen, ‘Music for the Tsar: a Preliminary Study of the Music of the Muscovite
Court Theatre’, Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 371–2.
66 Jacob Reutenfels, quoted ibid., 373.
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flutes.
67
Such music was to become a regular feature of Peter I’s parades and
entertainments.
Literary and intellectual life: publishing and printing
Anthologies and surveys generally include the seventeenth century and the
first decades of the eighteenth as the last chapter of Early Russian literature.
There was indeed much continuity from the sixteenth century. Russian tra-
ditional literature – lives of saints, miracle stories of the Virgin Mary, folk
tales – was enjoyed by most classes. Increasingly, however, these were supple-
mented by new ‘high’ genres – poetry, drama, sermons – for selected readers.
The separation of elite from popular literature continued, as the concept of
belles lettres emerged.
68
Little of this was reflected in print, however. In the
whole of the seventeenth century the Moscow Press (Pechatnyi dvor), for most
of the period the only one in Russia, published fewer than ten books that
were not wholly religious in content. These included the 1649 Law Code,
Meletii Smotritskii’s Grammar and a manual for training infantry regiments.
ThePress’sbest-sellerswerealphabetprimersforteachingbasicliteracy,closely
followed by the Psalter. Its total output between 1601 and 1700 amounted to
only 483 editions, of which more than 80 per cent were for liturgical use.
69
In other words, the medium of print was virtually reserved for sacred texts,
mostly heavy tomes for use in church, while profane or secular works were
confined to manuscripts or oral transmission.
Historians who measure Russia with a Western yardstick generally link
low achievements in ‘book culture’ with lack of learning. The idea runs like
a refrain through accounts written by Western travellers, many of whom had
some form of higher education. The absence of Russian names among the
luminaries of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ is hardly surprising when we
consider that not only did Muscovy have no universities or academies, but
also apparently lacked even elementary schools. Some Orthodox churchmen
magnifiedthe negative impressionbyequatingforeignlearningwith ‘guile’and
‘deception’. At the same time, we should not exaggerate the gap. Even Isaac
Newton, a devout Christian, studied topics such as astrology and alchemy
that today would be regarded as ‘unscientific’. For the mass of people all
67 Ibid., 375, 377, 382.
68 See E. K. Romodanovskaia, Russkaia literatura na poroge novogo vremeni (Novosibirsk:
Nauka, 1994), esp. pp. 3–11.
69 Luppov, Kniga,p.29.
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over Europe the world was explained by divine providence, not the laws of
physics. Everywhere book learning, an urban phenomenon, was for the few.
Even noblemen often had a minimal grasp of classical languages and Latin
humanism.
70
Books printed in Cyrillic in foreign centres of Orthodox learning reached
Russia, as well as secular books in foreign languages. Translations on secular
topics such as medicine and mathematics were commissioned in government
departments and works in manuscript on diverse subjects circulated among lit-
erate people, whilea flourishing oral tradition brought a variety of textseven to
the remote countryside. After the Time of Troubles many historical narratives
appeared that retold real-life events and showed an interest in personalities, for
example Avraamii Palitsyn’s Skazanie of the Troubles and Katyrev-Rostovskii’s
Book of Chronicles. Such works circulated alongside fictional tales of adventure
and mystery. Particularly popular were translations via the Polish from the
Great Mirror (Magnum speculum exemplorum) and Deeds of the Romans. Nobles
and townspeople read chivalric romances, picaresque tales and parodic works
like Liturgy to the Ale House and Shemiaka’s Judgement. A new genre was the
‘literature of roguery’ in which characters constantly transform themselves
and adopt new identities.
71
Tales in this category include Savva Grudtsyn and
Frol Skobeev, the latter remarkable for its lack of a moral message. Soviet histo-
rians exaggerated the significance of such tales, treating them as ‘democratic
satires’ that criticised the status quo. A more nuanced reading is now pos-
sible, revealing a mixture of hagiographic framing, foreign borrowings and
local embellishments. Redating has pushed these stories to the very end of the
century and to the ‘margins’ of the literary scene.
