UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Byzantine Liturgy and The

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Byzantine Liturgy and the Primary Chronicle A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures by Sean Delaine Griffin 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Byzantine Liturgy and the Primary Chronicle by Sean Delaine Griffin Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Gail Lenhoff, Chair The monastic chroniclers of medieval Rus’ lived in a liturgical world. Morning, evening and night they prayed the “divine services” of the Byzantine Church, and this study is the first to examine how these rituals shaped the way they wrote and compiled the Povest’ vremennykh let (Primary Chronicle, ca. 12th century), the earliest surviving East Slavic historical record. My principal argument is that several foundational accounts of East Slavic history—including the tales of the baptism of Princess Ol’ga and her burial, Prince Vladimir’s conversion, the mass baptism of Rus’, and the martyrdom of Princes Boris and Gleb—have their source in the feasts of the liturgical year. The liturgy of the Eastern Church proclaimed a distinctively Byzantine myth of Christian origins: a sacred narrative about the conversion of the Roman Empire, the glorification of the emperor Constantine and empress Helen, and the victory of Christianity over paganism. In the decades following the conversion of Rus’, the chroniclers in Kiev learned these narratives from the church services and patterned their own tales of Christianization after them. The ii result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus’—a myth promulgated even today by the Russian Orthodox Church—that reproduced the myth of Christian origins for the Eastern Roman Empire articulated in the Byzantine rite. The present study systematically uncovers this overarching liturgical subtext and reveals a vast web of new and previously undetected meanings in the text of the Primary Chronicle. iii The dissertation of Sean Delaine Griffin is approved. Ronald Vroon Debora K. Shuger Gail Lenhoff, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv For Kate, who is all light. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ..................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………vi Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………vii Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………viii Introduction …........................….................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Liturgical Subtext of Princess Ol’ga’s Baptism and Burial ............ 18 Chapter 2: A “New Constantine” in Rus’: The Liturgical Structure of Prince Vladimir’s Pre-Conversion Biography....................................................................... 48 Chapter 3: The Conversion of Prince Vladimir and the Baptism of Rus’ ................. 78 Chapter 4: Boris the High Priest and Gleb the Lamb .............................................. 113 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 143 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 148 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Financial support for this study was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and three organizations at the University of California, Los Angeles: the Graduate Division, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. I am very grateful for their support. The study would not exist but for the efforts of my advisor, Prof. Gail Lenhoff, who has taught me what it means to be a scholar. The same should also be said of Prof. Ronald Vroon, whose enthusiasm and intellectual rigor attracted me to the field in the first place. My debt to them both is truly immense. I am also grateful to those who have improved the project. Prof. Debora K. Shuger and Prof. Pierre Gonneau read and commented on draft chapters, and Vitaly Yefimenkov assisted me with the translations from Church Slavonic. A series of conversations with Prof. Simon Franklin yielded valuable insights, as did the comments and questions from audiences at the annual UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Slavic Workshop and the California Medieval History Seminar. I especially thank my parents, Donald and Joyce Griffin, for their steadfast and unconditional support. They raised an athlete and ended up with a scholar—I hope I have made them proud. I should also express my gratitude to Andrew Gary Hart, the man who first introduced me to the life of the mind and the worship of the Orthodox Church. If I have any worth as a scholar, it is because of him. Finally, I thank my wife, Kate, who was there with me through every page and paragraph. It is to her that I dedicate this work. vii VITA Sean Griffin graduated magna cum laude from Pepperdine University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Political Science. In 2010 he was awarded a Master of Arts in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles. During his studies at UCLA, Sean received a Dissertation Year Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays grant for study abroad, two Title VII awards, and two international travel grants from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2013 his article, “Le baptême d’Ol’ga dans le Récit des temps passés ou le palimpseste liturgique,” appeared in Ecrire et reécrire l’histoire russe, d’Ivan Terrible à V.O Kliuchevskii, a volume edited by Prof. Pierre Gonneau and published by the Institut d’études slaves. A related article, “A ‘New Constantine’ in Rus’: The Liturgical Structure of Prince Vladimir’s Pre-Conversion Biography in the Primary Chronicle,” is forthcoming in On Behalf of All and For All: The Place of Liturgy in Russian Culture, a volume from Slavica publishers edited by Prof. Ronald Vroon. Finally, in 2014, Sean published an article on Vasilii Rozanov as a part of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. viii Introduction The Byzantine world chronicle is a form of Christian history writing that emerged in Late Antiquity.1 Its origins are traditionally traced to Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, who compiled the first full-scale Christian chronicle in the late third century.2 The oldest extant chronicle of Byzantine provenance, that of John Malalas, dates from the sixth century, and it is followed by the Paschal Chronicle in the seventh century, the chronicles of Theophanes, George Syncellus and George the Monk in the ninth, and several versions of Symeon Logothete in the tenth.3 Near the turn of the eleventh century, the East Slavs adopted Byzantine Christianity, and the Byzantine tradition of chronicle writing was established in Kievan Rus’—the first East Slavic polity based in the present-day capital of Ukraine.4 The earliest chronicle of the Rus’ is the Povest’ vremennykh let (Tale of Bygone Years), which dates to the early twelfth century. This chronicle, better known in English as the Primary Chronicle, is the primary object of study in this dissertation. Since the days of Eusebius, chroniclers had charted the history of humankind from its sacred beginnings, revealing the workings of Divine Providence in the affairs of 1 Brian Croke, “The Origins of the Christian World Chronicle,” History and Historians in Late Antiquity (Sydney: Pergamon Press, 1983), 116-131. For more on the ancient origins of chronicle writing, see R. W. Burgess and Michael Kulikowski, “The History and Origins of the Latin Chronicle Tradition,” The Medieval Chronicle, Vol. VI (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 153-179. 2 Eusebius first compiled his Chronicle in the 280s. He completed the final and most influential version in 325 for the Vicennalia of Constantine I. The span and annalistic layout of this later redaction “became the pattern for chronicle writing in the Middle Ages in both the Greek East and Latin West.” Brian Croke, “The Originality of Eusebius’ Chronicle,” American Journal of Philology, 103 (1982), 195-200. 3 Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (New York: Scribner, 1980), 192. 4 For more on Byzantine chronicles in Rus’, see O. V. Tvorogov, Drevne-russkie khronografy (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 3-45. 1 men. History was important because it had soteriological meaning. All peoples and nations, past and present, were part of a divine economy for the salvation of the world. When the Rus’ accepted Byzantine Christianity “one of their tasks was to locate themselves on this imported and unfamiliar map of sacred time and space, to legitimize themselves as part of providential history, to show that they, too, had a place in the divine plan.”5 The Primary Chronicle is one attempt to do so: to reveal the mystery of Christian salvation playing out in the land of Rus’ as it had in other lands (and in other chronicles) over the preceding centuries. The Primary Chronicle begins with an apocryphal tale of Noah dividing the earth among his three sons after the biblical flood. There follows a lengthy ethnic history, in which the Rus’ and the Slavs are claimed to have descended from the line of Japheth, Noah’s third son. With a proper biblical lineage established, the chronicle begins to gradually narrow its focus: first to various Slavic tribes, then to the Poliane of the Kiev region, and eventually to the family who came to rule them, the Rurikids. This change

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