Withdrawal to Chernigov

The tradition remembers that St. Anthony, at some point in his old age, left Kiev for the lands of Svyatoslav Yaroslavich of Chernigov, where he is said to have dug a cave in the Boldina Hills near the city and so founded a monastery there before returning to Kiev. The withdrawal is associated above all with the political upheaval of 1068–1069 — the rout of the Yaroslavichi on the Alta, the Kiev uprising, and the expulsion and return of Grand Prince Izyaslav — but the sources do not date it cleanly, and the early Chronicle’s anger-episode of 1051 and this later political flight are repeatedly conflated. This file sets out what the tradition reports, distinguishes the two moments, and flags the disputes over dating and over the historicity of the Boldina foundation.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Kievan; father of Russian monasticism)

A Hermit in a Time of Upheaval

The tradition of Anthony’s withdrawal to Chernigov cannot be read apart from the political crisis of the late 1060s, which the Primary Chronicle narrates at length and into which the withdrawal is set. The crisis ran as follows. The three eldest sons of Yaroslav the Wise — Izyaslav of Kiev, Svyatoslav of Chernigov, and Vsevolod of Pereyaslavl, the ruling triumvirate of the Rus known as the Yaroslavichi — marched together against the nomadic Polovtsy (Cumans) and were heavily defeated on the river Alta in 1068 (PVL, s.a. 1068; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, on the Alta defeat and its consequences). The defeated Izyaslav fled back to Kiev, and when the Kievans, fearing a fresh Polovtsian attack, demanded that he arm them and lead them out again, he refused; the city rose in revolt, freed a rival prince (Vseslav of Polotsk) from prison and set him on the throne, and Izyaslav fled into exile in Poland (PVL, s.a. 1068; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The next year, 1069, Izyaslav returned with Polish help and recovered Kiev, exacting a reprisal on the city that had cast him out (PVL, s.a. 1069; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the uprising and the restoration). Of the three brothers, it was Svyatoslav of Chernigov who emerged with the most credit from the campaign — the Chronicle records that he, with a small force, won a victory over the Polovtsy at Snovsk where his elder brother had failed (PVL, s.a. 1068; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor) — and it is into Svyatoslav’s protection that the tradition sends Anthony.

The Caves dossier itself ties Anthony to the disaster of 1068 by another thread: the tradition that he had foretold the defeat on the Alta to the three Yaroslavichi before they marched — a prophecy reported by the later sources and pinned to them as devotional narrative rather than asserted as record (cf. PVL, s.a. 1068; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). Whatever its historicity, the prophecy shows that the tradition placed Anthony close to the events of 1068 — close enough that his withdrawal from Kiev came to be read against that political background.

The Tradition of the Withdrawal

The substance of the tradition is this. At a moment of danger to himself, Anthony left Kiev and withdrew to the territory of Svyatoslav of Chernigov, who received and protected him; there, near the city of Chernigov, in the wooded heights known as the Boldina (Boldino) Hills, Anthony dug himself a cave after his accustomed manner and lived in solitude, and around that cave a monastery is said to have grown — the foundation later associated with the Elias (Il’inskii) monastery at Chernigov. After a time Anthony returned to Kiev and to his cave on the Berestovo hill, where he died, by the most common reckoning, in 1073 (the withdrawal to Svyatoslav’s protection, the digging of the Boldina cave, and the eventual return are the tradition’s; the Caves Paterik and later Chernigov tradition preserve them; trans. Heppell). The episode is, in this telling, of a piece with everything else known of Anthony: a hermit who, when the world pressed too close — whether through a prince’s anger or a city’s revolt — answered as he always answered, by going deeper into solitude and, in the going, founding another monastery (the same disposition that runs through his whole career is drawn out at Anthony’s Withdrawal).

The cause of the withdrawal is where the sources grow difficult. Two reasons are given in the tradition, and they belong to two different moments. By one account, the cause was the anger of Izyaslav — the prince’s wrath at the monastery, which would point back to the quarrel of 1051 over the tonsures (see The Prince and the Monk). By another, more political account, the cause was Anthony’s involvement, or suspected sympathy, in the events of 1068–1069: when Izyaslav returned in 1069 and took his reprisal on Kiev, Anthony — associated in some way with Vseslav of Polotsk, the prince the rebels had raised, or simply suspect to the restored Izyaslav — was in danger, and Svyatoslav of Chernigov secretly brought him away to safety in his own lands. These are not the same story, and the difference of date between them — 1051 against 1068/69 — is nearly two decades.

