Introduction
Russia Bedeviled
Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia, the two tales offered here, propel us into the realm of evil with singular force. Each tale poses hard questions. Why does evil afflict us, and how does it manifest itself? Does it emerge from within the afflicted person, or is its locus external? Can it be overcome? These questions have been with us for as long as we have been human, and each generation has wrestled with them anew. Both Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia foreground the evil that befalls ordinary, fallible men and women, and both attempt to explain its origins, its consequences, and the means by which it can be rooted out.
The original versions of the tales were penned in the seventeenth century, at a time when Russia was embarking cautiously on the transition from medieval aesthetics and modes of thought to more modern, western European ones. Both reflect a distinctly pre-modern view of the world, and both present reality in ways that are sometimes difficult for today’s readers to make sense of. Neither attempts to psychologize its protagonist, so the motivations for Savva’s and Solomonia’s actions are often unclear, and plotlines hare off in unexpected directions. Russian Orthodoxy provides the canvas on which each tale is embroidered, but the authors interlard Church teachings with folk beliefs and carryovers from Russia’s pagan past, making it difficult to determine which value system is in the ascendant at any given moment. Setting, like character development, is reduced to a minimum. Perhaps as a result of these features, relatively little attention has been paid to either tale outside a small community of scholars.
And yet, Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia appeal to our deepest emotions and instincts, and they have much to offer present-day audiences. Aleksey Remizov, one of Russia’s premier modernists, avidly devoured medieval tales. Throughout his long and prolific career, he returned again and again to Russia’s pre-Petrine legacy, adapting and reworking early texts. He was particularly fascinated by The Tale of the Demoniac Solomonia and published his first rewrite of it in the émigré journal Volya Rossii in 1929. He went on to create several new variants, including a French translation and hand-illustrated albums in Russian and French.[1] His final treatment, which has been used for this translation, marks a return to the Russian, text-only format. He came to Savva Grudtsyn, by contrast, relatively late in his career, and he adapted it only once, at around the same time as he worked on his last rendering of Solomonia.[2] But he paired his Savva with Solomonia in a slim volume entitled Besnovatye (TheDemoniacs, alternately, The Possessed), from which we may infer his partiality for the tale as well as his recognition of its essential kinship with Solomonia.
Although Remizov’s adaptations fill a number of narrative gaps in the original Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia—and thereby bring them into closer conformity with modern audience expectations—they nevertheless track fairly faithfully with their seventeenth-century models. Indeed, both the medieval and the modernist renderings of the tales share similar approaches and structures. Both heavily foreground the actions of their protagonists, Savva and Solomonia, who are young people caught in the process of crossing a significant threshold into adulthood: the merchant Savva has recently set off on his first unsupervised trading venture; the priest’s daughter Solomonia has just married. It is precisely at these junctures that disaster strikes—dark powers interpose themselves in the young people’s affairs and compel them to forsake their human companions for demonic ones. Both versions of each tale contain a number of empathetic supporting characters who seek to arrest the protagonists’ fall, but almost all of these potential rescuers turn out to be either myopic or ineffectual. Abetted by the human community’s seeming impotence, demons whisk the inexperienced young people away from their proper places and subject them to remarkable geographical to-ing and fro-ing, all of which reeks of both sulfur and illicit adventure. The underworld unfolds itself before us in awe-inspiring ghastliness, but in each tale at least one righteous figure crops up and offers well-intentioned advice on how to escape. Ultimately, the all-merciful Virgin succors both Savva and Solomonia, and the two sufferers embrace celibacy and are forgiven their sins.
But the most striking confluence between the two tales, in both their seventeenth- and twentieth-century instantiations, is their shared vision of evil. Evil intrudes into each of the narratives in the form of a demon—not, in other words, as Satan himself but, rather, as one of his foot soldiers. For much of his tale, Savva is under the sway of a demon disguised as a perfectly respectable young man; toward the end of his ordeal this demon begins to multiply in alarming fashion. Solomonia, too, falls victim to a single demon (who, however, is definitely not respectable), but she, like Savva, subsequently succumbs to a multitude of diabolical familiars. In both cases, evil is external in origin, anthropomorphic in form, subordinate in echelon, and, ultimately, plural in number. It adheres to its victims tenaciously, and the tried-and-true rituals for vanquishing it—confession and exorcism—prove unsuccessful. Intractable demons, cunningly exploiting the tales’ physical and moral interstices, call the narrative shots, causing both the seventeenth- and the twentieth-century worlds of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia to founder and teeter perilously on the brink of dualist heresy. Only at the utmost extreme do Savva and Solomonia back away from the abyss and, freed from their demons, return to orthodoxy.
