Avvakum

Avvakum Petrov, commonly called Archpriest Avvakum, was a Russian priest, polemicist, and the principal leader of those who rejected the mid-seventeenth-century liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon, a movement later known as the Old Believers or the Raskol. He was born in the village of Grigorovo in the Nizhny Novgorod region of the Tsardom of Russia, most often dated to 1620 or 1621. His father Peter was a parish priest; his mother Maria was remembered for her piety and later became a nun. After his father's death Avvakum was raised in a clerical milieu and was ordained to the diaconate and then to the priesthood in the 1640s. He served first at Lopatitsy, where his severe preaching against drunkenness, folk amusements, and moral disorder already made enemies among local people and landowners. He subsequently became archpriest at Yuryevets-Povolsky, but again met with violent opposition and left for Moscow. There he was drawn into the circle known as the Zealots of Piety, a group of clergy and laymen close to Tsar Alexis who sought to raise the moral tone of parish life and to correct abuses in worship. For a time this circle included Nikon, who would become patriarch.

When Nikon, after his elevation to the patriarchate in 1652, began to revise Russian service books and ceremonies according to contemporary Greek models, Avvakum emerged as the most uncompromising opponent of the changes. He and his associates regarded the new three-fingered sign of the cross, the altered spelling of the name of Jesus, and the corrected liturgical texts as unlawful innovations that broke with the faith of the Russian saints. In 1653 Avvakum was arrested, publicly punished, and exiled to Siberia together with his wife Anastasia Markovna and their children. From Tobolsk they were sent still farther east under the voevoda Afanasy Pashkov into Dauria, in the trans-Baikal and Amur country. The years of forced march, hunger, cold, and beatings, and the death of some of the children, later formed the core of the suffering narrative in Avvakum's own writings. He continued to celebrate according to the old books and to denounce the reforms whenever he had the opportunity.

After Nikon's quarrel with the tsar and loss of effective power, Avvakum was allowed to return to European Russia around 1664. He was treated with a measure of respect at court, but he refused all suggestions that he accept the reformed rite. He was soon removed to Mezen in the north. The great Moscow council of 1666-1667, held with the participation of Eastern patriarchs, confirmed Nikon's liturgical corrections, deposed Avvakum from the priesthood, and laid anathemas on those who persisted in the old ritual. Avvakum and several companions were then condemned to lifelong imprisonment at Pustozersk, a remote ostrog on the lower Pechora in the Arctic. Confined for some fifteen years in an earthen prison, he nonetheless produced a remarkable body of work: petitions and letters to the tsar, polemical tracts, biblical commentaries, and above all the Life of Archpriest Avvakum Written by Himself, an autobiography in the vernacular that is both a spiritual confession and a landmark of Russian prose. From the pit he continued to encourage scattered communities that kept the old rite.

Avvakum remained a married member of the white clergy and never belonged to a monastic order. His wife Anastasia Markovna shared the Siberian exile and is portrayed in his Life as a model of endurance; the couple had several children, including a son named Ivan. Avvakum never held episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office. On 14 April 1682 he and three fellow prisoners, the priest Lazar, the deacon Fyodor, and the monk Epiphanius, were burned to death in a wooden structure at Pustozersk by order of the government of Tsar Feodor III. Old Believer communities immediately honored him as a hieromartyr. He is commemorated especially on 14 April. The established Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate did not canonize him, having treated the Old Believer movement as a schism, though it later withdrew the seventeenth-century anathemas against the old rites. Avvakum's Life and letters remain essential sources for the history of the Raskol, for seventeenth-century Russian language and religious mentality, and for the identity of Old Believer churches down to the present.