Basil Among the Russian Fools

Basil in the company of the other Russian fools-for-Christ: the earlier fools of Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov, and Ustyug; his fellow Moscow fool Blessed John, buried at the same cathedral; and, above all, Blessed Nikola Salos of Pskov, whose famous rebuke of Ivan the Terrible the tradition partly transferred to Basil. The line runs on to St. Xenia of Petersburg two centuries later.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified 1588; feast 2 August O.S. / 15 August N.S.)

A Crowded Tradition

Basil is the most famous Russian fool-for-Christ, but he is far from the only one; he stands at the summit of a crowded and well-populated tradition. Medieval and early-modern Russia produced a whole line of canonized yurodivye, concentrated in the northern and central towns and reaching its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, Harvard University Press, 1966, ch. 12; Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Franklin, Oxford University Press, 2006). Among the best known before or around Basil’s time are Procopius of Ustyug (d. 1303), a Western merchant converted to Orthodoxy who became the first widely venerated Russian fool; Isidore of Rostov (d. 1474); and the Novgorod fools Nicholas Kochanov and Theodore, remembered for a mock-battle across the Volkhov that dramatized the city’s factional strife (Fedotov, 1966, vol. 2; Ivanov, 2006). Placing Basil among them shows that he was not an isolated eccentric but the greatest flowering of an established Russian sanctity — the type Russia had long recognized and revered, brought to its most famous expression in the capital under Ivan the Terrible.

The Fools of Moscow: Basil and John

Moscow itself had more than one fool, and two are bound together in the tradition and at the cathedral. Alongside Basil stands Blessed John of Moscow — called “the Hairy” or “Big Cap” (Ioann Bolshoy Kolpak), from the heavy cap and the iron he wore — who died in 1589, a generation after Basil, and was likewise buried at the Cathedral of the Intercession, his relics venerated there (Erusalimsky, in Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya [PE], vol. 7, “Василий Блаженный,” Moscow, 2004, pravenc.ru/text/150789.html; Kuznetsov, Svyatye blazhennye Vasily i Ioann, Khrista radi yurodivye, Moskovskie chudotvortsy, Moscow, 1910 — whose very title pairs “the holy blessed Basil and John, fools for Christ, Moscow wonderworkers”). The two Moscow fools were remembered and studied together, and their shared burial made the great cathedral a double shrine of yurodstvo (see The Chapel and the Relics). John, like Basil, was remembered for boldness before the powerful; the pairing shows how thoroughly the type had established itself in the capital.

Nikola Salos of Pskov

The most important of Basil’s fellow fools, for this collection, is Blessed Nikola Salos of Pskov (d. 1576) — “Salos” itself being the Greek word for a holy fool — because his story and Basil’s became entangled. Nikola’s fame rests on a single celebrated deed. In February 1570, when Ivan the Terrible, having just sacked Novgorod in a frenzy of killing, came to Pskov intending the same, Nikola confronted him: he offered the tsar a piece of raw meat during Great Lent, and when Ivan objected that he did not eat meat in the fast, retorted that the tsar did far worse in devouring the flesh of Christians — a rebuke that, the tradition says, so shamed and frightened Ivan that he spared the city and withdrew (OCA, “Blessed Nicholas (Salos) of Pskov,” oca.org; the 1570 Pskov episode). This is the raw-meat rebuke that later tradition sometimes attached to Basil — impossibly, since Basil was long dead by 1570 — and which the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya identifies as Nikola’s, along with the Novgorod-fire material tied to the same 1569–70 campaign (PE, vol. 7; see Basil and Ivan the Terrible and The Anecdotes and Prophecies).

[Disputed: The “raw meat in Lent” rebuke of Ivan the Terrible belongs, in the sources, to Blessed Nikola Salos of Pskov and the events of 1570, not to Basil, who was dead by 1557 at the latest; the Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya (vol. 7) identifies both this deed and the associated Novgorod-campaign material as Nikola’s, transferred to the more famous Moscow fool. This compendium keeps the deed with Nikola. Both saints belong to the real sixteenth-century phenomenon of the fool who rebuked the terrible tsar; the specific raw-meat rebuke is Nikola’s.]

The entanglement is itself instructive about how the tradition works. Two great fools, in the same terrible decade, are each remembered for confronting Ivan; and a devotional memory, prizing the confrontation above the details, drew Nikola’s sharpest deed onto Basil, the most famous of all the fools. Naming the transfer honours both saints — Nikola keeps his deed, Basil keeps his integrity — and it illustrates the class-(d) conflation that the flagship methodology is built to catch.

The Fool and the Tsar as a Sixteenth-Century Type

Set side by side, Basil and Nikola reveal the fool-rebuking-the-tsar as a genuine sixteenth-century phenomenon, not merely a hagiographic trope. The contemporary witness Giles Fletcher, in Moscow in 1588–89, reports that such fools did reprove Ivan for his cruelty and enjoyed a licensed freedom before him (Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth, 1591, ed. Pipes and Fine, Harvard, 1966; see Basil and Ivan the Terrible). The fool’s peculiar power — powerless, naked, mad in the world’s eyes, and therefore untouchable and free — made him the one voice that could speak truth to the most fearsome autocrat of the age, and the age remembered its fools above all for exercising it. Basil rebuking Ivan in Moscow, Nikola rebuking him in Pskov: these are the twin summits of the tradition, the moment when the folly-for-Christ met absolute power and, in the tradition’s memory, did not flinch.

The Arc to Xenia

The tradition did not end with the sixteenth century, though it thinned. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries genuine fools were rarer and the authorities more suspicious, but the vocation persisted, and it produced its last great popular saint in Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg (d. c. 1803) — a widow who gave away her goods, took her dead husband’s name and clothing, and lived for decades as a homeless fool on the streets of the imperial capital (see St. Xenia of St. Petersburg). Basil and Xenia frame the tradition’s Russian arc: Basil at its medieval Muscovite height, before the terrible tsar; Xenia at its persistence into the modern city, among the poor and the grieving. The two are the great Russian fools of the popular imagination, and — as this repository’s paired treatment of them shows — they share not only the vocation but the historian’s difficulty: both are thinly documented saints whose deepest reality reaches us through late and devotional sources, and whose cults are firmer than their biographies (see What Can Be Known; St. Xenia: Hagiography vs. History). To read them together is to see the whole shape of yurodstvo as a Russian path, from Emesa through Moscow to Petersburg.

References

Erusalimsky, K. Yu. “Василий Блаженный.” In Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, vol. 7, 123–131. Moscow, 2004. pravenc.ru/text/150789.html. (Blessed John of Moscow at the cathedral; the raw-meat and Novgorod deeds as Nikola Salos of Pskov’s, transferred to Basil.)
Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford University Press, 2006. (The line of Russian fools; Procopius, Isidore, the Novgorod fools; the later decline.)
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, ch. 12. (The Russian fools before and around Basil.)
Kuznetsov, Ioann I. Svyatye blazhennye Vasily i Ioann, Khrista radi yurodivye, Moskovskie chudotvortsy. Moscow, 1910. (The paired Moscow fools Basil and John.)
Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591). Ed. Pipes and Fine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (Contemporary report of fools rebuking Ivan.)
“Blessed Nicholas (Salos) of Pskov the Fool-For-Christ.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The 1570 raw-meat rebuke of Ivan at Pskov.)