Worlds Apart

by Alexander Levitsky

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  As the introductory section of this twelfth-century epic clearly demonstrates, old Russia possessed a unique ensemble of myths and images, on which any modern work of fantasy could thrive. Its power resides in the mastery with which it links events of recorded history (Igor’s campaign, the solar eclipse of May 1, 1185) with events that parallel the campaign in the unrecorded history of nature. Personified, Nature becomes an active participant in history (the Sun’s eclipse blocks Igor’s campaign, birds portend misfortunes, wolves conjure up storms, foxes yelp at the shields). Igor’s campaign is further linked with the mythical universe (the bird-god Daeva), indeed, with the cultural heritage of all mankind (the Wisdom Tree, the Trojan Trail).

  Even this short excerpt reveals that old Russia had a keen sense of poetry, as the apostrophic turn to the semi-legendary poet, Boyan the Seer1 would suggest. Like Boyan, the anonymous author of The Lay, perhaps more appropriately translated as The Song of Igor’s Campaign,2 is clearly a poet in his own right. Although his narrative is replete with songs, laments, and dreams—a rich ensemble of recognizable tropes, figures and sub-genres of poetry—it lacks, as all Russian medieval texts do, a recognizable system of prosody accessible to a modern reader. In fact, like all of the texts (whether prosaic or poetic) that belong to the corpus of Old Russian Literature, it shuns any kind of recognizable division, such as a verse line, stanza, or end-rhyme. Even its punctuation and paragraphs cannot be fully analyzed, counted, or commented upon. Rather, as if to underscore the very indivisibility of its poetic universe, it weaves its own dynamic and ever-changing world of fantasy-making, which is enriched by a deft use of tropes and figures—a technique, which one of the foremost scholars of this period (Czyzhevsky) has called “magic realism.” Weaving “paeans from both halves of time”, or expressing and celebrating the past as coexistent with the present, could not have been a talent possessed only by the semi-mythical poet Boyan the Seer. Consider the history behind the Lay. Igor, a minor prince, led his warriors on an expedition which ended in fiasco: his troops were defeated and he himself was imprisoned—the incident merits only the barest mention in Russia’s medieval chronicles. Yet the Lay’s anonymous author adroitly transforms and transmutes this material into a splendid victory of verbal craft, permanently fixed in the annals of Russian literature.

  Other poets emerged as Russia itself underwent a cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the invading Mongolian hordes in 1237—a defeat which was recorded in practically all of her chronicles, and which meant her obliteration as an independent country for at least two centuries. And yet during this dark period of Russian history (commonly referred to as the Mongol yoke), when countless Russians were forcibly removed from their native soil and displaced to the East to serve as slave labor in building the Mongol empire, another unnamed poet enshrined in words the longing that the departing Russian men and women must have had for their now ruined homeland. Commonly referred to as The Orison on the Downfall of the Russian Land, this highly poetic, but still quite obscure, thirteenth-century Russian work was written shortly after the Mongol invasion. It opens with a passage depicting Russia as an enchanted world—a utopian, but clearly tangible vision of peaceful plenitude:

  O radiant brightness—most finely adorned Thou art, Rus’!

  Magnificent Land art Thou, charmed with such myriad beauties:

  Countless deep lakes, cerulean rivers, and sacred clear springs,

  Mountains so tow’ring, steeply pitched slopes, and oak groves unnumbered,

  Dazzling wide meadows, teaming with creatures, abundant in birds,

  Many great cities, and beautiful boroughs, monastic sweet vineyards,

  Princes most feared, proud boyars of honor, and countless great lords.

  All wealth is contained in Thine heart—O Christian and Orthodox Faith!

