DOI: 10.11649/a.1417 Article No.: 1417 Szymon Grygiel is a student reading history at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. e-mail:
[email protected] nr 9/2017 r. Szymon Grygiel The body and sanctity: The case of nineteenth-century Russian spiritual elders nspiration for the present study comes from a fragment of Dostoevskii’s Brothers Karamazov set in a nineteenth-century Russian monastery, where the monks and visitors assemble Iat the coffin of the venerable Starets Zosima (a spiritual elder who has just passed away) in eager expectation of a miracle about to happen. However, much to their disappointment, a smell of decomposition begins to come from the coffin and is taken by those present as God’s sign that the deceased is not a saint. Father Iosif’s argument to the contrary, that “the incorruptibility of the bodies of the just [is] not a dogma of the Orthodox Church” (Dostoevskii, 2009, p. 422), is not well-received among those assembled in the old man’s cell, and they begin to attribute negative features to the dead monk. It is astonishing that a somewhat similar situation should occur before the canonisation of Starets Seraphim of Sarov in 1903, only just over two decades after the publication of The Broth- ers Karamazov (1879–1880). The fact is confirmed by a statement from Metropolitan Antonii of St Petersburg on his remains, issued in view of the scandalous controversy whether the deci- sion to officially recognise his sainthood was right, considering the state of preservation of his relics seventy years after his death.