Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu: guts, but little glory

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu

I honoured this past Victory Day by watching Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu, the 1975 war movie by (and starring) Sergei Bondarchuk that directly inspired the people’s film 28 Panfilovtsev. It belongs very firmly in the category of ‘gritty’ war films. That’s a category that Hollywood simply doesn’t and can’t do very well. I suspect the American film industry is simply too given both by financial pressure and by force of habit to sanitising war in various ways. The only two Hollywood films I can think of, off the top of my head, that come closest to being ‘gritty’ like this film – and even these ones don’t quite fit the bill – are Clint Eastwood’s 2006 companion films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

I have to wonder if one reason that Hollywood, in fact, doesn’t and can’t do truly unsparing war films like this one is because there is simply no parallel experience in American history. There is nothing in our collective memory to match the total, mechanised, genocidal slaughter to the tune of twenty-five million Soviet people on their own home territory. In general, we do not have to grapple with the presence of mass death on our literal front porches. We do have as part of our history the genocides of the American Indians on the frontier, but outside a very small and select (but growing) group of Native-produced films these genocides are only ever treated – if they are even acknowledged or mentioned at all – from a ‘revisionist’ outsider perspective, and that largely as a result of the Vietnam War. The closest we come to any sort of parallel experience is the Civil War. But even this is not a particularly good parallel because we tend to elevate the Civil War in our storytelling, generations after the fact, to the level of misty, shrouded mythology of glorious ‘gods and generals’: something which simply could not be done for the generation that fought the Second World War in their own front yards.

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu is indeed a state-funded Soviet film about the Second World War – based on a novel by Mihail Sholohov – and there is of course a clear-cut villain that must be fought back. But it is also a film which does not shy away from showing us the brutal human costs of war – physical, mental, even spiritual. In more than one scene it comes close to showing the war as a total, meaningless waste: and this sentiment is even placed on the tongues of the more sympathetic characters. Oni srazhalis’ shows us, uncomfortably, the random and often meaningless deaths of characters we have begun to familiarise ourselves with. It shows us soldiers who become permanently disabled, who lose their hearing and who develop PTSD. It shows us families that have been torn apart. It alludes to wartime prostitution and the degradation of families. If films like Tuǵan jer show us a missing generation and an uprooted generation, then Oni srazhalis’ shows us what is happening to this generation as it is in the process of being torn apart at the seams and scattered to the winds.

Oni srazhalis’ follows a regiment of Soviet soldiers in retreat from the front, as they are being pushed back by the Wehrmacht across the Don. In this platoon are Pyotr Lopahin (Vasilii Shukshin), Nikolai Streltsov (Vyacheslav Tihonov), Ivan Zvyagintsev (Sergei Bondarchuk), the youngster Kopytovskii (Georgii Burkov), the cook Nekrasov (Yurii Nikulin) and the old veteran Poprishchenko (Ivan Lapikov). We see at once from their retreat that they have limited means of keeping their morale up, and the darkly-witty banter we see between them – about women, about families, about tobacco and alcohol and food – seem to alternate between attempts to stave off despair, and to genuinely build connexions with each other. Lopahin and Streltsov, early on, show very different attitudes to the war even though both of them are having the same sorts of internal struggles. Streltsov sees no point in being cheerful, while for Lopahin, staying cheerful seems the only way to stay sane. The relationships between these men, however, always remain on the level of the human: their jokes and their jealousies, their boasts and their stumbles.

In their retreat the beleaguered platoon still has to engage the enemy and halt their advance before they can pull away; the Soviet forces are show digging foxholes and trenches in a hurry before the air raids. These battles are necessary for these men, for the whole platoon, to survive… but at the same time there is very little glory in slowing a Nazi advance deeper into Russian territory in the hopes that a fresh wave of Soviet troops will advance. In these battle scenes there is a palpable sense of grim resolve, but very little of what American audiences would consider heroism. These are ordinary men who are forced to survive, to stave off the common end. They have rifles, Molotov cocktails and a limited supply of grenades against the grim mechanical might of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions – and we are not spared the details as the German tanks roll over the foxholes. At the same time, we do cheer, as we should cheer for the underdog, when the vulnerable Soviets manage to take down a tank with their limited resources. Several more engagements with the Germans follow, and the soldiers make it to the Don River where they are meant to hold while a fresh platoon is called up to halt the German advance.

Filmic symbolism is heavily employed in these scenes, as at the beginning and end of the film. The ‘Rodina’ is repeatedly symbolised by wheat, by wheat fields, by barns and agricultural technology. In the first pitched battle against the Germans, the Wehrmacht sets fire to the fields and bombs a windmill which bursts into flames before Streltsov’s eyes, as he is wounded by a nearby mortar shell. Later, Zvyagintsev – who was a combine operator before the war – finds a few lonely strands of long grass in the field which have gone unburnt, plucks the heads and chews them, and mutters to himself: ‘What a waste… what a waste.’ We can tell by his expression that he is not simply talking about the fields themselves, but about the sum total of what has happened to the country. Later we see a German Panzer division deliberately destroying a village with its barns and food supply, burning it and running the tanks through the rubble. The minimalist scoring, often with only a choir singing softly in the background, and stretches of total silence that accompany these sequences, contributes to a filmic atmosphere that alternates between the grimly realistic and the surrealistic. In a certain sense, any attempt to portray the war realistically demands a certain level of this surrealism.

Perhaps surprisingly for a Soviet film of this era, religion – and in particular the Orthodox Christianity of the common soldiery – is portrayed with a significant degree of sympathy. It’s notable that the director’s own character in the film, Ivan Zvyagintsev, is the one who, trapped in his foxhole with the German tanks advancing on him, looks up at the sky and crosses himself and lifts up a heartfelt prayer to God. Later, Zvyagintsev mutters that he should not have been so silly, and that he should be allowed some leeway because he is not a Party member… but the intensity of that moment, in which Zvyagintsev is helpless and turning to God in his helplessness, is not lost on the viewer.

Again, the film does not spare us the grisly details of these engagements. Streltsov is the victim of a ‘near miss’ by a mortar: one scene of the film passes silently, in multiple vision, swimming before our eyes as it swam before his. Streltsov sees the advancing soldiers and tries to fire his gun, but cannot even manage to stand up straight or hold his head up. His ears are bleeding. We are made to think, after that engagement, that he is dead… but we are later told that he was evacuated to a field hospital. At the very end of the film we see Streltsov, deaf and suffering from what is clearly a degree of PTSD, coming back to his old platoon out of loyalty – though clearly incapable of fighting again.

Speaking personally, a particularly harrowing scene in the film is when Zvyagintsev – who is caught when a nearby landmine went off behind him – is evacuated to a field hospital and operated on. Zvyagintsev is clearly in excruciating pain as his back and legs are riddled all over with shrapnel, and the field surgeons are trying to operate on him. They have to cut off his clothes, and Zvyagintsev starts cursing out the surgeon for cutting away his boots, and then hitting on the nurse who sees him naked, before he breaks down and starts weeping into his pillow. Although it first seems as though Zvyagintsev is merely trying to stave off and master the pain through the cursing and banter, it becomes clear that he is in fact traumatised and has no willpower or control left. One has to applaud Bondarchuk’s superlative acting skill here in holding that tension for so long.

At the end of the film, the remnants of their regiment are assembled. We recall the beginning of the film when a long line of them is marching through a ravine; now there are barely 20 men left. We see poor Streltsov struggling even to stay standing straight as the regimental banner is unfurled and as Poprishchenko kisses it. This is undoubtedly a patriotic note on which to end the film, and the voice-over quotation from Sholohov’s novel cements that. But it is also a deeply ambiguous one, as though Bondarchuk is defying us – in our comfort, from our position as the audience – to share in that expression, to say too easily that Streltsov’s, or Zvyagintsev’s, suffering is somehow ‘worth it’. In this he places himself firmly head and shoulders above the trumpeting maudlin sentimentality of Spielberg’s ‘serious’ war films. Like Eastwood thirty years later in Flags of Our Fathers, Bondarchuk is not content to lay the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War to rest in a simple expression of heroic resolve, not content to propagandise for any abstract cause. Unlike Eastwood, though, he doesn’t attempt to draw some sort of didactic lesson from the suffering of the soldiers. Instead, he lets them speak for themselves in their suffering, even when they don’t say anything at all.