Distinguishing 1051 from 1068/69

The central source-critical task of this file is to keep two episodes apart that the tradition runs together.

The first is the anger-episode narrated by the Primary Chronicle under the year 1051: the quarrel over the tonsures of Varlaam and Ephraim, Izyaslav’s threat to scatter the brethren and dig up the cave, the brethren’s readiness to leave for another land, and the reconciliation brought about by the prince’s wife (PVL, s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor; see The Prince and the Monk). In the Chronicle’s own telling this quarrel ends in reconciliation, and the monks who had set out to depart are recalled and restored; the 1051 entry does not narrate a withdrawal to Chernigov. The “readiness to leave” of 1051 is a threat aborted by the prince’s repentance, not a completed flight.

The second is the political turmoil of 1068–1069, narrated by the Chronicle under those years: the Alta defeat, the Kiev uprising, Izyaslav’s expulsion to Poland, and his return and reprisal (PVL, s.a. 1068; s.a. 1069; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor; Franklin and Shepard 1996). It is to this later crisis that a completed withdrawal of Anthony to Svyatoslav’s Chernigov is most naturally fitted — a flight from the restored Izyaslav’s reprisal of 1069, made possible by Svyatoslav’s protection. The 1068/69 events supply a motive (danger from a vengeful restored prince) and a protector (Svyatoslav, who held Chernigov and whose standing was then rising) that the 1051 episode does not.

The two are conflated because they share a structure — Anthony, Izyaslav’s displeasure, the readiness to depart — and because the Primary Chronicle gathers the whole Caves foundation-narrative retrospectively under 1051, so that events of very different dates are told together in a single thematic block (on the Chronicle’s retrospective, non-annalistic ordering of the Caves material, see The Primary Chronicle Account). A reader who takes the 1051 entry as a strict chronology will naturally fold the later flight into the earlier quarrel; a reader alert to the Chronicle’s method will hold them apart.

[Disputed: the date and circumstance of Anthony’s withdrawal to Chernigov. (A) One strand of the tradition refers the withdrawal to the anger of Izyaslav arising from the 1051 quarrel over the tonsures of Varlaam and Ephraim — but the Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor) ends that quarrel in reconciliation and narrates no flight, so on this reading the Chernigov withdrawal is either a separate and later event mistakenly attached to 1051 or a doublet of the 1051 threat. (B) A second, more political strand places the withdrawal in the upheaval of 1068–1069 — the Alta defeat, the Kiev uprising, and Izyaslav’s expulsion and vengeful return (s.a. 1068; s.a. 1069; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor; Franklin and Shepard 1996) — with Anthony fleeing the restored Izyaslav’s reprisal under the protection of Svyatoslav of Chernigov, a dating that supplies a coherent motive and protector. The two strands are frequently conflated in hagiography because the Chronicle tells the whole Caves story retrospectively under 1051. The 1068/69 setting is the more historically coherent for a completed withdrawal to Svyatoslav’s Chernigov; the 1051 link is best understood as the earlier, reconciled anger-episode pulled forward by association. The sources do not permit a firm single date.]

The Boldina Caves and the Chernigov Foundation

The tradition that Anthony, during his stay near Chernigov, dug a cave in the Boldina Hills and there founded a monastery is one of the load-bearing claims about his later years, and it must be handled with care, for it rests on later attestation rather than on the early Chronicle.