Russia’s Demons
Devils and demons have a long and illustrious lineage in Russian letters—we do no more than scratch its surface by pointing out examples such as Pushkin’s “Demons,” Lermontov’s “Demon,” Gogol’s “Night before Christmas,” Dostoevsky’s Demons, Sologub’s Petty Demon, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. These works, together with a host of other poems, stories, and novels, showcase the devil and his minions in infinitely varied and fascinating ways. As in most European cultures, the genealogy of Russia’s diabolical creatures reaches back centuries and reflects a series of unspoken (and, by the standards of official ecclesiastical culture, unspeakable) crosspollinations between Christian and pagan belief systems. Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia’s demons live out their own discrete existences at individual points along an unholy spectrum that extends from the imposing hell of Orthodoxy to the seamy underworld of folklore.
Who are these nightmarish creatures? In part, we can extrapolate an answer from nomenclature, since Russian provides a remarkable variety of designations for evil beings. From the Scriptures, early Russians took “Sotana,” or Satan; “diiavol,” the devil; “Veel’zevul,” Beelzebub; “Iskusitel,” the Tempter; and a host of other euphemistic circumlocutions. The Greek “dæmon” was rendered sometimes as “bes” and sometimes as “demon”; while “chert,” or devil, came into usage on the heels of sustained contact with Poland.[3] The pre-Christian folk tradition contributed the “leshy,” a forest demon or wood goblin; the “vodyanoy,” a water demon; the “polevoy” or “lugovoy,” a field or meadow demon; and the “bolotnoy,” a swamp demon.[4] These represent just a fraction of the possibilities, however, suggesting that Russians have enjoyed a complex, well-articulated, and abiding relationship with devils and demons of all sorts.
Another way of approaching Russian devils and demons is to examine their forms and functions. Both the canonical Old Testament and the Apocrypha provide a Jewish underpinning for early Christian demonology, which is then elaborated and expanded on over the course of several hundred years. Ultimately, the Christian narrative recognizes a single, terrifyingly powerful Devil but also multitudinous demonic henchmen, all of whom work to undermine man’s quest for redemption.[5] One of the most insidious of the demonic acts is to create chaos by loosing the powers of “disorder and planlessness,”[6] as we will have ample opportunity to witness in Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia.
The Christian Devil enters the earliest Russian Orthodox texts and icons as a somewhat nebulous figure, lacking the sharper definition that pagan and folk accretions would later provide.[7] Unfortunately, our evidence for the early pagan side of the Russian demonic synthesis is—and seems fated to remain—woefully inadequate. Written sources for polytheism among the eastern Slavs originate in monasteries and barely mention the indigenous belief system that Christianity supplanted. Ethnographic studies and place names allow us to augment these meager sources, but only up to a certain point. What we can say with a degree of confidence, though, is that various gods and goddesses seem to have governed life’s most essential activities, including conception and birth as well as planting, harvesting, and the pasturing of livestock. Unfortunately, we lack unequivocal evidence for the presence (or absence) of pre-Christian devils or demons.
We do know, however, that at least some of eastern Slavdom’s pagan deities survived Prince Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity. These survivors were sometimes elevated to the status of Orthodox saints but were as often as not demoted to household or nature demons[8] who, well into the modern period, played an active role in Russian village life. Unlike Christianity’s infernal devils, Russia’s folk demons lodge in the mundane world, often in places that mark boundaries between one type of physical space and another, such as swamps, caves, abysses, and ravines. They ply their unholy trade at liminal times and places, overtaking the unwary in doorways, in cemeteries, and at crossroads, at midnight, midday, or midyear. In contrast to Christian-inflected devils, they tend to harry the heedless rather than to beset the morally depraved,[9] although they are perfectly capable of burning down a barn or drowning a foolhardy youth if provoked.
In the nineteenth century, demons move beyond church and village and infiltrate the world of secular art. Writers and painters augment the earlier Russian diabolical arsenal with the western European “grand Devil in his majesty,” a figure who is distinguished by his power and singularity and who emerges with particular clarity in Romanticism.[10] This shift away from the demons of the pre-modern tradition toward a lone, majestic devil is in no way absolute—Gogol’s folk devils preserve the earlier paradigm, while Dostoevsky’s multifarious devils and demons defy easy categorization—but there is nevertheless a substantial broadening of possibilities.
