Yet even in his decayed state, Savva retained spiritual power. Sometime in the 1920s, Mikhail Uspensky, curator of the State Historical Museum and the Museum of the Revolution, was called in to the Lubyanka. A secret police officer pointed at a silver platter on a table and said, ‘Take this dish and put it in a museum. Do whatever you think necessary with what is on it … the bones of Savva Storozhevsky.’ The curator understood what the Chekist intended. Uspensky, who was from a well-established Moscow intelligentsia family, had married a Zvenigorod girl and built a dacha on a hill near the monastery. Their son, born in 1920, had been named Savva in honour of the saint; he grew up to be a polar scientist, writing books called The Motherland of the Polar Bear and The Birds of Novaya Zemlya. The Uspenskys kept the relics in their Moscow apartment for a while, then buried them in a sealed container in the garden of the dacha. After the dacha burned down, Uspensky moved them back to Moscow, saying he could not die before he had dealt with Savva. In 1983, the Uspenskys handed the relics over to the newly reopened Danilov monastery in Moscow. In 1998, they were returned to Savvino-Storozhevsky.
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On the day of our visit the monastery was busy. On the pathways of packed snow between the white monastery buildings, women in spike heels, tight jeans and short coats passed long-haired monks in black habits. In a lavka, a nun sold fresh bread, purple wine in plastic bottles, mead and soft pryaniki, honey cakes filled with plum jam. Outside the Cathedral of the Nativity, a notice advertised the monastery school. A mother, wearing a long dark skirt and headscarf in the Orthodox style, led her five young children into the cathedral ahead of us. Some of the frescoes had been repainted in bright tones. In the mottled dark gold and grey-black of the older frescoes were figures of bishops: Arseny of Tver, Dmitri of Rostov, St Pantelaimon, and the Venerable Savva in prayer before an icon on a rock in a desert. The colours in the unrestored parts of the church were most beautifuclass="underline" powder blue, pink, dark green, held between the cracks and fissures. The gold paint, contoured on the rough plaster, took in light from many tapers that made its surface appear to be in movement. Lamps of swirling silver hung from the canopy with its five domes. From the ceiling among teal-blue vine tendrils, the faces of saints looked down, suspended in gold; so many faces, without bodies but with hands open, taking in grace, or closed in prayer. The interior of an Orthodox church is intended to give a sense of heaven, and heaven is crowded. Visitors crossed themselves in front of an icon of Nicholas II and his family. A young man kissed a case of tiny brass reliquaries, one of which contained a fragment of stone from Golgotha.
Savvino-Storozhevsky’s most precious icons now hang in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Story has it that the three panels from an iconostasis depicting Christ, the Apostle Paul and the Archangel Michael, by one of the greatest of Russian icon painters, the early-fifteenth-century monk Andrei Rublev, were found under a woodpile in a derelict shed sometime in 1918 or 1919, and taken to the Kremlin workshops to be restored under the supervision of Igor Grabar, curator of the Tretyakov before and after the Revolution. Details of the story are obscure. The months of fear and anguish, when devout local Christians fought devout local Bolsheviks, were a time of rich opportunity for a canny aesthete like Grabar. He had been close to the World of Art movement in the 1900s, but chose to stay in Russia after 1917 and give his energies to the workers’ power. Former associates in the art world called him a renegade, ‘infected with the general psychosis’, for his part in the expropriation of Botticellis from princesses.
In the summer of 1918, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment set up a commission for the preservation of ancient Russian art. As well as Grabar, the commission included the art critic Pavel Muratov. The chaos of ‘war communism’ worked to the advantage of the art historians, who had long revered Rublev’s icons for purely aesthetic reasons. One of the commission’s first moves was to send a group of restorers to Savvino-Storozhevsky, where the frescoes were crumbling and covered with candle grease and thick white secretions of lime. A local historian in Zvenigorod believes that the story of the discovery of the Rublev panels in the woodshed may be a cover for one of the more educated young priests at the Cathedral. Father Dmitri Krylov had known one of the restorers of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment), the Byzantinist and art historian N. D. Protasov, since his student days. Fearing for the icons, he may have handed them over to the restorers without permission from his superiors at the monastery or from the local Bolsheviks. Protasov and Grabar then contrived the story about the woodpile for official reports.
Beside Rublev’s icons, ‘everything loses its lustre’; they ‘do not yield even to Titian’, Grabar wrote. He considered the Zvenigorod panels among the finest works of the fifteenth century. In his 1926 study of Rublev, Grabar described restoration as archaeological work, penetrating through layers of paint to find the secrets of colour and illumination, and gaze into the holy of holies of the creative process, where ‘we unlock the mystery of his craft and comprehend the precious meaning of his art’. The fragments of paint on the panels now look like mosaic; the material is torn back so that one can see, revealed up close in the strong light of the Tretyakov Gallery, the linen cloth on the icon wood on to which the layers of colour, the softest earth purples, blues and pinks, have been applied, and the artistic miracle of these icons, the circles of black paint that Rublev has transformed into a human gaze, dynamic sightlines that penetrate outward into the room. How is it possible that the fullness of a human gaze, a divine gaze, an intelligence, should still be present in a small circle of black paint on this piece of cracked and abraded wood? Is this a question for science? Rublev demands an ‘inward visit’, Alexander Men said, ‘mathematics cannot prove its beauty’. The features on the gentle faces are drawn as fine as incisions. There is no shadow in these faces, only a pervasive glow of gold, and, in the strong head of the Apostle Paul, occasional flecks of white, under the eye, on the earlobe, the brow, the back of the neck, the curling beard. The face of the Archangel is the most golden of the three, for Michael is made of light, the ‘chief captain of the host’, on whom Lucifer cannot bear to look. In Orthodox tradition, angels are ‘secondary lights’ that spread the fire of the divinity, defending earthly creation against the forces of ruin.