Nor was Morozova intimidated by the powers arrayed against her. Contemporary accounts detail her self-righteous and insulting behavior toward top churchmen. She is reported to have told a group of interrogators, “It is fitting, there where your liturgy is proclaimed [during church services], to engage in a necessary function and to vacate the bowel—that’s what I think of your ritual.” She was only slightly more polite to the tsar, to whom she wrote in 1670, “It does not befit the sovereign to harass me, poor servant that I am, because it is impossible for me ever to renounce our Orthodox faith that has been confirmed by seven ecumenical councils. I have often told him about this before.”42
By this point, Morozova was courting martyrdom. In 1671 she finally exhausted Alexis’s patience by refusing to attend his wedding to his second wife, Natalia Naryshkina. (Morozova’s protector, Tsaritsa Maria, had died.) Tired of Morozova’s obstreperousness and wanting to send a message to her fellow schismatics, Alexis ordered her arrested, along with her sister Evdokia and another female supporter, Maria Danilova. The three women were held in the Novodevichy convent in Moscow, where many boyar women visited them to express support.43 The tsar then exiled the three to more distant convents, even while continuing to offer them clemency on the condition that they accept the reforms. They refused. Finally, in the fall of 1675, incarcerated in a deep pit far outside Moscow, Morozova, her sister, and their friend died of starvation.
Morozova was not the only Old Believer martyr. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of members of the sect emulated the fate of their hero, Avvakum, who was burned at the stake in 1682. When threatened with arrest, they gathered in groups and set themselves on fire. After decades of intermittent, violent confrontation between the authorities and the schismatics, the conflict subsided. The Old Believers became a permanent sect within Russian Orthodoxy, officially outlawed but persisting. The faith endures to this day inside and outside Russia, women’s contributions to its survival continue, and Morozova remains a revered figure in its pantheon.
She was a most remarkable woman. Not only did she refuse to submit to the formidable powers arrayed against her, but she also worked to develop the theology of Old Belief. “Feodosia was assiduous in the reading of books,” Avvakum wrote, “and derived a depth of understanding from the source of evangelical and apostolic discourses.” She argued matters of faith forcefully with the church leaders sent to question her and also with other Old Believers, including the egotistical Avvakum. Even more remarkably for a Muscovite woman, she wrote religious tracts. After her death, Avvakum praised her intellectual fortitude: “When the time came, Feodosia put aside feminine weakness and took up masculine wisdom.”44 She was manly in her intellect, he wrote, and in her resistance to the authorities. That Morozova had transcended the supposed limitations of her gender was the highest praise Avvakum could bestow on her.
The history of Christianity is full of women rebelling against state and church authorities in defense of their understanding of the faith. Perhaps one explanation of this phenomenon is that religion was virtually the only source of power and authority through which women could hope to stand on an equal footing with men. Most female saints were women who had resisted the pressure of evil officials and unsympathetic families, willingly gone to horrible deaths, and then reportedly ascended to heaven to live with God. Some of these martyrs, for example the Muscovite favorite St. Paraskeva, patron saint of married women and housework, were as defiant and assertive as Morozova. The tales of all these female religious rebels inspired women across Europe to join heretical movements in the medieval period and to break with Catholicism altogether during the Reformation. Some of the new Protestant sects of Central and Western Europe were as dependent on the support of prosperous women as were the Old Believers in Russia. Morozova was probably ignorant of the Anabaptists and the Quakers, among whom women figured as founders, but she undoubtedly was versed in the hagiography of the early Christian female martyrs.
In 1669, Morozova was at odds with Avvakum’s sons, Ivan and Prokofii. Warned by Avvakum that “it will go badly for you [unless you]… make peace with my children,” Morozova wrote to Avvakum’s wife, Anastasia. After repeating her charges against the sons, she concluded:
“Little mother, I have sent you fifteen roubles for whatever need you may have, and I sent eight roubles to the little father [Avvakum]: two for the little father alone and six for him to share with Christ’s fraternity. Write to me whether it gets to them. And from now on don’t allow your children to read others’ letters, make them swear that from now on they won’t read my letters and the little father’s. Christ knows that I am as happy with you as with my own birth mother. I remember your spiritual love, how you visited me and nourished my soul with spiritual food. Formerly you really were happy with me and I with you, and truly I am as happy as before. But your children have turned out to be real spiritual enemies of mine….
Forgive me, a sinner, little mother, you and Ivan and Prokofii, in word, deed, and thought, for however I have grieved you. Ivan and Prokofii, you have greatly grieved and vexed me, because you wrote against me and others to your father…. Forgive me, my beloved mother, pray for me, a sinner, and for my son. I beseech your blessing.”
SOURCE: MARGARET ZIOLKOWSKI, ED., TALE o F Bo IARy NIA Mo Ro Zo VA: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS LIFE (LANHAM, MASS.: LEXINGTON, 2000), 89–90. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF ROMAN AND LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHING GROUP.
She probably took inspiration also from Muscovite customs that permitted women to express their piety outside the confines of the family and the convent. It was common for Muscovite women, peasants as well as nobles, to go on pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. A few became “holy fools” who traveled and preached from village to village. Some devotees of St. Paraskeva got together on Fridays to parade through their communities, singing the saint’s praises and calling on other women to quit their work and join them. The church was suspicious of this kind of spontaneous, unregulated religiosity. In 1551, delegates to a church conference complained, “False prophets, men and women and maidens and old grannies wander among parishes…, naked and barefoot, with loose hair and dissolute, shaking and beating themselves.”45 The Muscovite church was too loosely organized to repress the grannies, and so the shaking and beating continued, helping to pave the way for later conversions to Old Belief.
Morozova was inspired by the female saints; she was empowered by her rank. Because she was a boyarina, she could turn her home into a center of schismatic activity and build her authority as a leader of the movement. Her status emboldened her to defy the tsar; she knew that he would hesitate to strike down a woman from a leading family. Her sense of her own authority also empowered her to lecture Avvakum, which roused class and gender resentments in the priest. Angrily he wrote to her, “Are you better than we because you are a boyar woman?… Moon and sun shine equally for everybody… and our Lord has not given any orders to earth and water to serve you more and men less.”46 Avvakum kept telling her over the years that she should submit to him because he was a man and a priest. He had to repeat these orders because she continued to assert herself.