72
Traditional forms could accommodate new content, for example the ‘Life’
of the pious laywoman Iuliania Lazarevskaia written by her son, who stressed
her humility and charity rather than her asceticism or devotion to the liturgy.
73
The autobiographical ‘Life’ of Archpriest Avvakum, composed in the 1670s,
70 See arguments in Paul Bushkovitch, ‘Cultural Change among the Russian Boyars 1650–
1680. New Sources and Old Problems’, FOG 56 (2000): 89–111. On astrology and other
pseudo-sciences in Muscovy, W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight. An Historical Survey of
Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999); W. F. Ryan, ‘Aristotle and Pseudo-Aristotle in Kievan and Muscovite Russia’, in J.
Kraye et al. (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages (London: Warburg Institute, 1986),
pp. 97–109.
71 Marcia A. Morris, The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000).
72 Zhivov, ‘Religious Reform’, pp. 188–9.
73 See discussion in Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia. The Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 140–7.
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contained earthy scenes of family life written in a robust vernacular alongside
rhetorical passages underlining the theme of personal struggle.
74
The emergence of literature as an activity with distinct aesthetic and formal
requirements carried out by named authors is reflected in the work of the so-
called ‘chancellery’ or Printing Office poets of the first half of the century,
who specialised in didactic verse, epistles and appeals in syllabic metre derived
from Ruthenian models.
75
The first translated treatise on rhetoric in Russian
dates from 1623. The assimilation of new literary forms and a genre system
was accelerated by the Church’s programme for correcting service books.
A major pioneer of sermons, for example, was the Ukrainian scholar and
corrector Epifanii Slavinetskii.
The career of Simeon Polotskii (Samuil Gavrilovich Petrovskii-Sinianovich,
1629–80) exemplifies new trends in Latin/Slavonic literary culture.
76
This Kiev-
educated monk came to Moscow in 1664 to serve as tutor to Tsar Alexis’s
children. He left a massive legacy of sacred and secular writings in manuscript,
while his published works make him one of the rare authors active in Muscovy
whose name appeared in print during his lifetime or very shortly after his
death.
77
Most of his publications were produced in the Palace Typography
(Verkhniaia tipografiia), which in the 1670s to early 1680s operated alongside the
Moscow Press. His Psalter in Verse (1680) was a best-seller. Writings preserved
in manuscript include Vertograd mnogotsvetnyi, a massive anthology of 2,763
didactic poems written in syllabic verse, the content borrowed from Latin
originals by Jesuit writers, and the Rifmologion of occasional verses for royal
events. Polotskii makes frequent reference to classical authors and tales from
antiquity. The title page to his History of Barlaam and Josaphat (1681), designed by
Ushakov, has been hailed as ‘the first example of the use of Classical symbolism
by a Russian artist’.
78
In general, poetry was still regarded as a higher form of
spiritual activity. Even secular poems concentrated on moral improvement,
especially the curbing of pride and avarice.
74 See N. S. Demkova (ed.), Sochineniia protopopa Avvakuma i publitsisticheskaia literatura
rannego staroobriadchestva (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta,
1998).
75 See A. M. Panchenko (ed.), Russkaia sillabicheskaia poeziia XVII–XVIII vv. (Leningrad:
Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970); A. M. Panchenko, Russkaia stikhotvornaia kul’tura XVII veka
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1973); Bushkovitch, Religion,pp.140–5;D.I.Luburkin,Russkaia
novolatinskaiapoeziia: materialyk istorii XVII – pervaiapolovina XVIII veka (Moscow:RGGU,
2000).
76 Simeon Polotskii, Simeon Polockij. Vertograd mnogocvetnyj, ed. Anthony Hippisley and
Lydia I. Sazonova, 3 vols. (Cologne: B
¨
ohlau, 1996–2000); L. I. Sazonova, Poeziia russkogo
barokko (Moscow: Nauka, 1991).
77 Bushkovitch, Religion,pp.150–1.
78 Cracraft, Imagery,pp.127, 155.
657
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