It is very difficult to find a war film that says anything human about war. Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu comes damn close. It’s easy to see how Druzhinin and Shal’opa took this film as a direct inspiration for 28 Panfilovtsev: what with that film’s similar insistence on the ambiguity of its protagonists’ heroism, and the similar scenario of having to stave off repeated German advances with no supplies and dwindling reserves of human strength and will. As I think 28 Panfilovtsev bears witness, this is a Russian film but not exclusively so. It is one which is important for understanding the development of Kazakh film as well. If you want to understand – not simply acknowledge intellectually, but understand – how the Soviets experienced the Second World War, I recommend watching Oni srazhalis’, followed by Tuǵan jer, and then Oni srazhalis’ once more.

Holy Martyr Hesychios of Antioch

Saint Hesychios of Antioch
القدّيس الشهيد إيسيخيوس الأنطاكي

The tenth of March is the feast day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Hesychios, a martyr of Antioch who suffered at the beginning of the fourth century. A Hellenised Syrian who served in a high position in the Roman administration, he was stripped of his honours and executed for confessing Christ. He was glorified by God in the same wave of persecutions under Maximian in which shone forth Saint ’Ilyân of Homs.

Holy Martyr Hesychios [Gk. Ἡσύχιος, Ar. ’Îsîkhiyyûs al-’Anṭaki إيسيخيوس الأنطاكي] was probably born in the latter half of the third century. He embarked on a career in the Roman military, where he proved himself to be both capable and trustworthy. We know this because he attained to the ranks of the agentes in rebus or angeliaphoroi, the couriers of the Magistros in the Roman military postal system. Hesychios was given by the Roman government a valuable sash for his services, a mark of singular honour and merit among the mighty.

When the persecutions of Emperor Maximian began, a decree went down that all Christians serving in high office who refused to recant their faith in Christ were to be stripped of their honours and expelled from their offices, to live without honour as civilians. This happened to Hesychios when he refused to honour the Roman gods. When Maximian heard of this, he ordered additionally that Hesychios be stripped of all his clothing and be made to wear a rough sleeveless mantle made of hair, and to be as disdained and dishonoured as if he had consorted with women of ill repute.

When this was done Maximian invited the former angeliaphoros before him and goaded him: ‘Well, Hesychios, are you not ashamed that you lost the honour and office of courier, and that you have been debased to this kind of life? Or maybe you don't know that the Christians, whose way of life you preferred, have no power to restore you to your previous great honour and office?’

To which Hesychios answered: ‘Your honour, O Emperor, is temporary. But the honour and glory which Christ gives is everlasting and without end.’

Upon hearing this, the displeased Maximian ordered that Hesychios be taken out to the Orontes (now the Nahr al-‘Âṣi), and that a millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be cast into the river. This sentence was carried out, and thus the laudable athlete Hesychios attained to the laurels of martyrdom and the everlasting glory which he had sought from Christ. Holy martyr Hesychios, who disdained the honours of the world and sought the imperishable glories of the kingdom of heaven, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion of Saint Hesychios, Tone 4:

Thy Martyr, O Lord, in his courageous contest for Thee
Received the prize of the crowns of incorruption and life from Thee, our immortal God.
For since he possessed Thy strength,
He cast down the tyrants
And wholly destroyed the demons’ strengthless presumption.
O Christ God, by his prayers, save our souls, since Thou art merciful!

Orontes River (Nahr al-‘Âṣi) at Antioch

Tag der Befreiung

A scene from Berlin, May 1945

Today, the eighth of May, is not celebrated in all of Germany. However, as a one-time public holiday (Feiertag), it was commemorated today in Berlin. It has been celebrated as a day of remembrance (Gedenktag) in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since 2002, and in Brandenburg since 2015. It seems that the former constituent states of what once was East Germany are continuing to insist on holding the Tag der Befreiung, the Day of Liberation, that had been a public holiday there during the Deutsche Demokratische Republik between 1950 and 1990. This is as only good and right and proper, but on this day there needs to be a common consensus on what gets celebrated and how.

It strikes me that the East German states like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg and Berlin are at least starting to retell some of the appropriate stories about their past. They have had longer to come to grips with it, for one thing: despite the political failures of the DDR particularly after 1953, one upside was that Walter Ulbricht demanded as early as 1950 that East Germans come to terms with what was done during and after the war, and public remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust became something acceptable. This process would not begin in earnest until 1970 in the West, with Willy Brandt and his famous and touching visit to Warsaw. In general, the attitude of the East German states toward their position in Europe between Russia and the West, and in particular their œconomic position, seems a lot more honest and realistic than the attitude in the West – though of course the West does not see it that way. But there seems to be an improper emphasis from the top nowadays, on a selective storytelling that politicises the results of the war and recreates in part the same political, class and even racial divisions that undergirded the rise of the National Socialists to power in the first place.

For historical events like these, all possible ideological perspectives – including, I should note, the leftist one – are draped in multiple layers of irony. The military defeat of the fascist war machine in Europe is something that deserves to be remembered and celebrated, surely. It strikes me as on a certain basic level inhuman to deny the descendants and loved ones of the people who fell fighting against the Nazis an opportunity to express both grief and gratitude in a public way. The vast majority of that sacrifice fell on the shoulders of Soviet soldiers: 34.5 million who fought, and 8.6 million who died. In the West, that particular insight is rapidly going down the Orwellian memory hole (particularly ironic given the attitude of Orwell toward the Soviets!), while modern Russians are mocked or ridiculed in the Western press for expressing this memory in any organised public way, or while the coronavirus outbreak becomes an opportunity for Western Schadenfreude. If there were any justice in our historical remembrance, this would be a time for finding common ground rather than playing up differences for political gain.

All that having been said, we should never pretend that this victory came without a cost, or that the ground gained was somehow final. In one sense, the costs of the war were visited heavily upon the German people themselves, something which unfortunately does not register much in the traditional telling of the war’s aftermath, whether in Russia or in the Western countries. To be sure, many of these ‘good Germans’ were not in fact entirely innocent (occupying land and homes that had once belonged to Jews or Slavs or Roma), but that does not entirely justify how they were treated by the occupying armies. On the other hand, in the broader perspective the temptations of fascism are never as far away as we would like them to be, even in countries that consider themselves ‘allies’. And even putatively pro-Allied sentiment in the West can unfortunately still be a cover for various forms of selective storytelling and bigotry.

If Victory Day in Europe is truly to be a Tag der Befreiung, what must be commemorated first and foremost must be, not an ideological abstraction like liberty or human rights or even the brotherhood of nations, but instead the historical truth, in all its messy complexity. Anything less than that is no real liberation at all.

Skif: a Eurasian tribute to eighties Hollywood

Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) and Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev) in Skif

Rustam Mosafir – the director of 2015’s Begletsy – returned in 2018 with the big-budget action movie Skif (literally, The Scythian, but released in English under the title of The Last Warrior). This is a film that places itself readily in the sweet-spot ambit of reviewers like RedLetterMedia. It readily approaches the Tarantino threshold for æstheticisation of violence to the point where it becomes campy – but it skirts the line with enough adroit self-awareness that it never quite crosses it. Ostensibly set in the vicinity of Krasnodar during the Kievan Rus’ period (and shot on location in Crimea), though in such a way that it skirts the blurry line between historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, it is a grim, brutal, cynical depiction of the age that nonetheless carries itself with a suitably compelling degree of swagger.

As my brief description may suggest, Mosafir’s most recent film is in many ways an entirely deliberate throwback to Hollywood thrillers and action movies of the eighties and nineties: the Mad Max trilogy, the Lethal Weapon films, Conan the Barbarian, Rob Roy and the Death Wish movies, to name a few. (Mosafir directly credits as his inspirations in this film Mel Gibson, George Miller, Robert Howard and Charles Bronson.) As such there are strong thematic preoccupations with honour, power and its dangers, trust and betrayal, fate and destiny. The characters inhabit a universe of blood oaths and kingly intrigues, of human sacrifice and inhuman rage, where tribal clashes between East and West end messily and with gruesome results. There are also some bitterly cynical intimations, particularly toward the end of the film, about the very nature of political power.

