Russian Monastic Culture, "Josephism," and the Iosifo-Volokolamsk Monastery, 1479-1607, and: Kirillo-Belozerskii monastyr´ i ego ustroistvo do vtoroi chetverti XVII veka (1397-1625) (review)
- Russian Monastic Culture, "Josephism," and the Iosifo-Volokolamsk Monastery, 1479-1607, and: Kirillo-Belozerskii monastyr´ i ego ustroistvo do vtoroi chetverti XVII veka (1397-1625)
The publication of these two volumes has placed the study of Muscovite monasticism on a new plane. In the early 1900s, the superbly trained church historian Nikolai Konstantinovich Nikol´skii (1863-1936) turned almost exclusively to the study of Rus´ literature and became a seminal Soviet academic figure in this field. But before he did so, he published monograph-length chapters on Kirillov's physical structures (chapter 2) and economy (chapter 1), and, in three journal installments, four-fifths of chapter 4 on the Beloozero cloister's communal and cell life, as well as some specific and general materials which might have served as the base for an eventual chapter 6 on its bookcraft (knizhnost´).1 Now in one volume a team of scholars led by Z. V. Dmitrieva has issued chapter 3 on administration, an enlarged chapter 4, chapter 5 on church services, and several useful appendices, all as found in manuscript form in the Library of the Academy of Sciences. Tom Dykstra, for his part, has produced the most [End Page 169] intensive study to date of the social structure of a major Muscovite cloister. Here we examine these works in turn.
Nikol´skii was about as immersed in the original papers as anyone could be. He personally rescued some of the Kirillov manuscripts that had appeared on the open booksellers' market and assiduously guarded all codices in his possession in 1917-18 (see N. V. Kraposhina in 2: 6). The minutiae in these chapters are staggering, as if the proverbial statement about God and details (attributed, maybe apocryphally, to Goethe) was one of Nikol´skii's chief mottos. All his chapters contain numerous extracts from sources in the footnotes, and all but one have ample appendices with published sources ranging from estate registries relating to agriculture, income, expenses, and upkeep of state servitors (1: chap. 1) to inventories of church and estate buildings and graves, a synodicon (memorial list), Vasilii Shuiskii's army recruits in 1607, and a description of the "Lithuanian vandalization [razorenie]" of 1612-13 (1: chap. 2).2 They also include lists of igumens (abbots), managers (stroiteli), cellarers, treasurers, grangers (zhitniki), and librarians (2: chap. 3); and a detailed liturgical obikhodnik from the 1560s, followed by a brief extracted instruction from 1621 to the ecclesiarch concerning the sounding of the church bells (2: chap. 5). Nikol´skii also created his own lists: for example, of the 80 churches, many of them heatable in the winter, within the 51 parishes on lands owned by Kirillov in 1601 (2: 103-5). Scholars researching anything connected to such matters can immediately profit from these sources.3
Reading Nikol´skii's first two chapters, one feels as if one is on the site of Kirillov, its estates, and its river network in the late 16th or early 17th century, something that one does not always perceive in reading A. A. Zimin's wide-reaching and mostly sound study of the Iosifo-Volokolamsk Monastery as a seigneurie.4 From Nikol´skii's chapters 3-5, one immediately realizes that the author knew the cell rules, liturgies, and liturgical cycles inside out: he even gives the reader a tour of an imagined cell with its limited contents.5 In the toilsome and assiduous study of Rus´/Russian liturgies going on right now in the manuscript divisions of the Russian State Library, State Historical Museum, [End Page 170] Russian National Library, and elsewhere, the publication of this chapter 5 could...
