The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

66 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

in the 1220s. The steppe frontier was endless and could not be defended. Thus the Church blessed Prince Alexander in his journeys of taxpaying tribute to the Mongol capital on the Volga River. Two centuries later, when internal rivalries fractured the Horde, Muscovite tsars pitted one khanate against another and reunited the Russian lands.

In the Stalinist period, Saint Alexander Nevsky was rehabilitated. Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film Alexander Nevsky, released in 1938 with Prokofiev’s stirring score, became propaganda art in the Party’s campaign to replace proletarian internationalism with Russo-centric heroes in the shadow of Hitler’s growing might. As Eisenstein had intended, enthusiastic moviegoers saw in the “Germanic” Teutonic knights close relatives of the contemporary fascists. When Stalin and Hitler concluded their non-aggression pact in August 1939, Alexander Nevsky was immediately withdrawn from the movie houses, to be just as rapidly reinstated in June 1941 after the Nazi surprise attack.

In times of national trauma, it is common for governmentsto turn to military heroes as patriotic rallying points. For this purpose Russia’s warrior saints have proved surprisingly durable, even during officially atheistic periods. Throughout the post-communist 1990s, a reinvigorated Russian Orthodox Church won enthusiastic new converts among Russia’s armed forces, humiliated and impoverished by the loss of the Soviet empire.9 In 2004, the Air Force and the Patriarch (with the full approval of President Putin) jointly celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the world’s first heavy bomber unit (the fighter plane Ilya Muromets of 1914), a ceremony that included a blessing of the troops and, in 2005, the consecration of 160 new bombers in Russia’s Long Range Aviation Forces. The emergence of a faith-based army in this once officially atheistic country will most certainly affect the plots of Russian war literature and its prototypical heroes.

Folk tales (Baba Yaga, Koshchey the Deathless)

The Russian folk tale [skazka] obeys a different logic than does the saint’s life. In his study of the European folk tale, Max Lu¨thi notes a cardinal difference between it and more didactic narrative such as legendry. “The saint’s legend wantstoexplain,it wantstocomfort,”Lu¨thi notes.“Itdemandsfaithinthetruth of the story and in the correctness of its interpretation. The folktale, however, demands nothing. It does not interpret or explain; it merely observes and portrays . . . It is precisely this relinquishment of explanations that engages our trust.”10 This insight helps us to see why the greatest of Russian psychological novelists, Leo Tolstoy, exhausted by writing War and Peace and temporarily sick of his own hyper-hortative literary voice, turned to folk-tale speech in several

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