The last band of Scythians – a warlike nomadic people who have all but faded entirely from history – make their living as hired killers for lords and khans who can pay their price in gold. They call themselves the ‘Wolves of Ares’, and they are led by a red-bearded man named Yar (Vitalii Kravchenko) and by a spiritual elder named Anagast (Viktor Solov’ev). The Wolves of Ares kidnap the wife, Tatyana (Vasilisa Izmailova) and newborn son of a loyal Rus’ warrior named Lyutobor (Aleksei Faddeev), with a ransom demand knifed to the door-jamb of his house. The demand is that Lyutobor poison his liege, the knyaz Oleg of T’mutarakan (Yurii Tsurilo). Lyutobor dutifully reports this to his lord, and Oleg subsequently frames Lyutobor for poisoning him – the idea being that he would use the opportunity to get his wife and son back, and also find out who in the T’mutarakan court tried to suborn Lyutobor to assassinate Oleg. Lyutobor’s only hope to find his family rests in a Scythian captive that his people took when they raided his home: a young fighter named Kunitsa (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who hopes to challenge Yar for control of the Wolves when he grows strong enough.

The film’s primary relationship – the one that sets forth the thematic problems of trust, honour, betrayal and vengeance – is the tense relationship between Lyutobor and Kunitsa. At first, neither of them likes or trusts the other in the slightest. As far as Lyutobor is concerned, Kunitsa is just an animal. On the other hand, Kunitsa thinks Lyutobor’s Christianity makes him weak and that his scruples make him naïve. However, despite in the beginning Lyutobor forcing Kunitsa to swear an oath to Ares on his blood-stained sword, Kunitsa proves over and over again that he is willing to honour his word – and so he gains Lyutobor’s grudging respect. On the other hand, Kunitsa comes to admire Lyutobor for his tenacity as well as for his prowess in battle. It wouldn’t be quite right to call this a ‘buddy’ film, despite the subtle hat-tips to Lethal Weapon in this relationship. Lyutobor and Kunitsa gain respect for each other through a number of encounters and survival scenarios, and the natural flow of these events effectively builds audience sympathy and investment in that friendship. But at the same time, the two of them stand on either side of a religious and cultural divide that, even toward the end of the film, is never quite bridged. The film seems to intimate that the only force that can bridge it is bloodshed, even political mass murder.

In fact, what the film has to say about honour and trust is that both of these things are fragile, and built on a landscape of power-struggle and intrigue that can roll over and crush them at any time. With the notable exceptions of Kunitsa and Anagast – both of them Scythians! – and Lyutobor’s loyal wife Tatyana, all of the major characters go back on their word or violate a relationship of trust in some way, and they do it for gain, in power or in wealth. At the beginning of the film, a Qypchaq warrior named Qumai (played by Rustam Mosafir himself) challenges Lyutobor to a wrestling-match, but when Lyutobor beats him fair and square, the humiliated and enraged Qumai draws a knife and tries to stab Lyutobor in the back. This sets the tone for a number of encounters and relationships in the film. Although kinship, friendship and religious obligation are expressed by most of the characters in Skif, the only ones ever shown to 100% hold up their end of a bargain are Scythian. And in the end they suffer a dreadful, tragic price for this honesty.

Scythian lore exercises a powerful grip on the Russian imagination. The obvious point of reference is the Aleksandr Blok poem Skify, which ties the character of the Russian nation to the ancient Asiatic steppe nomads. But it goes back further than that. As religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev highlights, the great Slavophil cultural critic Aleksei Khomyakov in Semiramis spoke of the civilisational principle of iranstvo: the principle of fire and sunlight and the sacredness of the spoken word, which is opposed to the animistic principle of kushitstvo with its emphasis on power, monuments and necessity. In Khomyakov’s ethnographic imagination, the Scythians embodied the ‘Iranian’ principles of sacred truth, hatred of the lie, and the idea that true freedom consists in keeping one’s word – and then passed on these traits to the Russians. This same imagination seems to fuel Mosafir’s low-fantasy vision of whom the Scythians were and what they believed, though if Oleg is any indication, he expresses a strong doubt that the Russians inherited it except indirectly.

The logic of Skif appears, at first, to be ‘Cushitic’. The gods that go unseen are false. Power is invested – even by supposedly ‘Christian’ characters like Oleg – in magic totems of wood and stone, which must be sated by blood. Necessity overrules any conception of the sacredness of one’s word. Sons betray fathers; fathers kill sons. Lords and servants cheat each other. Men betray other men to their deaths for purses full of gold. Alliances are broken; tribes are massacred. The world we get to view through the eyes of Lyutobor is bleak and brutal. But it seems like Mosafir is in ultimate agreement with Berdyaev and Khomyakov, given that the few fleeting glimpses we get of any sort of spiritual freedom – including a particularly poignant and bittersweet one at the very end of the film – come through the perspective of the Scythians themselves.

This political angle on the amoral nature of acquiring and keeping political power, and the options available for a person of integrity under it, prompts a contrast with another genre film, but not a Hollywood one. Despite several echoing similarities in theme and in plot beats between Skif and Zhang Yimou’s Hero – with Jet Li’s Wuming sharing certain qualities and temperament with both Lyutobor and Kunitsa and with Yurii Tsurilo’s Oleg displaying a similar outlook to Chen Daoming’s Qin Shihuang – the final tragic choice of Wuming to uphold the state order without regard for his own life at the end of Hero, stands in stark contrast to Lyutobor’s penultimate choice to defy the state order without regard for his own life.

The Scythians left their archaeological traces across a good quarter of the Eurasian continent, from the Balkans across Crimea and the Caucasus to Kazakhstan. They also left their genetic traces among human progeny in a broad swathe of the same. In the modern day, the Ossetian people of the Caucasus, who are descended from the Sauromatai tribe of Late Antiquity and the Alan people of the Middle Ages, still speak a language which is descended from Scythian. I do have to wonder a bit if Mosafir consulted at all with these Ossetian neighbours while they were filming this in (relatively) nearby Crimea.

The production values and cinematography in Skif are every bit as polished and lavish as one would come to expect from a modern action flim, though again Mosafir appears to be quite fond of stylistic throwbacks to the silver era of eighties and nineties genre films, action movies and crime thrillers. The palette is washed out with the exceptions of the blood effects, which are always a vivid red. Certain scenes – like the one in which Lyutobor imbibes a psychoactive drink after being captured by a forest tribe and goes berserk – rely on fish-eye lens first-person camerawork and filters to capture the violent psychedelia of the practice: actually, no Western film, but instead the Kazakh films Otyrardyń kúıreýi (with which Skif shares similar thematic material) and Igla come the closest in my experience to these effects. In fact, Mosafir’s portrayal of Lyutobor’s berserkergang – including both the indiscriminate bestial rage during the episode and the extreme physical and emotional weakness of the warrior in dénouement – appears to be remarkably accurate from what historical knowledge of the practice we have.

The action scenes are nicely choreographed, and Mosafir takes delight in favouring us with numerous mobile first person takes to provide a sense of disorientation in combat. The elaborate and outlandish costumes – leather and metal spikes and face-masques galore – and ubiquitous face-paint further entrench the inevitable comparisons with Mad Max, as Mosafir no doubt intended. I will say, however, that some of the CGI blood effects, particularly in Lyutobor’s last confrontation with Qumai and even during the berserkergang, were unintentionally hilarious and came close to having the opposite of the intended effect: this is why I say earlier that Mosafir is playing on the ragged edge of the Tarantino threshold. The musical score is eclectic: a mixture of traditional symphonic accompaniment, ethnic drumming and instrumentation including some khöömi throat-singing, and a bit of modern darkwave dance music (during the end credits). The soundtrack is excellent in that it is suitably subdued, and supports the action rather than distracts from it.

This film is entirely watchable and entertaining as a popcorn action thriller. It’s well-paced, is visually lush, has solid dramatic tension and a decent emotional core. At the same time, I note with some dismay, many of these new movies from modern Russian directors – both in the ‘mainstream’ like this one and in the art-house circuit like Fedorchenko’s ethnofuturist dramas – are soused in a double faith, a dvoeverie, that self-alienates them from the native strength of the Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not entirely sure what is driving this. In Mosafir’s case, I wonder – both from Begletsy and from this film – if he feels that Orthodoxy in Russia has something opportunistic about it, something too close to the amoral logic of princely power.

