Optina and Russian Culture

Optina Pustyn was, for most of the nineteenth century, the meeting-point of the Russian monastic tradition and the Russian literary intelligentsia. Gogol came in 1850–51; the Slavophile Kireyevsky brothers, whose library helped build the monastery’s, were buried within its walls; Dostoevsky came in 1878 after the death of his son and met Elder Ambrose; Konstantin Leontiev lived there for years and was secretly tonsured under Ambrose’s blessing in 1891; Vladimir Solovyov and Leo Tolstoy came too. The elder Ambrose anchored a register of pilgrim-writers that made Optina, in the period’s own phrase, a conscience of educated Russia by the river Zhizdra.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

Gogol at Optina (1850–1851)

Nikolai Gogol, in the religious crisis of his last years, visited Optina Pustyn — the documented visits fall in 1850 and 1851, when he came over from the neighboring Kireyevsky estate at Dolbino and from Dolgoruky lands nearby (Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, ch. on Gogol; Wikipedia, Optina Pustyn, locating the visits). What Gogol found at Optina — a living monastic order, elders who received the laity, a reading public for the Fathers — fed directly into the religious turn of his late work and the unfinished second volume of Dead Souls. Stanton makes Gogol a founding case in his study of Optina’s “iconic vision”: the monastery as an image of an integral, sacramental order against which the writers measured a fragmenting modern Russia. Gogol corresponded with Optina figures and is recorded marking up patristic books, the very editions the monastery was then producing; the meeting of the tormented author of Dead Souls with the Optina world is one of the early signs that the monastery had become legible to Russian high culture as something more than a provincial cloister.

The Kireyevskys’ Graves

The Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–1856) and his brother Pyotr Kireyevsky (1808–1856), the folklorist, are both buried within the walls of Optina (Wikipedia, Optina Pustyn: “the Slavophile Kireyevsky brothers, both buried within the monastery walls”). The connection was not incidental. Ivan and his wife Natalya were spiritual children of Elder Macarius and the lay partners in the Optina patristic editions (see The Optina Editions); the brothers helped build the monastery’s celebrated library. Their graves at Optina are the physical sign of the bond between Slavophilism and the monastery: the philosophy of “integral reason” laid to rest beside the elders whose Fathers it had drawn upon. That both brothers died in 1856, within months of each other, and were brought to Optina for burial, fixed the Slavophile movement’s most intimate tie to the monastery in the ground itself. For the generation that followed, a visit to Optina could include a visit to the Kireyevsky graves — a small pilgrimage within the pilgrimage, joining the secular philosopher’s tomb to the elders’ relics.

Konstantin Leontiev: The Resident-Author and the Secret Tonsure (1891)

Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) — diplomat, novelist, and the most uncompromising of Russia’s conservative thinkers — moved to Optina and lived for several years near the monastery as a resident lay author under the spiritual direction of Elder Ambrose, writing his late cultural-philosophical essays in the monastery’s shadow (Wikipedia and Britannica, Konstantin Leontiev; “The Spiritual Path of Konstantin Leontiev,” orthochristian.com). His attachment to Optina and to Ambrose was the governing fact of his last decade.

On August 18, 1891, Leontiev was secretly tonsured at Optina with the monastic name Kliment (Clement) — taken in memory of his friend the Optina monk Fr. Kliment Sederholm — under the blessing of Elder Ambrose, who however directed him not to remain at Optina but to move to Sergiev Posad, by the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra (orthochristian.com, “The Spiritual Path of Konstantin Leontiev”; Wikipedia, Konstantin Leontiev). The sequence is poignantly tight: Ambrose himself reposed on October 10/23, 1891, having left Optina that summer for the Shamordino convent; Leontiev, newly a monk, died of pneumonia at Sergiev Posad on November 24, 1891, weeks after his elder. The secret tonsure under Ambrose’s blessing is among the best-attested episodes of the elder’s direction of a major literary figure.

Leontiev’s case shows the elder’s direction at its most discerning. Leontiev was a difficult man — aesthete, pessimist, prophet of a “blossoming complexity” who feared the leveling of modern life — and his Orthodoxy was as severe and demanding as his temperament. He had first sought the monastic path years earlier (some accounts speak of an earlier, abortive tonsure attempt), and his whole late life orbited Optina and Ambrose. That Ambrose, having finally tonsured him, sent him away to Sergiev Posad rather than keeping him at Optina, is itself an act of pastoral judgment: the elder placed the new monk where he could be cared for and where his death — which Ambrose may have foreseen as near — would fall under the protection of another great monastic house. The whole episode is documented in the spiritual biographies of Leontiev and stands as a window onto how Ambrose handled a soul too complex for any formula.

It is worth being exact about what the secret tonsure was and was not. A secret (or “in-secret,” taynoye) tonsure makes a man a monk before God and the elder without public announcement or change of outward life; it was a recognized recourse for those whose circumstances — illness, unfinished worldly business, or simple discretion — made an open entry into a monastery impractical. For Leontiev, mortally ill in fact within months, it was the gathering-in of a soul that had long belonged to Optina in spirit. The name Kliment bound him to a particular Optina friendship, that with the convert and monk Kliment Sederholm, whose own life Leontiev had written. The blessing was Ambrose’s; the timing, the name, and the direction to Sergiev Posad were all the elder’s discernment at work upon a single difficult life in its last season.

Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Tolstoy

Fyodor Dostoevsky visited Optina in late June 1878, after the death of his young son Alyosha, traveling with the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov; he stayed two days (June 25–27) and met Elder Ambrose. The visit fed The Brothers Karamazov: Elder Ambrose stands behind the figure of the Elder Zosima (a debt the repository notes elsewhere, alongside Dostoevsky’s own pointing to St. Tikhon of Zadonsk), and the bereaved mother whom Zosima consoles echoes Dostoevsky’s own grief (Stanton, Optina Pustyn in the Russian Literary Imagination, ch. on Dostoevsky; orthochristian.com / Russia Beyond on the 1878 visit). Leo Tolstoy visited Optina repeatedly across his life — drawn to the place even as he came to reject the institution of eldership — making his final, famous flight toward Optina and the nearby Shamordino (where his sister Maria was a nun) in the last days before his death in 1910 (Wikipedia, Optina Pustyn: Tolstoy “visited the monastery, although he did not approve of the staretsdom”). Tolstoy met Ambrose on earlier visits and came away impressed in spite of himself; the elder, for his part, is reported to have judged the great writer hardened in his pride. The encounter is the sharpest image of the culture war the monastery sat astride: the most famous moralist in the world and the most famous elder in Russia, unable either to agree or to ignore one another. That Tolstoy, excommunicate and dying, turned his last journey toward Optina is the period’s most eloquent testimony to the monastery’s gravitational pull.

The register of Optina’s literary visitors does not end with these names. Vasily Rozanov, Sergei Nilus (later the chronicler of St. Seraphim’s Motovilov conversation), and a long train of lesser writers and thinkers came in the late imperial decades; the monastery’s guest registers and the elders’ correspondence preserve the record of a steady traffic between the capitals and the cell. Stanton’s study reads this whole phenomenon as the formation of an “iconic vision” in Russian letters — Optina functioning in the literary imagination as an image of wholeness, the still point against which the writers measured the disorder of the modern self. Whether one accepts that reading or not, the bare fact stands: for the better part of a century, an extraordinary share of Russia’s creative and intellectual elite found its way to one small monastery in Kaluga province, and for thirty of those years the man they came to see was Ambrose.

What Optina Meant in the Culture Wars

Optina occupied a singular place in the nineteenth-century Russian quarrel over the nation’s identity. To the Slavophiles and the conservative intelligentsia it was the proof that Russia possessed a living spiritual tradition equal in depth to anything in the Christian West — a counter-image to the rationalist, Westernizing current of the age. The monastery on the river Zhizdra, near Kozelsk, became a recurring symbol: a place to which the educated and the troubled came down out of the capitals to find an order they had lost. The framings that cast Optina as a kind of conscience of Russia — “Russia’s conscience by the Zhizdra” — belong to this reception and are best read as the period’s and later commentators’ assessments of the monastery’s cultural role, not as a documented self-description (Stanton, Optina Pustyn in the Russian Literary Imagination, on the monastery’s place in the literary imagination; cf. Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn and Its Era).

The pilgrim-writers’ register is the concrete record of that role: Gogol, the Kireyevskys, Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Tolstoy, Leontiev, and later Vasily Rozanov among the writers; and behind them the peasants and townspeople who came in their thousands to the same elder. That a single starets — Ambrose — received both Dostoevsky and the illiterate peasant woman with the same word is the heart of what Optina meant: not a refuge for intellectuals only, but a point at which the whole society, high and low, passed through one door.

The literary afterlife sealed this meaning. The Brothers Karamazov, with its Elder Zosima drawn in part from Ambrose, carried the Russian institution of the starets to a worldwide readership and made Optina — under a thin fictional veil — a permanent fixture of world literature. Leontiev’s essays gave the monastery a place in the conservative philosophy of culture; the Slavophiles had already made it the proof-text of their account of Russian identity. Tolstoy’s lifelong, conflicted gravitation toward Optina — culminating in his deathward flight in 1910 — is the negative confirmation of the same fact: even the great heresiarch of the age could not stay away. Optina was where the Russian nineteenth century went to argue with itself about God, and the elder at its center for thirty of those years was Ambrose.

References

Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Others. Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature 3. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya [Optina Pustyn and Its Era]. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970.
Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. (On the 1878 Optina visit and The Brothers Karamazov.)
“The Spiritual Path of Konstantin Leontiev — The Beginning of Wisdom.” orthochristian.com / pravoslavie.ru. (Used to locate the 1891 secret tonsure as Kliment and Ambrose’s direction to Sergiev Posad.)
“Konstantin Leontiev.” Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica. (Used to locate the tonsure date August 18, 1891, and death November 24, 1891.)
“Optina Pustyn.” Wikipedia. (Used to locate the Kireyevsky graves, the writers’ visits, and Tolstoy; not the terminal citation.)