The Primary Chronicle‘s foundation-narrative of the Caves (s.a. 1051) does not record a Chernigov foundation; the linking of Anthony to the Boldina Hills and to the origins of the Chernigov monastery (later the Elias / Il’inskii house) belongs to the later Caves and Chernigov tradition, developed in the Paterik and in local Chernigov memory (the Boldina foundation is the tradition’s, preserved in the later sources rather than the early Chronicle; trans. Heppell). On the one hand, the claim is entirely in character: digging caves and withdrawing into solitude is precisely what Anthony did everywhere he went, and a hermit sheltered near Chernigov would naturally have made himself a cave there, around which disciples could gather as they had on the Berestovo hill. On the other hand, the impulse to derive a second great monastery’s origin from the founder of the first is a familiar hagiographical pattern, and the early evidence for Anthony’s personal foundation of the Boldina house is weaker than for his Kievan work.

[Disputed: the historicity of Anthony’s foundation of the Boldina Hills caves near Chernigov. The tradition — preserved in the later Caves Paterik and in Chernigov local memory (trans. Heppell) and widely repeated in hagiography — holds that Anthony personally dug the Boldina cave during his Chernigov withdrawal and so founded the monastery there (associated with the later Elias/Il’inskii house). The early and near-contemporary source, the Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1051; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor), narrates only the Kievan foundation and is silent on a Chernigov one; the Boldina attribution rests on later attestation and conforms to the hagiographical pattern of tracing a second monastery’s origin to the founder of the first. The withdrawal to Svyatoslav’s protection has a plausible historical core in the 1068/69 turmoil; the specific claim that Anthony personally founded the Boldina monastery is a later traditional development, secure as tradition but not established by the early record (handled per METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

The Return and the Pattern

The tradition has Anthony return from Chernigov to Kiev and to his cave on the Berestovo hill, where he ended his days; the common reckoning places his death in 1073, two years before the consecration of the great stone church of the Dormition that his blessing had foretold and that Theodosius and the brethren would raise (the return to Kiev and the death at the Caves are the tradition’s; the 1073 dating is the conventional one, consonant with the Primary Chronicle‘s placing of Theodosius’s death in 1074 the year after; cf. PVL, s.a. 1074; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor). The withdrawal to Chernigov was thus, in the tradition, a temporary thing — a season of danger weathered in another prince’s land — and not a permanent removal; Anthony belongs, in the end, to the Kievan hill where he had dug his first cave and where his relics were laid (on the relics and the place of burial, the veneration treated elsewhere in this collection).

Read as a whole, the Chernigov episode is the political enlargement of a pattern already established in Anthony’s life. The hermit who would not rule his own monastery, who dug himself deeper into the hill rather than govern the community he had gathered, and who in 1051 was ready to leave the cave altogether rather than surrender the monastery’s freedom, answers the crisis of 1068–1069 in the same idiom: he withdraws. The withdrawal is not flight in the sense of cowardice but the recurrent gesture of a man whose whole vocation was recession from the press of the world — and who turned even his recessions into foundations, leaving a new cave wherever he went (see Anthony’s Withdrawal, and on the eremitic ideal it expresses, Monasticism). That a season of political danger should have ended, in the tradition, with the digging of yet another cave and the seeding of yet another monastery is among the most characteristic things the tradition could have remembered about him — and it is on the strength of this many-foundationed solitude that the later church names him the father of Russian monasticism (on that legacy, Russian Monasticism; on the conversion-history that made these foundations possible, The Baptism of Rus).

References

The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text (Povest’ vremennykh let). Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (S.a. 1051: the anger-episode and its reconciliation, with no Chernigov withdrawal narrated; s.a. 1068: the Yaroslavichi, the Polovtsy and the Alta defeat, Svyatoslav’s victory at Snovsk, the Kiev uprising and Izyaslav’s flight; s.a. 1069: Izyaslav’s return and reprisal; s.a. 1074: the death of Theodosius, the year after the conventional date of Anthony’s death.)
The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. Trans. Muriel Heppell. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The later tradition of Anthony’s withdrawal to Svyatoslav’s protection, the Boldina Hills cave near Chernigov, and the Chernigov foundation; the developed devotional form of the episode.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (Anthony’s eremitic vocation and his recurrent withdrawals; the Caves monastery amid the princely politics of the Yaroslavichi.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The Yaroslavichi triumvirate; the 1068 Alta defeat and the Polovtsian threat; the 1068 Kiev uprising, Izyaslav’s expulsion and his 1069 restoration; Svyatoslav of Chernigov’s rising standing.)