Qyz-Jibek: a slow stunner of a tragic period drama

Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov) and Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) in Qyz-Jibek

The Kazakh film I’m reviewing today is the 1970 Kazakhfilm production Qyz-Jibek directed by Sultanahmet Qojyqov, the retelling of the epic tragic romance of the same name which had earlier been rendered into a production for the Soviet theatre. This film is glacially slow-paced, with barely enough of its Romeo-and-Juliet story to justify padding out its 142-minute runtime, and features a heavily-stylised formal cinematic language and theatrically-inspired acting direction that recalls the preferences of Eisenstein. As such it is certainly not be to everyone’s tastes. I won’t lie, it took me a long time to get all the way through it. But it is a stunningly beautiful film, which took full advantage of all of the technical versatility of its filmic medium. It lavishes gleeful attention on the natural beauties of the Kazakh landscape with its sapphirine lakes, dry rugged mountains and deserts and vast high grasslands. There are also a number of technically-impressive wildlife shots of swans and owls. The film also builds dramatic tension with close-up shots of the main actors. Careful craft clearly goes into practically every take. It’s a film which is difficult to like, but which one cannot help but appreciate just because it’s so pretty.

The story involves the ill-fated romance and courtship of the titular Jibek (Merýert Ótekesheva) with the warrior Tólegen (Quman Tastambekov), and Tólegen’s death at the hands of the cruel and treacherous brigand Bekejan (Asanáli Áshimov). There is a tone of high tragœdy about the original story, since the political forces that surround the two lovers through their families doom their marriage to a bitter end. The internecine conflicts for political power between Tólegen’s father Bazarbaı (Káýken Kenjetaev) and the clan of Bekejan, with Jibek’s father Syrlybaı Han (Kenenbaı Qojabekov) caught in between, offer some ideological overtones that resonated with a mediæval Kazakh audience.

There is a great deal of creative use of colour in the film, particularly red, white and black. The colour scheme actually mirrors that of Beloe solntse pustyni in some ways: a film which came out the same year. The duels and cavalry battles are intricately choreographed and spectacularly shot with a mixture of wide-angle ærial and mobile shots. The violence is highly stylised in a way that appears to præfigure Sergei Bodrov’s steppe dramas Kóshpendiler and Mongol. Attention is lavished in close-up on blood spatters across the sand, and these are often mirrored by flowering red blossoms in the field. Atmosphere is also used to great effect, with clouds and sunsets providing some of the needed lighting effects for the duels and battles between Tólegen and Bekejan.

The costumes and the set-pieces are equally lush; there is a great deal of effort put into giving the appropriate texture to seventeenth-century nomadic Kazakhstan. Each shot is meticulously framed, as though the director wanted to get the perfect angle to deliver the correct emotional impact – though my one complaint is that the editors were far too overly fond of wipes, and sometimes used them inappropriately. The scene in the yurt between Tólegen and Jibek on their wedding-night is admirably restrained: the eroticism is actually heightened and sublimated by the fact that it is expressed symbolically and refrains from ever ‘showing too much’. Despite this restraint, one can certainly see echoes of this scene in the (much more explicit) parallel sequences in Ermek Tursynov’s Kelin.

One can’t quite shake the feeling, as one is watching it, that one is watching the local equivalent of an Arthurian romance or a cinematic interpretation of some other folk tale. Despite the very disparate intended audiences, I was reminded more than once of the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland version of The Adventures of Robin Hood: Quman Tastambekov does have a certain expression, bearing and mode of delivery that strongly recalls Errol Flynn at times. Certainly Tólegen is portrayed with a measure of Robin Hood’s humour, cunning and general nobility of spirit. On the other hand, the romanticised and æstheticised violence – along with the thematic concerns with a political anarchy that is only barely and imperfectly constrained by a veneer of traditional steppe courtesy – carries with it certain echoes of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The film ends abruptly and discordantly, showing us one fragment of the death of Jibek after she learns of her husband’s fate.

These purely-stylistic comparisons don’t quite do the film justice, though, unless we take the parallel a little deeper. This film is iconic in a way that Robin Hood would be to the British or that the entire Western genre would be to us Americans. It has a mythopœic depth. That is to a significant extent because this film stands solidly at or near the fountainhead of the dastanic epic style in Kazakhstani cinema: with its high romance; its ideological focus on the struggle, here unrealised, for the unification of the tribes; its valorisation of an epic hero (or two in this case, Tólegen and Jibek) imbued with the martial and hospitable excellences of the steppe. It portrays an important national legend – not quite on the same level as Alpamıs, yet not very far off from it either.

The distinctions between Tólegen and Bekejan are highlighted here for the typically dastanic ideological purpose of highlighting the virtues of the Kazakh people. Tólegen is an obedient son – in most things. His choice of bride is not particularly welcomed by his father. And yet he loves his father dearly and rides to his rescue in battle. Tólegen is also shown to be brave, resourceful, respectful of the steppe traditions of fair play and hospitality – yet not without a certain degree of cunning. Bekejan, on the other hand, is portrayed as suitably masculine to work as a foil for Tólegen, but without respect for the steppe traditions. Though he is a formidable warrior, he is lascivious, disrespectful – and ultimately treacherous and ungrateful for Tólegen’s assistance in battle.

The version I watched was officially dubbed-over in Russian, with some of the original dialogue and particularly the singing being audible. The soundtrack features a great deal of Kazakh folk song and traditional dombyra airs: rendered in Russian to be intelligible to a broader Soviet audience, but still retaining their original flavour and melody. The singing and dombyra were provided by the characters

And so, when all of these elements are put together, there is an extent to which it is meant to feel as though we are watching not so much a film as a moving painting, an objet d’art meant to capture as much of the traditional Kazakh spirit as possible: whether in the costumes or the music or the landscapes or the cavalry battles. There is not as much of a sense of ethnographical voyeurism here as there is in, say, Amangeldy – because this is a film which has Kazakhs telling a uniquely-Kazakh story about themselves. The story itself, however, is one which has both a specific local political meaning and a universal appeal: the star-crossed lovers caught in the middle of a tribal feud.

Once again, though: although it is exquisite as an artistic accomplishment, and although it is an important landmark in the development of Kazakhstani film, this movie has a tendency to try the patience of the casual watcher. The martial set pieces are engaging and exciting enough, and the eye is naturally drawn to appreciate the framing and movement and technical mastery of the medium, but you have to navigate between them through turgid expository dialogue and establishing action whose delivery is theatrical to the point of being maudlin. I do recommend it for its sheer stunning beauty, but it is not the sort of film that I would go out of my way to rewatch for enjoyment.

Holy New Martyr ’Ahmad the Calligrapher of Constantinople

Saint ’Ahmad of Constantinople

The third of May is the feast day, in the Orthodox Church, of Saint ’Ahmad the Calligrapher of Constantinople. Saint ’Ahmad is a particularly interesting case, being a convert to Orthodox Christianity from Islâm in the heart of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. He is also a beautiful example of how conversion can happen merely at the will of God rather than at the will of man, without any obvious design or desire or missionary ideology at work, let alone any violence or coercion.

’Ahmad [Ar. ’Ahmad أحمد‎, Turk. Ahmet] was raised by observant Muslim parents in seventeenth-century Constantinople – then already called Istanbul by its Turkish conquerors. According to some hagiographical sources, his surname was Kalpes. He was well-educated enough to find employment in the government as a defterdâr دفتردار or book-keeper, and rose to the position of Scribe of the Second Rank in the Chancellery of the Sultân, working in the Great Archives.

He was not married, but according to the legal customs of the Turkish capital, he was able to take a concubine – a Great Russian woman who had been taken captive in one of the wars between the Russians and the Tatars. His concubine was attended by an elderly maidservant who was also a slave. Both of these women were devout Orthodox believers. And as seems to have been typical of ‘mixed marriages’ of this kind, he allowed the two of them to practise their Orthodox faith freely. Thus, the two Russian women of his household attended Liturgy on feast-days in particular. The old woman went more frequently, and she brought back the antidōron back from the Church for her mistress to eat, as well as holy water for her to drink.

’Ahmad would sometimes approach his woman after she had partaken of the blessed bread and holy water. When he did so, he noticed an indescribably sweet fragrance emanating from her mouth. He would ask her what she had been eating to make her smell so sweet. But the Russian woman, unaware that she was doing anything different than usual, would tell her husband that she was not eating anything out of the ordinary. But ’Ahmad continued to notice the sweet fragrance whenever he came near her after she ate the antidōron. It wasn’t long before she put two and two together, and told him that she was eating the bread that had been blessed by the Orthodox priest from the Church, which the elderly servant brought back to her from the Liturgy.

