Russia: Satan the Translator

chapter 5 Russia: Satan the Translator

In Russia, the fear of the Devil and his followers, the Satanists, appeared in a peculiar way in the 17th century. Previously, in the Russian folkloric tradi- tion, the Devil was represented as a comic figure, who clumsily attempted to fool others but often was fooled: a “poor Devil” who, overall, was not particularly scary. The situation changed with the spread in the 17th century of a numerological prophetic literature, which concentrated on apocalyptic previ- sions about the year 1666, feared as it contained 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. By chance, or misfortune, in 1666 something really happened: it was the culminating year of the liturgical reform process in the Russian Orthodox Church by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681), unpopular with a significant portion of the Russian population. The Raskol, the schism of the “old believers” (raskolniki), was a consequence of this. They refused the new liturgy and continued their existence, divided into a myriad of sub-sects, until the present. The theme of the Devil and the fear of Satanists played a prominent role for the first raskolniki. The main text of the Raskol, the Life of Archpriest Av- vakum, accused Nikon of having made a pact with the Devil and of having regular exchanges with the Evil One, as a real Satanist.1 Nikon, and his followers’ dealings with the Devil were seen as having caused a particularly fearful consequence: the imminent advent of the Antichrist, who was not a simple human agent of the Devil but the “most powerful incarnation of Satan, against which simple humans could do nothing”.2 About who the incarnation of the Devil, the Antichrist, exactly was, the “old believers” had divided opinions. For some it was Nikon, for others Tsar Alexis i (1629–1676), or his successor Peter the Great (1672–1725), for others still a metaphysical entity that could have different contemporary incarnations, among which the worst was yet to come.

1 See the annotated edition of Vita dell’Arciprete Avvakum scritta da lui stesso, by the Italian scholar Pia Pera (1956–2016), Milan: Adelphi, 1986, p. 73. See also Georg Bernard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia, Stanford (California): Stanford University Press, 1999. 2 Pia Pera, “Dal Demonio all’Anticristo fra i vecchi credenti”, in E. Corsini and E. Costa (eds.), L’autunno del Diavolo, vol. i, cit., pp. 593–594. More extensively, by the same author, see I vecchi credenti e l’Anticristo, Genoa: Marietti, 1992.

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The fear of the Devil and the Antichrist pushed the raskolniki to suicide, and often to mass suicide. Their actions had an obvious protest content, but it was more a metaphysical than a political protest. At the start the “old believers” killed themselves by dying of hunger; subsequently they “tried (…) other methods: some drowned themselves, others stabbed themselves or buried themselves alive, or set fire to themselves”. Between 1675 and 1691, “around twenty-thousand Old Believers immolated themselves”.3 These horrors may appear disproportionate compared to the origins of the schism connected to questions of liturgy. It is not surprising that some followers of the mainline Russian Orthodox Church saw in turn in the leaders of the Raskol a group of worshippers of the Devil in disguise, or agents sent by the Prince of Darkness to cause the moral and physical destruction of the faithful. These episodes must be taken into consideration to understand how, at the end of the 17th century, “devils dominated the Russian imagination”.4 In Im- perial Russia, there were cases of possession reportedly induced by sorcerers, lesser known but not too different from those we examined in France.5 An in- teresting research conducted by Valentin Boss, published in 1991, shows how among Russian intellectuals, from the 18th century on, a diabolical element was present in a particular incarnation: the fascination for the character of Satan in the poem by John Milton (1608–1674), Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan, as had happened in other European countries, was appreciated for his “noble” and “heroic” qualities. The Satan of Milton became a positive figure, a cult character. This appreciation typically belongs to Romantic Satanism and manifested itself in England before Russia, particularly in the circle of radical bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) and, moving in a less political and more esoteric direction, in the writings of William Blake (1757–1827).6 How- ever, in Russia things perhaps went further, to the extent of inspiring esoteric circles and the creation of a peculiar form of Satanism. The Russian Devil was hidden between the folds of an originally Christian book, if not always orthodox, like that of Milton, and in the subtle game of translations. In the 18th century, not many Russian literati spoke English, but almost all knew French and read Milton in the translation Le Paradis perdu

3 P. Pera, “Dal Demonio all’Anticristo fra i vecchi credenti”, cit., p. 587. 4 Valentin Boss, Milton and the Rise of Russian Satanism, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1991, p. 3. 5 See Christine D. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia, DeKalb (Illinois): Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 6 See P.A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron, cit.