The nineteenth-century process of reimagining literary demons continues into the twentieth. Most saliently, the Symbolists initiate an “astonishing surge” of interest in depictions of the demonic, casting the devil as a proud rebel who spurns conventional morality, as a spirit of malaise, as an agent of apocalypse,[11]or even as an all-powerful force capable of challenging God.[12] The Symbolist devil, who transforms order into chaos, nicely mirrors modernism’s “fragmentation of the previously monolithic world-view of the realist novel.”[13]
Even the advent of Soviet power does not wholly efface Russian literature’s fascination with unholy powers. Mikhail Bulgakov’s diabolical entourage in The Master and Margarita reintroduces an entire gamut of demonic beings, both Russian and western. The deeply erudite professor Woland reminds us, on first appearance, of Goethe’s Faust, but later, in his dealings with Margarita, he behaves more like Mephistopheles. In the opening scene of his “magic show” he adopts a world-weary, Romantic guise, but he subsequently performs a series of pranks worthy of a Russian folk demon. In the novel’s final scenes he is resplendent, easily the equal of Yeshua, Bulgakov’s Christ figure. Woland’s protégés, taken as a cohort, are similarly heterogeneous: Azazelo hearkens back to the enigmatic Azazel of Hebrew Scriptures; Korovev looks suspiciously like Ivan Karamazov’s tawdry devil; and Behemoth—the Book of Job notwithstanding—is reminiscent of trickster folk demons. All three ultimately undergo transfigurations similar to Woland’s, after which they are revealed to be austere and deadly serious spirits.
The demonic continues to entice Russian writers even after Bulgakov. Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, with its devils masquerading as angels, provides a bone-chilling example of late-Soviet, demon-induced chaos. In Erofeev’s postmodernist vision, nothing is what it seems; his hapless antihero Venya, like the traveler in Pushkin’s “Demons,” finds himself astray in an unrecognizable, demon-beguiled universe.
In rounding out our treatment of the Russian devil, we should turn briefly to the question of how he may be recognized. What, in short, do Russian devils and demons look like? F. Buslaev has suggested that the earliest iconographers were parsimonious in their depictions, as if fearful that vividly demonic features might unduly entice viewers. Accordingly, devils were often portrayed schematically, as semi-humans, serpents, or animals.[14] Occasionally, however, they took on human lineaments, in which case they dressed like foreigners. In early literary works, demons sometimes assumed deceptively attractive disguises, masquerading as friends, monks, women, or even angels.[15] Folk demons, by contrast, might have wings or tails or be covered in fur. Those who lived underwater could be blue and slimy or scaly. They might sport long beards, or they might appear as half-man, half-fish. Forest demons often posed as conventional peasants but were capable of metamorphosing into other shapes and sizes.[16] Demons in the modern period manifested yet broader possibilities: they sometimes adopted the guise of brooding giants, like Vrubel’s famous paintings of Lermontov’s demon; at other times they dressed like shabby relatives, like Ivan Karamazov’s devil. Then again, they might be interiorized as overmastering passions, like Father Sergius’s spirit of excessive pride. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a form that Russian devils have not taken, making it quite challenging to discern and evade them. The weak or even the merely unwary were—and presumably still are—in constant danger of falling prey to “a diabolical imitation instead of an authentic Creation.”[17]
1.
Julia Friedman, Beyond Symbolism and Structuralism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 68.
2.
A.M. Gracheva, “Povest’ A.M. Remizova ‘Savva Grudtsyn’ i ee drevnerusskii prototip,” TODRL 33 (1979): 391.
3.
F.A. Riazanovskii, Demonologiia v drevne-russkoi literature (Moscow, 1915), 32–44.
4.
Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 64.
5.
Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (New York: Meridian, 1977), 60–66.
6.
Robert Detweiler, “From Chaos to Legion to Chance: The Double Play of Apocalyptic and Mimesis,” in The Dæmonic Imagination: Biblical Text and Secular Story, ed. Robert Detweiler and William G. Doty (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 1.
7.
Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and the Orthodox Tradition,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 33–35; also Fedor Buslaev, Bes (SPb, 1881), 7.
8.
Iu. M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century),” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and trans. Robert Sorenson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 36.
9.
Faith Wigzell, “The Russian Folk Devil and His Literary Reflections,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 63–65.
10.
Pamela Davidson, “Introductory Essay,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 2–3.
11.
Julian W. Connolly, The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 277–80.
12.
S.L. Slobodniuk, D’iavoly ‘Serebrianogo’ veka (Drevnii gnostitsizm i russkaia literatura, 1890-1930) (SPb: Aleteiia, 1998), 15.
13.
Adam Weiner, “The Demonomania of Sorcerers: Satanism in the Russian Symbolist Novel,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, 373.
14.
Buslaev, Bes, 7–8.
15.
Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell,” 38.
16.
Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 64–70.
17.
Johanna Renate Döring-Smirnov, “Dämonologische Vorstellungen in zwei anonymen russischen Erzählungen des XVII. Jahrhunderts,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 31/31 (1985): 111.
Translator: Marcia A. Morris
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