Valerie Kivelson has done fundamental work on magic and witchcraft prosecution in Russia: "Male Witches and Gendered Categories in 17th-century Russia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 606-31 and Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). W. F. Ryan's work is encyclopedic: The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
Eve Levin looks at magic and healing: "Healers and Witches in Early Modern Russia," in Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects, ed. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 105-33. On minstrels, see Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: A History ofthe Skomorokhi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978). On medicine at the court, see Clare Griffin, "The Production and Consumption ofMedical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Russia: The Apothecary Chancery," Doctoral thesis, University College London, 2013.
On "dual faith": Robert O. Crummey, "Old Belief as Popular Religion: New Approaches," Slavic Review 52 (1993): 700-12; Eve Levin, "Dvoeverie and Popular Religion," in Stephen K. Batalden, ed., Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 31-52 and her "Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia," in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 96-114; Stella Rock, Popular Religion in Russia: "Double Belief" and the Making ofan Academic Myth (London: Routledge, 2007).
On church reform: Jack V. Haney, From Italy to Muscovy: The Life and Works of Maxim the Greek (Munich: W. Fink, 1973); Jack Edward Kollmann, Jr., "The Moscow Stoglav (Hundred Chapters) Church Council of 1551," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1978; Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, chap. 3; Robert O. Crummey: "The Orthodox Church and Schism," in Maureen Perrie, The Cambridge History ofRussia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 618-39 and his "Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia," in James D. Tracey and Marguerite Ragnow, eds., Religion and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52-79.
On the Old Belief, Robert O. Crummey's body of work is essentiaclass="underline" The Old Believers & the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community & the Russian State, 1694—1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970) and essays collected in Old Believers in a Changing World (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). Georg Michels examines social and political aspects of the Schism in At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999) and "Ruling without Mercy: Seventeenth-Century Bishops and their Officials," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2003): 515-42.
PART III
THE CENTURY OF EMPIRE: RUSSIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Imperial Imaginary and the Political Center
To stay viable, empires must stay dynamic. They must regularly renegotiate their deals with subject peoples; they should adjust fiscal policy to pay for state building and military reform in ways that do not undermine the crucial "hub and spokes" verticality of imperial power. They must successfully integrate new peoples and new practices without upsetting imperial structures. They must keep the center strong, with regular administrative reform or growth, maintenance of revenue streams, and vigilance over succession in the ruling family; they must prevent the development of rival political centers. Finally, they should constantly refresh or alter their ruling ideology to embrace new trends, new constituents, and/or new needs. The Russian empire in the eighteenth century was strikingly successful in these challenges, not least in the recasting of its imperial imaginary.
REFRESHING THE IMPERIAL IMAGINARY
A welcome aspect of the imperial imaginary in the eighteenth century is how explicitly stated it was. As we saw in Chapter 6, Muscovy produced no political philosophers and few explicit statements of political philosophy; its vision of the purpose of the state and relationship of state and society must be extracted implicitly from chronicles and sermons, court rituals and architecture. Only with the arrival to Muscovy of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-educated clerics—the Zealots of Piety early in the seventeenth century, and from the 1670s Semeon Polotskii, Epifanii Slavinetskii, Sylvestr Medvedev, and others—did a written political discourse develop, taking the form of baroque panegyrics. These men constitute the kernel of an intellectual elite, although there was little debate and dispute in their literary community. Clerics in service to the state, they wrote to inspire and celebrate the state. In so doing, they set the pattern for literary production for at least the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, when writers were closely connected with the state (often state servitors) and perceived their tasks as celebrating the virtues and achievements of Russia and its autocratic rulers. In the eighteenth century their genres (odes, epic poetry, panegyrics, and plays) and identities (nobles, scholars) became more secular, but their activity and messages perpetuated tropes shaped by the late seventeenth century.
Figure 13.1 Ukrainian-trained engravers brought baroque book illustration to Moscow in the second half of the seventeenth century, often using it to political ends. In the frontispiece to Lazar Baranovych's Blagodat' i istina ["Grace and Truth"] (Chernigov, 1689), engraver Ivan Shchirsky depicts co-tsars Ioann and Peter Alekseevichi with Christ at center, while a maiden is being crowned above in emulation of the iconographic representation of "Holy Wisdom." This is considered an allegorical reference to regent Sofiia Alekseevna, whose name means "wisdom." General Research Division, The New York Public Library.
The messages that Kyiv-educated clerics preached to the court elite from mid- seventeenth century reflected the integration of classical thought into Orthodoxy through Byzantine sources and Jesuit models that had been occurring in Kyiv through the century. Polotskii, Slavinetskii, and others wrote panegyrics and poetry in honor of regent Sofiia Alekseevna and court notables; Sofiia Alekseevna was eulogized as "God-given" and pious, and also for more modern attributes. Playing on the meaning of Sofiia's name as "wisdom" (Figure 13.1), Karion Istomin construed this as secular learning as opposed to tradition and praised her wisdom for bringing the decidedly worldly benefits of peace, prosperity, and riches. Ukrainian-influenced preachers introduced the court elite to concepts of the "common good" and a more secular purpose for governance. Introducing Aristotle's concept of tyranny, Polotskii also evoked biblical precedent in depicting the good ruler as one who leads his people to better pastures. All these authors depicted society as an earthly paradise and the state's role as creating, in Viktor Zhivov's phrase, "cosmic order" in a turbulent world, drawing on ideas both age-old in Orthodox thought and common to seventeenth-century European political theory. Themes of the ruler as presiding over social harmony were not only inspiring but pragmatic for Muscovite autocracy, inasmuch as they implied that the state was modeled on godly images, was implicitly superior to the Church, and needed no fundamental change.