The reforms of Peter the Great (Peter I) (reigned 1682–1725)
The son of Tsar Alexis, Peter the Great, changed the historical fate of Russia by radically turning away from the Byzantine heritage and reforming the state according to the model of Protestant Europe. Humiliated by his father's temporary submission to Patriarch Nikon, Peter prevented new patriarchal elections after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. After a long vacancy of the see, he abolished the patriarchate altogether (1721) and transformed the central administration of the church into a department of the state (caesaropapism), which adopted the title of “Holy Governing Synod.” An imperial high commissioner (Oberprokuror) was to be present at all meetings and, in fact, to act as the administrator of church affairs. Peter also issued a lengthy Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovny Reglament) that served as bylaws for all religious activities in Russia. Weakened by the schism of the “Old Believers,” the church found no spokesman to defend its rights and passively accepted the reforms.
With the actions of Peter, the Church of Russia entered a new period of its history that lasted until 1917. The immediate consequences were not all negative. Peter's ecclesiastical advisers were Ukrainian prelates, graduates of the Kievan academy, who introduced in Russia a Western system of theological education; the most famous among them was Peter's friend, Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov. Throughout the 18th century, the Russian Church also continued its missionary work in Asia and produced several spiritual writers and saints: St. Mitrofan of Voronezh (died 1703), St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (died 1783)—an admirer of the German Lutheran Johann Arndt and of German Pietism—as well as other eminent prelates and scholars such as Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow (died 1803). All attempts at challenging the power of the tsar over the church, however, always met with failure. The metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matsiyevich, who opposed the secularization of church property by the empress Catherine the Great, was deposed and died in prison (1772). The atmosphere of secularistic officialdom that prevailed in Russia was not favourable for a revival of monasticism, but such a revival did take place through the efforts of a young Kievan scholar, Paissy Velichkovsky (1722–94), who became the abbot of the monastery of Neamts in Romania. His Slavonic edition of the Philocalia contributed to the revival of Hesychast traditions in Russia in the 19th century.
Saint Basil the Blessed
▪ church, Moscow, Russia
also called Pokrovsky Cathedral, Russian Svyatoy Vasily Blazhenny, or Pokrovsky Sobor,
church constructed on Red Square in Moscow between 1554 and 1560 by Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, as a votive offering for his military victories over the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. The church was dedicated to the protection and intercession of the Virgin, but it came to be known as the Cathedral of Vasily Blazhenny (St. Basil the Beatified) after Basil, the Russian holy fool who was “idiotic for Christ's sake” and who was buried in the church vaults during the reign (1584–98) of Tsar Fyodor I.
The church was designed by two Russian architects, Posnik and Barma (who may in fact have been one person). According to popular legend, however, it was built by an Italian architect who was blinded so that he could never create anything that was similar or equal.
icon
▪ literature
in literature, a description of a person or thing, usually using a figure of speech. To semioticians, icons are signs, verbal or otherwise, with extra-systemic resemblances to the persons or things they denote. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) by W.K. Wimsatt is an important New Criticism text on the subject.
▪ religious art
in Eastern (Eastern Orthodoxy) Christian tradition, a representation of sacred personages or events in mural painting, mosaic, or wood. After the iconoclastic controversy of the 8th–9th century, which disputed the religious function and meaning of icons, the Eastern Church formulated the doctrinal basis for their veneration: since God had assumed material form in the person of Jesus Christ, he also could be represented in pictures. Icons are considered an essential part of the church and are given special liturgical veneration. They also serve as mediums of instruction for the uneducated faithful through the iconostasis (q.v.), a screen shielding the altar, covered with icons depicting scenes from the New Testament, church feasts, and popular saints. In the classical Byzantine and Orthodox tradition, iconography is not a realistic but a symbolical art; its function is to express in line and colour the theological teaching of the church.
Additional Reading
Kurt Weitzmann, The Icon: Holy Images—Sixth to Fourteenth Century (1978).
Tretyakov Gallery
▪ museum, Moscow, Russia
in full State Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Gosudarstvennaya Tretyakovskaya Galereya,
Moscow art museum founded by Pavel M. Tretyakov in 1856. It contains the world's finest collection of 17th- and 18th-century Russian icons, having more than 40,000 of them.
There are also 18th-century portraits, 19th-century historical paintings, and works of the Soviet period. The museum is organized into Early Russian Art, Art of the 18th Century, Art of the First Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Second Half of the 19th Century, Art of the Early 20th Century, and Soviet Art.
Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich
▪ Russian author
born Dec. 12 [Dec. 1, Old Style], 1766, Mikhaylovka, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk] province, Russia
died June 3 [May 22], 1826, St. Petersburg
Russian historian, poet, and journalist who was the leading exponent of the sentimentalist school in Russian literature.
From an early age, Karamzin was interested in Enlightenment philosophy and western European literature. After extensive travel in western Europe, Karamzin described his impressions in his Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790), the most important of his contributions to a monthly review, Moskovsky zhurnal (1791–92; “Moscow Journal”), that he founded on his return. Written in a self-revealing style influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Laurence Sterne, the “Letters” helped introduce to Russia the sentimental style then popular in western Europe. Karamzin's tale Bednaya Liza (1792; “Poor Liza”), about a village girl who commits suicide after a tragic love affair, soon became the most celebrated work of the Russian sentimental school.
In 1803 Karamzin's friendship with the emperor Alexander I resulted in his appointment as court historian. The rest of his life was devoted to his 12-volume Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo (1816–29; “History of the Russian State”). Though based on original research, this first general survey of Russian history was conceived as a literary rather than an academic work. The history is, in effect, an apology for Russian autocracy. It is the first such Russian work to have drawn on a great number of documents, including foreign accounts of historical incidents. Uncompleted at his death, the work closes with the accession of Michael Romanov (1613). As history it has been superseded, but it remains a landmark in the development of Russian literary style; it provided a main source for Pushkin's drama Boris Godunov. His History is also considered to have contributed much to the development of Russian literary language, for in it he sought to bring written Russian—then rife with cumbrous locutions—closer to the rhythms and conciseness of educated speech and to equip the language with a full cultural vocabulary.