Marta Diwiejewska

Schema-nun Martha of Diveyevo, known in Polish as Marta Diwiejewska and in the world as Maria Semenovna Milyukova, was a Russian Orthodox monastic of the early nineteenth century and one of the closest spiritual children of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. She was born in 1810 in the village of Pogiblovo (later renamed Malinovka) in the Ardatov district of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire. She came from a pious peasant family; her elder sister Elena likewise entered the Diveyevo community and is also venerated as a saint. From childhood Maria was inclined toward prayer and the monastic life, and in her early teens she and her sister sought the counsel of the Sarov elder Seraphim.

Under Seraphim’s direction Maria was received into the small women’s community that had grown up around the Kazan church in Diveyevo, a foundation originally associated with the schema-nun Alexandra (Melgunova). Because of her youth she lived at first as a novice, occupied with the ordinary labors of the sisterhood—field work, household tasks, and the cycle of church services. Saint Seraphim, however, discerned in her an unusual spiritual maturity. According to the traditions preserved in the Diveyevo chronicles and in the memoirs of the sisters, he secretly clothed her in the great schema, bestowing the name Martha, while allowing her to remain outwardly among the untonsured sisters so as not to attract attention to so young a schema-nun. He spoke of her as one who had already attained a high measure of holiness and whose intercession was powerful before God.

The same sources attribute to Schema-nun Martha experiences of spiritual vision connected with the future of the Diveyevo monastery. Saint Seraphim is said to have shown her, or to have spoken with her about, the coming construction of a great cathedral, the procession along the holy canal (kanavka) that he ordered to be dug around the community, and the monastery’s role as a place of special protection in later times. She was remembered by those who knew her as meek, silent, and wholly obedient, combining hard physical work with unceasing interior prayer. Her life in the community lasted only a few years.

Schema-nun Martha died on 21 August 1829, at about nineteen years of age, and was buried in the Diveyevo enclosure near the graves of the foundress Alexandra and, later, her own sister Elena. Local veneration at her grave continued through the nineteenth century and was interrupted by the Soviet suppression of the monastery in the twentieth century. After the return of the Seraphim-Diveyevo Monastery to the Church in the early 1990s, her relics were recovered and enshrined for public veneration. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified her as a locally venerated saint of the Nizhny Novgorod diocese in 2000; she is commemorated on 21 August and together with the other Venerable Women of Diveyevo. She never married and had no children, having entered the monastic path in adolescence. Historical documentation of her life is limited largely to the Diveyevo monastic tradition and the circle of Saint Seraphim; many details of her inner life remain known only through that hagiographical record.