  The manuscript, which returns the reader’s mind to a time just prior to the Mongol invasion, is often regarded as second in importance only to The Song of Igor’s Campaign in the Old Russian literary canon. Its extant text (only slightly longer than the passage quoted) consists of a fragment from what was most likely a much longer work, lamenting Russia’s lost glory. Our passage is, however, rhetorically complete in the sense that it represents an organized verbal medium, with a recognizable beginning and closure: its last line provides a mirror-like restatement of its rhythmic and poetic opening. As mentioned earlier, Russian pre-sixteenth-century prosody remains a mystery in that scholars working from surviving manuscripts have to this day been unable to derive its systemic unity. Nevertheless, On the Downfall of the Russian Land is clearly a rhythmically executed text, which is transposed in our translation into eight verse lines of irregular ternary meters. Thereby we give it a visual organization lacking in the original, but which is implicit in its rhetorical design. It is noteworthy that the author, lamenting a ravaged Russia, chose the present tense to represent its natural beauty. In this sense the passage unscrolls a bird’s-eye-view fantasy of a recreated past—an Edenic utopia which for the author and his generation is now irretrievably lost.

  Many centuries were to pass before Russian literature would be able to express such awareness of the land’s intense beauty with comparable power. That is not to say that during this period Russia had no literature. On the contrary, forced by the tragic loss of its independence, Russia turned especially to holy writ for inspiration and produced wonderful translations of countless hymns and books of the Bible. Yet no matter how groundbreaking the various transpositions of the sacred texts may have been, translational literature is rarely studied with an eye to the originality of the translator as a poet in his own right. Moreover, since such texts had anonymous translators, they are further neglected due to the post-Romantic notion of the pre-eminence of the persona of the writer, and are usually not considered as literature proper.3 Although original in their transformations of the model texts, they require their own explication and fall outside of the corpus of the present anthology. Quite unfortunately, we are able to offer here only a snapshot of a vast and self-contained medieval fantasy universe, which included many other genres (lives, martyrions, travelogues, chronicles, orations, sermons, etc.)4 from which modern Russian writers drew productive motifs, images and inspiration. Dostoevsky himself, for instance, found the Lives of the Saints to be a rich trove.

  Since our volume has space limitations, we should like to introduce here only one additional work, namely The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself (1682). This text, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, and The Orison on the Downfall of the Russian Land are arguably the three most original and most celebrated Russian works composed before Peter the Great. Avvakum (the Russian form of the Old Testament name Habbakuk) was born in 1621 and became a priest at the age of twenty. A zealot and a staunch traditionalist, for forty years Avvakum was a thorn in the side of Church authorities. A vociferous opponent of the ecclesiastical reforms imposed on the Russian Orthodox Church by the Patriarch Nikon, in 1653 Avvakum was exiled to Siberia with his family. Their wanderings through this vast, largely unexplored territory were to last nine years. In 1682 he was burned at the stake. His death, just as his uncompromising life, have left an indelible mark in Russian consciousness as supreme examples of an unbending spirit, which many Russians have grown to admire and emulate. But for our purposes, we should also remember that Avvakum was a sophisticated writer and that his Life is considered one of the most accomplished autobiographical journey “novels” ever composed in Russia.5

  TITLE PAGE:

  Avvakum,

  the Archpriest,

  hath been charged to write his Life

  by the monk Epifanii—his personal confessor,

  so that the works of GOD shall not pass into oblivion;

  and to this end hath he been charged by his confessor

  for the glory of Christ our GOD.

  Amen!

  Vision 1:

  In our Russia there was a sign: the Sun was dimmed in [7]162 (1654), a month or less before the
plague. Simeon, the Archbishop of Siberia, was sailing along the Volga river, as darkness covered the light at midday, two weeks or so before St. Peter’s day. Simeon and his crew lingered by the shore, weeping for three hours. The Sun grew black, as the Moon approached, gliding from the West. According to Dionysios, GOD thus reveals his wrath against men: at that time Nikon, the Apostate, was defiling the Faith and the laws of the Church, and for this GOD poured forth the vial of his wrathful fury upon the Russian land; a mighty plague it was—no time to forget—we all remember. The Sun grew dark once more about fourteen years later, during the Fast of St. Peter, on Friday during the sixth hour, when the Moon covered all by darkness—ebbing from the West—again revealing the wrath of GOD: at this time the hierarchs in a cathedral church were shearing the Archpriest Avvakum—that destitute and poor soul—along with some others, and after damning them, they cast them into a dungeon at the Ugresha river. The True Believer will understand what is happening to our Land due to the turmoil in the Church. Enough talk of it: On Judgment Day everyone will understand! Let us endure till then …

