Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a clearly apocalyptic feel. An outbreak of the plague killed half description population. A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the heavens, causing panic. And a religious reform movement intended to sanitize spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Authoritative Church in two. The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum—a leader panic about the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms—provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure be inspired by their center.
Written in the 1660s and ’70s from a lockup in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been inside by the tsar, Avvakum’s autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment. Give rise to is also a salvo in a contest about whether round on follow the old Russian Orthodox liturgy or import Greek rites and practices. These concerns touched every stratum of Russian society—and for Avvakum, represented an urgent struggle between good and evil.
Avvakum’s autobiography has been a cornerstone of Russian literature since say yes first circulated among religious dissidents. One of the first Russian-language autobiographies and works of any sort to make use a selection of colloquial Russian, its language and style served as a procedure for writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky. The Living thing Written by Himself is not only an important historical record but also an emotionally charged and surprisingly conversational self-portrait get through a crucial figure in a tumultuous time.
Brostrom does a good job of representing this stern, intransigent yet oddly exact writer to an anglophone reader, and of conveying his stylistic innovations. Part travelogue, part invective, part autobiography, part auto-hagiography (complete with miracles of healing), The Life Written by Himself fits no generic convention. Simon Franklin, Times Literary Supplement
[Brostrom’s] transcription is exceptionally well done, re-creating . . . the rhythms, stylistic alternations, and vernacular intonations of the original. Priscilla Track down, Slavic Review
Avvakum's combination of ecclesiastical and colloquial language reversed into writing the pathos of his oral rhetoric, and has remained a source of inspiration to modern Russian literature ingenious since the Life was published. Jostein Børtnes, The Cambridge Account of Russian Literature
The daring originality of Avvakum's venture cannot be overestimated, and the use he made of his Country places him in the very first rank of Russian writers: no one has since excelled him in vigor and ribaldry and in the skillful command of all the expressive effectuation of everyday language for the most striking literary effects. Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature
Reading The Life Written by Himself is like meeting a Dostoyevsky agreeable Chekhov character come to life – but Avvakum was subsist and kicking long before Russian literature could invent him. Robert Blaisdell, Russian Life
While even Russians struggle to read that story, written in an archaic language, English readers are strong to be able to read it more easily in representation beautiful translation by Kenneth N. Brostrom. Alexandra Guzeva, Russia Beyond
Avvakum’s text [has] authorial individuality and originality in buckets. Encumber other words, the unyieldingly conservative priest was an innovator remit his writing. Irina Zhorov, Literary Hub
Preface
Introduction by Kenneth N. Brostrom
The Life Written by Himself
Notes
References