The curiosity of her husband was aroused by this revelation, and in secret he summoned a Greek priest to their home and asked him to prepare a place in the Church where he might observe in secret how this bread was baked and prepared, and distributed amongst the faithful. ’Ahmad began attending services in secret like this for some time, dressing himself in a blue turban and humble garments of dark colours, and observing all that went on in the Church. He even attended Patriarchal Liturgies, and when the Patriarch – at that time it would have been Iakōvos – was behind the altar ’Ahmad beheld him shining with light and buoyant, levitating with his feet off the floor. When the Œcumenical Patriarch came out from behind the Royal Doors to bless the people, he saw rays of light emanate from his hands and fall upon all the congregants. None of this light, however, fell upon him. This happened over several such Liturgies. In this way ’Ahmad grew to embrace the Orthodox faith. He summoned the priest again, and asked to be baptised – and the priest, seeing his sincerity, obliged him. ’Ahmad practised Orthodoxy for a time in such secrecy that only God and the priest who baptised him know which name he took for himself; that is not known to us in the present day.

Being a scribe in the Chancellery meant that his position was coveted by many – including the Scribe of the Third Rank who was below ’Ahmad in the office of the Chief Secretary. Also, it meant that his attendance was required at dinners and formal functions of the Ottoman government. At these functions, where food was plentiful and the atmosphere eventually grew relaxed as the nargileh (hookah) was passed around, the envious Third Rank Scribe would often make insinuating comments to the Secretary about the piety and suspect opinions of ’Ahmad – who of course had not come to mosque with any regularity since becoming a Christian.

It fell out that, as he and the other dinner-guests were smoking the nargileh at one of these government functions in late April of 1682, the conversation turned toward what one thing in the world was greatest. The first of the guests ventured forth the opinion that the greatest thing of all was wisdom. Another opined that the greatest thing was a fine woman. And still another offered the opinion that a well-prepared pilaf with yoghurt was of course the best thing, for was that not the food that was offered in Paradise? When the thread was passed to ’Ahmad, he could not contain his burning love for the Faith, and he proclaimed that faith in Christ was the greatest thing in the world. In a calm and reasoned voice he delivered himself of the truth that Christ had risen in the body from the dead and had conquered death – could there be anything greater? At this the other guests began to berate him and accuse him of blasphemy, and they seized hold of him and dragged him before a judge on the charge of apostasy.

The judge, or qâḍî قاضٍ, who heard his case, asked him if he had indeed apostatised from Islâm, and ’Ahmad answered truthfully that he had been baptised into the Orthodox Church and proclaimed the Faith after his conversion experience during the Patriarchal Liturgy. He hoped also that his accusers and those who envied his position would also come to receive the fullness of this Truth. This being said the qâḍî was compelled to throw him into gaol, where he was to be deprived of food and water for six whole days.

’Ahmad was hauled out from his prison and brought before the same qâḍî. But instead of finding him weakened and cowed at his treatment in the prison, they found instead that his resolve had been strengthened by his fast. They brought him before the court of the Sultân himself, and the Chief Secretary declared that the sentence for apostasy was death by beheading. ’Ahmad declared himself ready and even joyful at facing such a death. The sentence was passed down and the martyr was beheaded on the third of May, 1682. Saint ’Ahmad’s remains were committed to the sea near the Bosporus, and that place where his body washed ashore was for a week bathed in a divine light. Holy new martyr ’Ahmad, confessor of the true Faith among the Ottomans, pray unto Christ our God for the salvation of our souls!

Venerable Pafnutii, Abbot of Borovsk

Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk

Today is International Labour Day, the first of May, the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. There is going to be a strike for hazard pay and safer working conditions in several major cities across the United States, staged by essential food service, retail and tech industry workers who are compelled to continue working during the pandemic. To those seeking recognition and a better work environment: I stand in solidarity with you and support your struggle!

It is also the commemoration in the Orthodox Church of Prophet Jeremiah who preached of just wages for the workman and comfort for the orphan and widow; of 79 monastic martyrs at Sînâ’ and at-Tûr in Ægypt; of the holy queens Berhte of Kent and Tamara the Great of Georgia. It is also the feast-day of a great monastic saint of Russia, the venerable Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk. Saint Pafnutii was the spiritual father and tutor of the future abbot, monastic teacher and social-justice advocate Saint Iosif of Volokolamsk.

Saint Pafnutii [or Paphnutius], in the world Parfenii [or Parthenius], was born in Kudinovo in the year 1395. Pafnutii’s grandfather was a Tatar, a basqaq (or ‘tax collector’) of the Golden Horde under Batu khaghan. When the Russians rose up in a revolt against the Horde, they took Ivan’s father hostage, and instead of killing him they offered him the choice of taking on the Orthodox faith. Pafnutii’s grandfather took this option and was baptised in a bathhouse, taking the Christian name of Martin.

Ivan, the son of the baptised Tatar Martin, had a homestead in Kudinovo which he inherited from his father, and there married a Russian woman named Photini. The two of them were poor, but they honoured God. And even with what little they had, they were still renowned for giving with an open hand to those who had less, much like the widow at the Temple with her two small coins. Photini became pregnant and bore a son, whom they called Parfenii. Even as a small child Parfenii was of a mild and sweet temper, and had a character which inclined toward the Church. He wanted to study the Holy Scriptures, and his father allowed him to do so at the nearby monastic school in Borovsk. As he studied the Scriptures, he not only learned to read and gained this worldly knowledge, but he also grew in character: his hagiography tells us that in this study he became meek, humble and chaste, not entering into idle chatter or evil gossip, but instead speaking only when he had something meaningful to say.

When young Parfenii was twelve years of age, he begged his parents’ leave from home to go and study full-time at Borovsk. Though Ivan and Photini were unhappy to part from their beloved son, they saw how earnest he was and let him go. He went to the Monastery of the Protection of the Mother of God on the outskirts of Borovsk. There the abbot placed the young lad under the discipline of an elderly, blind priestmonk named Nikita, who had himself been under obedience to the great Saint Sergii the Wonderworker of Radonezh. Father Nikita had himself been an abbot in Serpukhov, but had given the office to another and retired to Borovsk on account of his great old age and failing eyesight. As a novice under Father Nikita, Parfenii spent seven years in obedience. He served the old man faithfully and in a spirit of love, also acquiring the monastic virtues. At the end of that seventh year, the Abbot Markell of the Protection Monastery tonsured Parfenii and bestowed upon him the monastic name of Pafnutii.

As a monk he spent twenty years further, glorifying Christ by working with his hands, struggling against the passions, and obeying whatever his brother-monks desired him to do. When Abbot Markell reposed in the Lord in the year 1434, the brothers of Protection Monastery began to desire that Pafnutii be appointed as his successor. Pafnutii was unwilling, but he was prevailed upon by the prince of Borovsk, Simeon Vladimirovich, as well as the Metropolitan of all Rus’, Saint Photius, to accept the abbacy. Indeed, it was Saint Photius himself who ordained Pafnutii a priest and bestowed the office of rector upon him.

Abbot Pafnutii was blessed with keen insight, and he laboured hard not only in the offices of the church and in private prayers at night, but also to care for his flock of monks. It happened early in his abbacy that he had occasion to send one of the young monks to the village for supplies. In the village this young monk met a pretty girl and they fell into fornication. That night, Abbot Pafnutii dreamed about a delightful orchard full of fruit-trees, but as he was delighting in them, he noticed that one of the fruit-trees had cracked, split in two, and fell to the ground in front of him. Distressed, the abbot heaved up the fallen trunk, bound it together and began to fill in the earth around it. But the tree fell over again. Pafnutii did not give up, but each time took the fallen splinters of the tree and placed them in the orchard earth, no matter how many times it fell over.

When at last he awoke, Abbot Pafnutii began to understand what his dream meant. The orchard was his monastery, and the fruit-trees were his monks. The fallen tree was a brother who had sinned. It was not long after that the brother who had fell into fornication with the girl in the village returned from his errand. Appearing before the abbot, his face was darkened with shame and grief at his sin. The abbot asked him what was wrong, but the young brother could not speak, neither could he look into Saint Pafnutii’s eyes. But Pafnutii – neither angry nor condemning – took pity on the boy, drew him out from the presence of the other monks, and began to take patient counsel with him. After Pafnutii’s gentle but stern admonitions, the boy confessed to what he had done.