  Vision 2:

  [Upon hearing the confession of a young woman, burdened with many sins], I reached my izba home. The hour must have been nigh onto midnight. I wept before the icon of the Lord, so that my eyes swelled: I prayed in earnest that God might detach me from my spiritual children, since the burden was heavy and hard to bear. And I threw myself face-down on the ground, sobbing in grief. As I lay there, all unawares of my bitter weeping, the eyes of my heart beheld the river Volga, and this is what I saw: Two stately golden boats were sailing gracefully—their oars and masts were of gold—all was of gold. At the helm of each sat a man for the crew, and I said to them: “Whose ships are these?” They answered: “Luke’s and Lawrence’s.” Now Luke and Lawrence had been my spiritual children; they set me and my house on the path to salvation, and their passing had been pleasing to God. And lo, I then saw a third ship, not adorned with gold, but decked out in varied hues—red, and white, and blue, and black, and ashen—so that the mind of man could not take in all its beauty and excellence. A radiant youth sat at the helm, steering so eagerly toward me from the Volga, as if he would want to devour me. And I called out to him: “Whose ship is this?” And he—sitting in it—replied: “Your ship. Sail in it with your wife and children, if you’re going to pester the Lord.” And I was seized with wonder and, having seated myself aboard, I pondered: “What is this vision? And what kind of voyage will it be?”

  Vision 3:

  Having fixed our boat, we let out our sails and made ready to cross the Baikal—the sea-lake. But midway the air grew eerily quiet, so we took up oars. In that place the sea is not very broad, maybe a hundred—or some eighty—versts (65-50 miles). Just as we were reaching for the shore a storm sprang up with mighty winds, and it was hard to find refuge sheltered from the waves. At the banks—ringed by steep mountains—the cliffs of rock stood fearfully high: I have wandered twenty thousand versts, and more, over the face of the earth, but never have I seen their like. Along their summits are pavilions and turrets, gates and pillars, walls and courtyards—all skillfully fashioned from stone and earth—all works of GOD. Onions grow there, and garlic, bigger than the Romanov onion and uncommonly sweet. Wild hemp grows there as well in the care of GOD; in the courtyards grow fine, red grasses and most colorful, exceedingly fragrant flowers. And there are great numbers of birds—geese and swans that drift over the lake like snow. The water is fresh, but huge seals and sea-lions live in it: I saw no such sea-calves and sea-hares all the time I lived on the shores of the ocean-sea Mezen. This lake swarms with fish—sturgeon and trout, sterlet, salmon and whiting and many other kinds. The sturgeon and taimen salmon are fat as can be; one can’t fry them in a pan—nothing but fat would be left. And all this has been done through our Jesus Christ, our Light, for man, so that he—with a mind at last at rest—might lift his praise to God. But such is man that he is given “to vanity, and his days are as a shadow that passeth away.” He capers like a goat; he puffs himself up like a bubble; he rages like a lynx; he seeks to devour others like a serpent; when he covets the beauty of his neighbor’s mate, he neighs like a colt; he is fiendish as a devil; when he has gorged himself full he drops off to sleep like any heathen, without saying his prayers. He puts off repentance till his old age and then disappears—we know not where, to light or darkness. But all will be revealed on Judgment Day. Forgive me all: for I have myself sinned more than other men.

  While neither The Lay of Igor’s Campaign nor The Life of Archpriest Avvakum can properly be called a fantasy, let us note that both involve a journey—a subgenre considered a principal venue for fantasy-making, as, for example, in Lewis Carol’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. To be sure, Igor and Avvakum travel over real geography, but a geography so foreign to the average reader of their day as to take on the function of a fantastic topography akin to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. At the same time, both the military tale and the spiritual narrative posit a universe replete with signs and wonders, natural and supernatural phenomena sent to guide, assist and admonish the human soul in its travels.

