The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Traditional narratives 65

duty of the confrontational fool – but the opposite: to organize, discipline, and inspire it to prayerful and productive labor. With his own monks, Theodosius proved himself a gentle and patient advisor. His Life, written by the chronicler Nestor (Z, pp. 116–34), portrays him as an astute psychologist who counseled monastic residents on the virtues of self-control and self-reliance. To his enemies, however, Theodosius could be uncompromisingly severe. In his youth, those enemies included his own possessive mother, who fought tenaciously to keep him within the biological family fold, beating him without mercy when she discovered he had girded his loins with iron chains. He escapes her, of course, for his vocation is preordained. When his mother tracks him down, she discovers that she will have access to him only if she enters a convent. Her love drives her to it – and eventually she provides the chronicler Nestor with her son’s story. This model of a working male community under threat at the edge of the civilized world, led by a spiritual ideologue who must overcome (among much else) the protective and procreative instincts of the family, will combine with the traditional Russian epic hero (bogatyr) to inspire the Soviet construction novel. In Chapter 8 we discuss its prototype, Fyodor Gladkov’s 1922–24 novel Cement, the saga of a ruined factory restored after the Civil War under the charismatic leadership of a returned soldier-engineer named Gleb.

Our final exemplary saint’s life, that of the first Russian warrior saint, also had a revival during the Stalinist period. Alexander (1220–63), later called Nevsky because of his 1240 victory over the Swedes on the Neva River, became Prince of Novgorod in 1236. Two years later, Mongols were at his doorstep, but a miracle of spring flooding made the swamps impassable and kept the fierce horsemen at bay. Alexander reigned for sixteen years, fending off the attacks of Swedes, Lithuanians, and Teutonic knights from the west while buying off the Mongol overlords with tribute to the south and east. His Life, composed around 1280, is the first hagiography of a secular prince and military leader. It is titled “Tale of the Life and Courage of the Pious and Great Prince Alexander” (Z, pp. 224–36). Wherein lies the courage?

In the Russian context of exposed borders and the nightmare of an all-front war, courage for a virtuous state-builder meant knowing when to subdue one’s pride in theinterests of national survival.Against the well-armed, highly aggressive Catholic nations to the west, Alexander fought lightning-swift, strategically brilliant battles. In such maneuvers, pursuit of glory was possible and appropriate. (Before one such battle, recalling the partisan gods in ancient Greek warfare, Saints Boris and Gleb appeared in a vision to one of Alexander’s allies – less as martyrs of non-resistance than as heroes of national unity.) But a very different strategy was required to fight Khan Batu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, whose “Golden Horde” came to occupy most of Eurasia after the fall of Kiev