The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

74 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The first is the period of Savva’s seduction, fall, and pagan bewitchment. Apprenticed in the city of Oryol, Savva is befriended by a wealthy elderly citizen, Bazhen Vtory, who has a young beautiful wife. The wife seduces Savva so successfully, and he cooperates so enthusiastically, that the young man, startled at his own appetite, resolves to refrain from carnal activity (at least for the duration of one holy day) for the sake of his soul. The wife, enraged, devises exquisite punishment: having slipped him a magic love potion to increase his desire, she connives with her unknowing husband to expel him from their home. Savva grieves and begins to waste away.

The second phase begins when Savva summons up the devil: “If someone would do something so that I might again take sexual pleasure with this woman . . .” Suddenly a young man appears, offers to intervene, asks Savva to provide a brief written note renouncing Christ, and again Savva is welcome in Vtory’s house. The wife is not exactly in league with the devil. She is “incited” by him – and one of the fascinating aspects of the tale is its ambivalent, borderline treatment of human responsibility. The externalized medieval model of “an angel on one’s right shoulder, a devil on one’s left,” battling over possession of the helpless human soul, coexists with a more modern internal explanation: “Human nature knows how to lead the mind of a young man into iniquity” (p. 455). Is human nature the victim, the carrier, or the willful initiator of the vice? Is the body choosing to pursue its pleasure, or has the body itself been taken captive and thus deserves our sympathy? This archaic image of an outside “devil doing it to us” remained vital, deep into Russian literature’s maturity: in the art of Gogol and Dostoevsky, in the mystical poems and stories of the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), and in plays and novels by the Soviet-era Mikhail Bulgakov, all of which combine folk devils and grand Lucifers with astute human psychology and rigorous moral accounting.

The two “brothers,” Savva and his false friend, become inseparable. They travel to the friend’s home – which is Hell, of course, but on the horizon of earth, a city of gold – to present Satan with the God-rejecting letter. At this point the tale veers off to the west, much as the leaner Grimm tale, “Faithful John,” had opened up to absorb a Koshchey-the-Deathless subplot when that famous German folk tale moved east. Savva Grudtsyn incorporates Muscovite military history as well as a Polish chivalric subplot. The two brothers join the tsar’s mercenaries fighting to recapture Smolensk from thePoles (an historically documented battle from the early 1630s). Savva jousts with three giant Polish knights, defeating them (although not without some wounds) with the devil’s help. Then Savva falls ill. The final phase begins.

Several aspects of this remarkable final segment prefigure the later, great moral Realists, most notably Leo Tolstoy, whose 1890 story “The Devil” begins