The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 41

and irritably vain Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Significantly, the noun shut also means “joker,” one who tells a joke [shutka], and is a common euphemism for the devil. Devils played jokes as well as told them; “mocking laughter could often be heard as man was led astray.”10 Russian cautionary proverbs frequently rhyme smekh [laughter] with grekh [sin]. But pagan devil-jesters and ecclesiastical (church-recognized) devils tended to laugh for different reasons. Sinyavsky notes that in Russia, even holiness often had a “shut-like” quality about it (p. 59). This enigmatic comment brings us to the most curious of the Russian fools, the yurodivy or “holy fool.”

Holy foolishness originated in Byzantium but was greeted with increasing reverence as it moved north. The yurodivy was a wanderer, an ascetic, a renouncer of goods, home, family, social standing, even the resources of reason. If a holy fool did seek temporary residence, his peasant host was honored as a pravednik. The yurodivy went around barefoot, winter and summer, dressed in rags and often bruised across the back, shoulders, and loins by heavy chains. He was foolish (or feigned madness) not for his own benefit, and not always even for the sake of some concrete good, but in order to stimulate others toward a moral reassessment of their actions or attitudes. Not all holy-foolishness was perceived as yurodstvo Khrista radi, “folly for the sake of Christ.” But in all cases it attested to one’s liberation from the immediate environment and its confining perspectives. The holy fool lived in another time-space and had access to its truths.

For this reason the fool’s utterances, even the most incoherent, were presumed to carry prophetic meaning. A yurodivy could speak the truth to tsars without fear of reprisal. In addition to its sly skomorokh-monks, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov also contains a holy fool who confronts Tsar Boris with his crime (the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry) publicly on Red Square and emerges unscathed, even after refusing to pray for the “Herod-tsar.” The yurodivy’s role is paradoxical. He must live in permanent insecurity and homelessness, despising all hierarchy, fixing his focus not on this world but on the other world, yet he is not a hermit or recluse. He is a social and public figure. It is difficult to represent this type in a psychological novel, because the author (and the reader) cannot get inside its consciousness. There is no coherent, mappable inside. Holy foolishness is entirely performative, symbolic, and specular.

The type fascinated Dostoevsky. At one point in his confession to Sonya, Raskolnikov – wondering what sustains her in the squalid, beggarly underworld of Petersburg – calls her a yurodivaya. He fears that further contact with her will cost him his reason and perhaps even turn him into a holy fool himself. In the novel Demons, the grotesque fool, wanderer, and “prophet” Semyon Yakovlevich becomes a popular tourist attraction for bored young people of the