  Travels to enchanted and mysterious places and the heroic deeds of protagonists embarking on such journeys characterize another major source of literary creativity, namely the oral narrative tradition. The two permanent sources of inspiration for the development of fantasy in Russia were skazki (folk tales) and byliny (folk epics). No written sources for either survive from earlier than the eighteenth century, while the major corpus Russian folk tales and epics was collected, transcribed, and edited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In folk tales we find that fantastic journeys can successfully be undertaken by female protagonists, as well as by male, but the latter dominate almost exclusively the epic realm. The principal characteristics which allow a female protagonist to succeed in the world of magic transformations are usually perseverance, orderliness, and above all beauty, be it Alionushka whose youthful charms ultimately rescue both herself and her brother Ivanushka from poverty, or Marya Morevna, a warrior princess who—no matter how powerful her military exploits—is attractive to prince Ivan precisely because she is a “beautiful queen.” A poor merchant’s daughter has the success of her quest inscribed in her name, Vasilisa the Beautiful. Her story follows the typical plot of an ascent to the throne of a folk hero, who despite considerable obstacles succeeds in marrying beyond his/her social origins.

  Vasilisa marries a prince at the end of the tale, but even she needs the help of magic agents and a great deal of self discipline and perseverance to be victorious in her struggle with her wicked step-mother. For the purposes of our discussion Vasilisa the Beautiful is remarkable on two counts. First, that her principal magic agent, a gift from her dying mother, is a fully animated talking, eating, and hard-working doll—rather than the magic beast typical of the folk mytho-poetic universe. The doll gives Vasilisa advice and comfort whenever she is in trouble, performs all the menial chores for her, weeds flower beds, sprays the cabbage, brings the water into the house, and fires up the stove; it even shows Vasilisa an herb that will protect her from sunburn. The wish for a magic agent in human form to accomplish daily tasks—so unambiguously expressed in this popular tale of Russia’s pre-industrial folk culture—considerably predates the futurist concept of robots or androids, a theme which has defined much of modern science fiction ever since Karel Capek coined the word in his famous [1920] play RUR.6 It is notable that the ultimate benefactor and protector in Vasilisa’s fictional universe is a superhuman doll which allows her to triumph even over the all-powerful, villainous and deceptive female ruler of Russian forests, Baba Yaga.

  The behavior of the latter provides second noteworthy aspect of this folk tale. Baba Yaga normally eats people, tricking them in uncanny ways to accomplish this. But because of the magic abilities of Vasilisa’ doll, the witch here becomes yet another agent assisting the heroine to get the better of her vicious stepmother and her t
wo step-sisters, the tale’s true villains. Her role as a positive force in Vasilisa’s quest is not immediately apparent, however, as the tale’s magically shifting and mystifying setting is described:

  Vasilisa thus made ready, tucked her doll into her pocket, crossed herself before the icon, headed off into the forest. Fearful, trembling, she walked onwards. Then she heard the sound of hoof-beats and a horseman galloped past her. White his visage and his raiment, white his steed and all his trappings—and the dawn came with his passage. She went further, and another horse was heard and soon passed near her. Red was he, and all his garments, and his jade was red as fire—pallid dawn gave way to sunrise. Just as evening fell the maiden came upon a little clearing where the witch’s hut was nestled. Suddenly another horseman, black of visage and of raiment, mounted on a coal-black charger, galloped by where she was standing—night had fallen in the forest.

  As if the magic of these visions was not enough, Vasilisa must still face Baba Yaga’s entry into the plot, accompanied by the usual paraphernalia surrounding the witch’s dreadful persona: terrifying noises resounding through the woods, trees crackling and dry leaves rustling as she herself appears riding in a mortar, which she prods on with a pestle, sweeping up her tracks with a broom. The only way for Vasilisa to survive is to serve the witch in her hut for the next three days and nights. Baba Yaga is truly frightening when she instructs Vasilisa to perform next-to-superhuman tasks. Her power is restated as Vasilisa learns from her captor that the three horsemen, obviously embodiments of the sun’s daily journey across the sky, are also “her faithful servants.”7 Yet after Vasilisa performs nearly impossible chores with the help of her untiring doll, Baba Yaga rewards the heroine by giving her a skull with burning eyes, whose rays consume the true villains in the tale by fire and turn them to ashes.