Abbot Pafnutii gave the boy a long regimen of penitence to perform. However, he continued to keep a close watch on him, because the tree in his dream had fallen and needed replanting more than once. Fornication was one thing; it was far harder for Pafnutii to cure in the young monk the sin of despair. But through Abbot Pafnutii’s patient and gentle guidance, which forbade the young monk from either shirking his penance or from heaping upon himself further damnation in self-reproach, he was able to steer the youngster back onto the correct path. In this way, Pafnutii was able to be a wise doctor for the spiritual needs of each of his monks, and a good shepherd who kept his lambs out of the jaws of the ravening wolf.

Saint Pafnutii had been abbot thirteen years at Protection Monastery, when he fell into a grave bodily illness from which it seemed he would not recover. He took the great-schema upon himself, not hoping for any worldly relief. The affliction which he suffered was not of natural origins, and it left him as quickly as it had come. On the very day that he renounced his abbacy – the twenty-third of April, the feast of Saint George the Greatmartyr in 1444 – he was cured of his disease. He left the monastery, taking with him one disciple, and settled in a densely-wooded spot two miles distant from the Protection Monastery, where the rivers Protva and Ister’ma meet. The new schemamonk and his disciple had thought to live there in a silent hermitage as hesychasts, but neither was this the will of God.

The brethren of Protection Monastery, having discovered where their beloved former abbot had gone, gathered around him and fashioned cells for themselves in the place where he had established himself, and sought again to be under obedience to him. They asked his permission to build an oratory and a chapel, which they dedicated to the Nativity of the Holy Theotokos. And since he could not forbid them from doing so, instead Pafnutii blessed the work and consecrated the temple himself, assisted by the saintly Metropolitan Iona of Moscow himself.

Prior to this, however, Saint Pafnutii was given a test of his faith. The abbot and the metropolitan had, to put it mildly, not gotten off on the right foot. The Metropolitan had been consecrated by the synod of bishops of Moscow in 1448 – without the approval of Constantinople. To be sure, there were some fairly strong extenuating circumstances, but Abbot Pafnutii was a stickler for the canonical order and thus refused either to offer congratulations to the new Metropolitan Iona, or to call him by his new title. As a result, Pafnutii was called to Moscow to answer for himself, and when he arrived there he was clapped in irons and thrown into gaol. The new Metropolitan went in person to visit the Abbot in gaol, and there followed between them – as Saint Iosif recounts – a tense and at times heated discussion. In the end, though, the two of them were reconciled. Saint Pafnutii came to understand the hard position of the Russian bishops, and acknowledged Iona as Metropolitan. For his part, Metropolitan Iona knelt at the feet of Abbot Pafnutii, asked his forgiveness (and was given it) for the rough treatment he had meted upon him, personally unshackled him, gave him gifts, kissed him and sent him back to his monastery in peace.

The new Nativity of the Theotokos Monastery was beset with some problems: most of them related to engineering. The church, being built along the banks of two rivers, was exposed to attack from one side. The monks built a fence there, but it was nowhere close to sufficient. They began to think of diverting the river, and so they constructed an artificial causeway to wall off a portion of the Ister’ma. After they had done this, however, the river water was no longer fit for drinking, and monks had to be sent far away to fetch drinking water. They complained of this to Abbot Pafnutii, who went off by himself, walked over the causeway and rested under a certain tree, praying to God to help him find a solution to their water problems. At once, beneath that tree, a holy well of pure, clean, drinkable water erupted, which supplied the needs of the monastery.

The monastery faced other problems – political ones. It so happened that the heir of Prince Simeon of Borovsk was a proud and overbearing knyaz named Vasilii Yaroslavich. This boasting, strutting man would come into the abbey and give orders to the monks, and the Abbot would patiently remonstrate with him, saying: ‘God is God and Cæsar is Cæsar’. Vasilii Yaroslavich was not at all pleased with the construction of the Nativity Monastery so close to the Protection Monastery of which his family had been patrons, and still less that many of the monks of the Protection Monastery were leaving to be under their former Abbot. He began to concoct in his mind a scheme to rid himself of the troublous Abbot Pafnutii. Vasilii gave orders to violent ruffians under his employ to set fire to the new monastery and drive the monks out. But these ruffians, whenever they drew near the monastery, saw the brothers gladly labouring and building in the forests for the sake of their beloved Abbot, and singing sweetly to themselves in praise of Christ, and they could not bring themselves to do violence upon them. For these men, violent and greedy though they were, feared God, and their hearts were moved.

Then Vasilii Yaroslavich sent Ermolai. Ermolai was a Tatar who had taken on baptism but had not renounced his violent ways. He went to the monastery in stealth, with a brand in one hand and a sword in the other, ready to set the monastery ablaze and slay any, monk or novice, who tried to flee. But God struck him blind, and instead of stealthily attacking the monastery he fumbled in an unseeing rage over the grounds, until at last he was found and brought before Saint Pafnutii. Pafnutii shared Ermolai’s Tatar heritage and knew the Tatar tongue, and so he spoke to Ermolai joyfully in Tatar speech, and called him by his name. Ermolai, whose heart was touched by hearing his mother tongue spoken, knelt before the saint and touched his head to the earth, confessing to him everything: what he had planned to do in the monastery, and who had sent him. Saint Pafnutii forgave him, and prayed to Christ for him, and no sooner was this done than the Lord restored Ermolai’s sight. Ermolai left the monastery in peace and did nothing to harm any of the monks.

At this time, the Russian lands were attacked by the Tatar lord Mäxmüt Khan [also Makhmutek or Mamotyak in Russian sources], the son of Oluğ Möxämmät. The Russian princes, who were ever at odds and quarrelling amongst themselves, could not muster a force sufficient to repel this attack: the few who met Mäxmüt Khan in battle were led by the Grand Duke Vasilii Vasil’evich of Suzdal, and among them was none other than Vasilii Yaroslavich of Borovsk! Mäxmüt took the Grand Duke and all his men captive in battle, and demanded that the people of Russia pay yasaq in compensation for his release.

Being kept in bonds in the tents of the Tatars, Vasilii Yaroslavich remembered his sins against Abbot Pafnutii, and began to feel remorse for what he had done. He prayed to God and promised that he would reconcile with Pafnutii, if ever he received his life and his freedom. God heard his prayer, and Abbot Pafnutii went among his monks, among the rich and even among ordinary people trying to raise the yasaq necessary to pay off Mäxmüt Khan and release Vasilii Vasil’evich and all his nobles. Even if he was able to raise a kopek from a poor peasant, he was thankful for this and added that peasant to his prayers; and for this reason it was called the ‘kopek ransom’. The Tatar Khan was good to his word, and when he had received the yasaq he released the Russian princes back to their lands. When the Prince of Borovsk returned home, the first thing he did was to go to Abbot Pafnutii and beg his forgiveness for the many sins he had committed. This the abbot gave gladly.

At one time the fast of Great Lent was nearing an end, and the monastery had no fish with which to celebrate the Lord’s Pascha. Both the brothers and the lay workers at the monastery were grieved by this. But Abbot Pafnutii told them: ‘Do not grieve for this, my brothers, and do not tempt God. The All-Merciful Lord who made us and brought light into the whole world by His Pascha, will comfort us, His workers, in our griefs. And He will give unto those who fear him an overabundance of good things!’

As it turned out, these words would not go long unfulfilled by the All-Good and All-Wise Treasure of Blessings! On Holy Saturday, the sexton of the oratory went out to the holy well by the Ister’ma to draw water for the Pascha Liturgy, and he happened to cross the river as he was going over the causeway. There he saw leaping and playing in the river, more freshwater whitefish than he had ever seen gather in one place! This was because the river had swollen with the spring rains, and the fish had taken refuge in the still waters near where the monks had dug. The sexton hurried back to tell Saint Pafnutii about this, and the Abbot, giving thanks to God, told the lay brothers to go with nets and go to catch whitefish for the Paschal feast. The fishermen brought back so many of the slender silver swimmers that both monasteries – Nativity and Protection – had enough fish for all the monks to eat fish at every meal during Bright Week! What they did not eat themselves, they distributed amongst the poor in Borovsk.

By wonders such as this the name of Abbot Pafnutii became known throughout the Russian lands, and many eager young people were drawn to him to benefit from his wisdom and kindness. These included sæcular and married young men and women as well as those who would become monks. His most famous disciple, Ivan Sanin, came to him when he was twenty years old – the same age Pafnutii had been when he was tonsured by Abbot Markell. Saint Pafnutii placed the young Ivan under a discipline before giving him the tonsure, and the monastic name of Iosif.

