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Maksim Gor’kii beautifully captures the exhibitionistic aspect of the holy fool’s masochism: “Don’t You see, Lord, how I torment and lower myself for the sake of Your glory? Don’t you see? Don’t you see, people, how I torture myself for the sake of your salvation? Don’t you see?”28

Holy foolishness held an appeal not only for those who practiced it, but for many of those who witnessed it as well. Sometimes large crowds would gather around holy fools who were going through their masochistic routines. Impressionable children could not but be influenced by holy foolishness. The future narodnik writer Gleb Uspensky and his childhood friends, for example, admired and even imitated a holy fool named Paramon: “The children began to believe in the possibility of redemption and the happy life that would come in the next world. They followed Paramon around town, fasted, put nails in their shoes, and the child whose shoes first leaked blood became the envy of all the others.”29

The depiction of holy foolishness in various art forms has its own attraction. Russian literature features numerous examples of holy fools, or characters who resemble holy fools, such as Pushkin’s Nikolka, Nekrasov’s Vlas, Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Sonia Marmeladova, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.30

Quite understandably, Billington associates holy foolishness with “masochistic impulses.”31 This is not to deny that holy fools were doing other things besides being masochistic (e.g., they sometimes offered a form of social protest, they prophesized, some suffered from an autistic disorder, etc.). Nor should we forget that folly for Christ’s sake existed in other branches of Christianity, such as Greek Orthodoxy. It is curious, however, that thirty-six Russian fools have been canonized, while only six Greeks have. Saward is quite justified to speak of the “Russian enthusiasm” for holy foolishness.32

In the middle of the seventeenth century a new catalyst for masochistic practices developed on the Russian religious scene. It was at this time that a schism (“Raskol”) arose between the official Russian Orthodox Church and a loosely affiliated group which eventually came to be called the Old Believers or Old Ritualists (“staroobriadtsy”).33 At issue were general questions of the growing secularization of Russian culture, the hierarchicalization of church authority, and the acceptability of foreign models for religious behavior. There were also some very specific issues of ritual, especially the question of how to make a proper Sign of the Cross. The Orthodox Patriarch Nikon, influenced by contemporary Greek Orthodoxy, issued instructions proscribing the old practice of using two fingers to cross oneself and requiring that this gesture be performed with three fingers instead. The theological doctrine behind this change is somewhat obscure (apparently three fingers signify the Holy Trinity, two signify the dual, divine-human essence of Christ). But the reaction to the new rule on the part of religious conservatives, such as the notorious Archpriest Avvakum (1620–82), was clear and categoricaclass="underline" “That wolf Nikon, in league with the devil, betrayed us through this crossing with three fingers.” In particular the change in ritual was viewed by Old Believers as an opportunity to become victims:

In the instruction Nikon wrote: “Year and date. According to the tradition of the Holy Apostles and the Holy Fathers it is not your bounden duty to bow down to the knee, but you are to bow to the waist; in addition, you are to cross yourself with three fingers.” Having come together we fell to thinking; we saw that winter was on the way—hearts froze and legs began to shake. Neronov turned the cathedral over to me and went himself into seclusion at the Chudovsky monastery; for a week he prayed in a cell. And there a voice from the icon spoke to him during a prayer: “The time of suffering hath begun; it is thy bounden duty to suffer without weakening!”34

And suffer the Old Believers did. The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum Written by Himself is filled with grisly scenes of flogging, burning, mutilation, starvation, forced labor, and other horrors—all welcomed in the name of Christ:

Down came the rain and snow, and only a poor little kaftan had been tossed across my shoulders. The water poured down my belly and back, terrible was my need. They dragged me out of the boat, then dragged me in chains across the rocks and around the rapids. Almighty miserable it was, but sweet for my soul! I wasn’t grumbling at God…. The words spoken by the Prophet and Apostle came to mind: “My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him. For whom God loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons. But if ye partake of him without chastisement, then are ye bastards, and not sons.” And with these words I comforted myself.35

Fortunately for Avvakum’s reader, there is some occasional comic relief. Avvakum is capable of making fun of himself, he gently humiliates himself (this is part of his masochism) and his tormentors.36 He is aware of his own narcissism, for he confesses to the pride which moved him to become self-appointed leader of his schismatic religious movement. As Priscilla Hunt observes, the revelation of this pride “…went beyond the conventional self-denigration of the humility topos.”37 There is a grandiose flair to Avvakum’s masochism. His “voluntary suffering,” his “self-abnegation and debasement”38 entitled him to assume leadership of what he felt was the true spiritual way for Russia. And for this political prominence he paid precisely what he wanted to pay: he and three of his companions were placed in a pit filled with wood and burned to death.

Many lives came to a violent end during the apocalyptic days of the Russian schism. Avvakum and other leaders of the Old Believers sometimes even glorified suicide. Christ himself, after all, had welcomed the cup of death. There are numerous reports of both individual and mass suicides (usually by burning, sometimes by drowning) in the Old-Believer communities. A “deranged love affair with death,” as Brostrom calls it, spread across the northern forests of Russia.39 For example, in a village in the Ustiug region on October 8, 1753, 170 Old Believers—men, women, children—locked themselves in a large hut and would not let two Orthodox priests approach to dissuade them from their intention to “suffer in the name of Christ and for the two-fingered sign of the cross.” Then, after shouting obscenities at the priests, they proceeded to set fire to the hut, and all inside died in torment.40

D. I. Sapozhnikov, who has written an entire book on this horrifying subject, provides a chart detailing fifty-three recorded incidents of individual or mass self-immolation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chart indicates a grand total of 10,567 victims, although the actual figure is undoubtedly higher because it was impossible to record all incidents of group suicide in the far-flung Old-Believer communities.41

As historian Robert Crummey observes, “the Old Believers wanted martyrdom and were willing to go to great lengths to organize suitable circumstances.” Their “urge for passive suffering” provides a striking illustration of a specific, religious type of masochism. The various instances of mass suicide among Old Believers had “psychological rather than social roots.”42 A psychoanalyst can only agree with this assessment by a professional historian.