Part of the young Ivan Sanin’s discipline was – much like Pafnutii’s own novitiate had been – caring for an elderly monk. In Ivan’s case, this monk was named Konstantin. Konstantin was nearing the end of his earthly life, and Abbot Pafnutii sent Ivan to care for him. The young novice went to the elderly monk’s cell to pray with him after the morning devotions, and then left him to attend to other duties. As he was passing by the abbot’s cell, Pafnutii came out and told him: ‘Someone was praying and I heard a voice that told me that the old man Konstantin had gone to the Lord. I came out to see who it was and I saw you.’

Ivan, taken aback by his abbot’s address, replied: ‘I’ve just come from Konstantin. He is still alive.’

The abbot then sent him back to Konstantin to make sure. When Ivan returned there, he found that Konstantin had already reposed peacefully in the Lord.

There was another elder who had lived a long time in the monastery by the name of Evfemii. Evfemii had spent much of his life imitating the life of his abbots, and particularly Father Pafnutii, and Christ had given him the gift of tears. He also had a certain gift of foresight. At the time there were two brother-monks in the choir who were given to an impure attraction to each other; and for this reason Saint Pafnutii had cause to rebuke them several times.

At one time during the Liturgy, Evfemii saw the two of them singing in the choir; and during that time he beheld in a vision, a horrendous devil assault these two monks with hooks and weapons of iron, hoping to drag them off out of the choir. Time and again the devil assaulted them, and time and again his weapons were deflected, harmlessly, off the bodies of the two young monks, who kept their place in the choir. Evfemii noticed this, and understood that whenever the brothers inclined to their forbidden attraction, the devil was able to hook them with his weapons. Whenever the brothers resisted the thought, the devil’s weapons fell away useless. Evfemii stood up and began to read from the Holy Gospel, and the devil could not bear to listen and disappeared. Again the devil came and attacked them, but he was defeated by the Cherubic Hymn. Again the devil came and attacked them, but he was defeated and banished at the Hymn to the Theotokos and the presentation of the Gifts.

At the end of the Liturgy, Evfemii took Saint Pafnutii aside and told him what he had seen concerning the two monks. Saint Pafnutii called the two monks to him and had Evfemii repeat the story; and the two monks were both admonished and heartened by what they heard. Gently the saintly abbot told the monks not to entertain the thought, but instead to take counsel in confession and so uproot them from the heart.

The monastery continued to grow, and Saint Pafnutii began to understand that the little wooden oratory would not be sufficient to house that many monks. He and his monks laboured for several years on the building of a stone church at the centre of the monastery. The edifice being finished, and the workmanship being admired all over Russia, the prince of Borovsk invited several excellent iconographers to design frescoes for the interior of the Church, including a layman named Dionisii, who was attached to the monastery. Dionisii was an excellent writer of icons, but his feet were lame, and he could not work for long on the tall, broad interiors of the stone church. But Saint Pafnutii prayed for Dionisii, that Christ and the Theotokos might grant strength to his feet, and his lameness was healed as he began his work.

The lay brethren, including Dionisii, were under injunction from the saint not to bring flesh meats within the monastery enclosure. For the most part they kept to this rule, but Dionisii broke it on one occasion by bringing a thigh of lamb stuffed with eggs into the monastery for his dinner. As he sat down to his dinner, he opened the eggs only to find that they were filled with maggots. His whole body began to itch and within an hour he was almost completely covered with sores. At once he sent for the saint and confessed his sin, begging for forgiveness. Saint Pafnutii sternly warned him not to do it again, but readily forgave him, took him into the Church and sprinkled holy water over him. Dionisii went to sleep that night, and after he awoke the next morning his skin was healed of its sores.

Saint Pafnutii was very fond of wild animals, especially birds. He firmly besought anyone who came onto the monastery grounds that they were not to harm the ravens who nested in the woods around the monastery. One proud boyar unleashed his falcon upon the ravens, but no sooner had his falcon gotten his talons into a raven but it plummeted from the sky – dead. At another time, the son of a local burgomaster was riding by the monastery with some friends, and chanced to see a murder of ravens take wing in front of him. Without thinking, he drew his bow and shot, felling one of the poor birds. He turned his head behind him to boast to his friends at having made such a shot, but found that his neck was frozen in place as he did so. He could not turn back the right way. His friends, alarmed, took him before Saint Pafnutii. And of course he knew what had happened and how the young man had behaved. Saint Pafnutii hit the bell and summoned the brothers, who demanded to know why he had called them at an irregular hour. And Pafnutii told them: ‘God has avenged the blood of a raven.’ He then prayed over the young man in the name of the Holy Cross, and told the young man to turn his head around the right way. In this way his neck was healed.

Like Saint Isaac of Spoleto, Saint Pafnutii used his keen insight to gently admonish and enlighten thieves. A group of thieves who stole three oxen from the monastery were stricken blind and blundered around the woods through most of the night before the monastic brothers found them the next morning; Saint Pafnutii healed their eyes and they did not steal again. At another time, a servant who had withheld for himself some alms from his master meant for the monastery, was greeted in a friendly way by the saint. But when he sat down to bread, his whole body became paralysed and he could not move. Saint Pafnutii took him into the church, prayed over him so that he was healed, and admonished him in secret about what he had done before sending him back home. The whole monastery knew of this story, but he would not tell the brethren of the reason for it until much later.

Elder Pafnutii was often given his divine insights in visions; at one time two brothers wished to leave the monastery, and Elder Pafnutii was warned of this in a dream. He saw a devil take burning brands from his hearth and use them to set alight the cell which the two brothers shared. He told this vision to the two brothers the following day. They showed him that they had packed their few belongings and had prepared to leave, and then confessed and repented their sin. At another time, a brother of the monastery who had a shrewd and sarcastic tongue received a dream in which he was cast out of the church and given over to be beaten by devils after having made one biting remark too many. He confessed to Elder Pafnutii and mastered his tongue.

Saint Pafnutii told his disciples that one could tell the state of a man’s soul by looking into his eyes. In several cases he proved this. One young monk who had come across a group of women in the village came back to the monastery filled with disturbing thoughts. Elder Pafnutii looked him in the eyes once and sighed, ‘This man is not the same as he was before!’ Distraught, the young man sought the counsel of the monk Iosif Sanin, who sent him to confess his sins. Thus Saint Pafnutii was able to correct him. On another occasion someone from Saint Iosif’s village came to visit Saint Pafnutii, desiring to become a monk. Pafnutii sent him away, and Iosif asked him why. Pafnutii told him that his countryman had once murdered a monk by stabbing him in the stomach with a knife, and had never confessed this sin. He knew this by looking him in the eye. He was even able likewise to discover one of the monks who had poisoned his master many years before, and had never confessed that sin either. Elder Pafnutii was clear that no amount of ascetic striving can take the place of confession and repentance.

Elder Pafnutii once cured a demoniac who came riding into the monastery enclosure demanding to see him. He came up to Saint Pafnutii not knowing his face, and demanded to see the saint. But the elder looked the demoniac in the eye and said: ‘You’re not out of your wits, but a crafty devil has got its hold on you.’ The demoniac flew into a rage and tried to assault Pafnutii, but failing to harm him got back on his horse and made his way to a nearby lake, where he tried to drown himself. The monastic brothers lay hold on him and brought him back to Saint Pafnutii, who was able to release him from the demon and give him back soundness of mind.

There was another miracle of Saint Pafnutii involving fish. He asked the prince leave for three days to send lay brothers to fish at a certain spot. Then he gave one of the brothers money to buy several new barrels. This lay brother, however, was stingy, and complained to Pafnutii that he didn’t need to buy new barrels, he’d just take an old one. But the saint glared ferociously at him, and ordered him to take the money and buy the barrels. The reluctant fisherman went and did as the saint told him. At the end of those three days, he had caught 730 large fish for the monastery – more than the prince had caught fishing that same place all summer! It was enough to fill up not just the old barrel but every one of the new barrels he’d bought with the saint’s money. And he was well-furnished because the saint had foreseen the results of his fishing.

One of Saint Pafnutii’s students developed an inflammation of the eye. In grave suffering he sought healing; Saint Pafnutii gave him his prayer rope and told him to say the Jesus Prayer one thousand times. The student was in such agony from his eyes he could barely move his lips, but the prayer came to him more and more smoothly, and as he got to five hundred iterations he felt the healing power come over him. He left off praying and jumped up with joy to tell the saint, but soon the inflammation seized him again as badly as before. Saint Pafnutii chided him and told him to complete the thousand prayers; only after he did so was he fully healed.

Saint Pafnutii also healed a leper who was suffering and very near to death. Pafnutii not only healed his deathly illness, but also cleansed his skin from the corruption of the disease by sprinkling holy water upon him. Another man was brought to Saint Pafnutii on the brink of death. The doctors had pronounced him doomed to die within the day, and his relatives had already made preparations to bury him. But the monk prayed over the man, and he rose from his bed and – to the amazement of his kin – walked about in fullness of health, as though he’d never been sick. At another time, a noblewoman went weeping before the saint begging his prayers for her son, who was sickly and on the point of death. Saint Pafnutii, who loved children and took pity on the woman’s state, prepared some holy water and also sent her back with some fish for the child to eat. (It was customary at that time to give recovering invalids something to eat to gauge if they were really returning to health.) The noblewoman was not much reassured, expecting to come back and find her son dead. But she went back to her son and sprinkled the holy water over his body, and at once the boy sat up in his bed and greeted her with joy, then asked her for food. His noble mother gave him the fish Saint Pafnutii had sent back with her.

Saint Pafnutii cured several demoniacs through the invocations of the Holy Cross. A certain noblewoman who was known to Aleksei Goburin was possessed by such a devil; she often sent her sons with offerings to the Nativity Monastery. She was attacked by many devils in her dreams, but always in these dreams a grey-bearded old monk would stand in front of her and drive the devils back from her, and she heard a voice in her ear repeating, ‘Pafnutii of Borovsk will drive the devils away from you.’ After she had been cleansed she went to Borovsk to see the saint, but women were not allowed to enter the monastery. She sent her sons inside and bade them bring Pafnutii within sight of her. They did as she asked, and when she saw him she recognised him at once as the man in her dreams who had held off the hordes of devils from her. From then on she became a generous patron of both monasteries. Another novice was tormented by dreams of a devil who prowled around his cell – sometimes in the form of a great dog, and at other times in the form of the bear. When he told Saint Pafnutii of this, the elder instructed the novice to read with him from the Psalter. The power of the Psalms held off and chased away the devils, who did not return to plague the young novice.

Elder Pafnutii was a close friend to the poor and humble. He did not hesitate to stand up to the powerful and proud, and was not servile before them. But with those who approached him in humility, he was warmly accessible. He made no distinction between monk and lay; he spoke gladly with common folk and invited them to his table as brothers. None of them ever left a conversation with him in a spirit of mourning. Any wayfarer who came into his monastery was welcome to his table and would not leave unfed. In one year there was a famine in Borovsk, and Saint Pafnutii threw open the larders of the monastery and gave away every last crumb of food in it to those who were starving. When the stores ran out so that nothing remained even for the monks, Saint Pafnutii prayed all the harder for the deliverance of the hungry, and with tears implored God to let the people live until the next summer. And wondrously, the monks went into the larder to find that the food had been replenished! Elder Pafnutii held generosity and justice to beggars and the needy to be the chief of virtues. He was fond of telling this story:

One act of charity can save a man, if he lives by the law. One generous man did alms throughout his life. When he died, another man was given this vision of his soul’s progress. He was brought to the river of fire, and on the other side of the river was Paradise: a wondrously bright, warm, sweet and beautiful garden. But the soul of the man found no way across this horrible river. But he begins to see the souls of the beggars who received alms from him in life. With their bodies they lay down across the river, making a bridge for him. By their grace to him, the generous man crossed the bridge into Paradise.

According to Saint Pafnutii, God who protected Russia could also turn His face away from the Russian people if they went too long astray from the correct path, and refused to repent of their sins for too long. He spoke in such terms about the calamity of plague that fell upon the Russian people in the year 1407, and rebuked the Russian people for falling further into drunkenness, licence and greed rather than returning to God and their love of their neighbours. (It seems a timely reminder now: in the time of plague Elder Pafnutii exhorted his people to be kinder to one another, and neither to turn away from the needy for fear of contagion, nor to hoard food or livestock or gold or silver.)

During this plague, he said, there was one nun who was rescued from the sickness on the brink of death, and who was given visions of who was there in the afterlife. She said that she had seen the generous, the merciful, those who were mindful of the poor, and those who were kind to animals, in Paradise, regardless of their faults in life. Figuring prominently of those she had seen in paradise, interestingly enough, was Ivan I Kalita of Moscow, who despite his flaws of character and temperament was apparently fairly generous to the poor.

Among those she had seen in torment were the greedy and avaricious. She saw devils tormenting the souls of the wicked by forcing them to wear white-hot chains of gold, or by throwing gold coins into their open mouths and mocking them by telling them to eat and be satisfied. One of the greedy she saw being thus tormented, it seems, was the notoriously opulent Lithuanian king Vytautas.

Pafnutii also once had a vision while he dozed on the Church steps in the few minutes before the reading of the Gospel at Divine Liturgy. He saw the gates of the monastery open and a crowd of men and women with candles come into the Church. One of them, as he passed, he recognised as one prince Yuri Vasil’evich, whom he realised had died. The prince had apparently considered himself to have been allowed to enter Heaven only by the prayers of the saint. After the vision was over and Saint Pafnutii awoke, he went into the Church praising God’s mercy.

Saint Pafnutii sent his beloved disciple Saint Iosif Sanin to the court of the knyaz Mikhail Fedorovich of Vorotyn, where he found the nobleman deeply downcast. Iosif asked him what was wrong. The nobleman, it turned out, had kept a monk close by his side: a holy man named Matvei Varnavoi. The prince of Vorotyn had loved Matvei and cherished his advice, which was always wise and timely. But his son Ivan Mikhailovich had grown jealous of the holy man and ordered him to be killed. Shortly after this Ivan Mikhailovich himself died, and his mother desired to have a commemoration Liturgy held for him. But when the priest sent for prosphora to be baked, the oven began to roar so hot that it scorched the bread which was supposed to be blessed. When Elder Pafnutii heard this from his pupil Iosif, he gave a profound sigh of grief. ‘The Lord has told me the truth: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay; (Rom. 12:19) and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matt. 7:2)”’

Elder Pafnutii said of the monastic life:

The root of the monastic life is—not possessing anything; obedience and humility; and placing yourself below everyone else.

Abbot Pafnutii, it must be said, was a model not only of humility and forgiveness but also of just plain old hard work. He chopped and hauled firewood, dug out plots for farming, weeded, watered and raised the vegetables, and yet always managed to arrive early to prepare for the daily Divine Liturgy in the oratory. Being a schemamonk, he normally would not serve the Liturgy himself, but took the Gifts together with his brothers – only once did he serve the Liturgy, with no priest being available for his monks, and afterwards he said that for fear and awe his soul had barely remained in his body. He wore a ragged sheepskin garment and threadbare shoes not even fit for a beggar. He was lenient and patient with his brothers, but strict upon himself. He lived all the time in the original cell he had made when he took on the Great Schema. At mealtimes he always ate last, allowing his brothers to take the choice food for themselves. He fasted totally on Mondays and Fridays, and ate no oil or sauce on Wednesdays. He also was so humble that he did not dare to bodily touch anyone, man or woman, for he revered them above icons, as they were icons of God. He never spoke unless he had something needful and meaningful to say.

At the age of twenty he entered the monastic life. At the age of forty he became an abbot. He spent sixty years under monastic discipline – twenty-seven of those under the Great Schema. And at the age of eighty years, in the year 1475, having reached the end of his earthly days, he reposed in the Lord, at peace with his brothers and beloved by all.

Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk was indeed a model of justice as well as holiness, the two not being at odds but finding completion one in the other. He did not pursue meekness and humility and chastity in a closed-off and selfish way, for his own sake alone, but did everything for the sake of his monastic disciples and for the common people who lived around him. He gave of his own physical substance, his monastic reserves, and his spiritual wealth as well for the sake of those who were suffering in times of famine. As such he is a perfect saint to commemorate on May Day along with the Prophet Jeremiah. Holy abbot Pafnutii, meek and gentle servant of the poor, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk, Tone 4:

Thou didst illumine thy fatherland
With thy radiant life of prayer and fasting,
And wast filled with divine gifts of the Spirit.
Thou didst strive valiantly in this temporal life and show mercy to all,
Becoming an intercessor for the poor.
And so we entreat thee, O Father Pafnutii,
Pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!