Basil in Art and National Memory

Basil’s peculiar afterlife in image and imagination. In iconography he is the naked, white-bearded fool, chains in hand, against the towers of Moscow. In the national memory he is fused with the cathedral that bears his name — a building whose ringed, many-coloured domes have become the single most recognizable visual shorthand for Russia itself, so that a hidden fool’s name marks the emblem of a nation.

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

The Icon

In Orthodox iconography Basil is depicted according to his ascetic sign: an old man, naked or nearly so, with a long white beard, his body gaunt from austerity, often shown against the walls and towers of Moscow or before the cathedral that holds his relics (Preobrazhensky, in Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya [PE], vol. 7, “Василий Блаженный,” Moscow, 2004, pravenc.ru/text/150789.html — the iconography section). The nakedness that was scandal in life becomes, in the icon, the saint’s identifying attribute, the visible summary of his renunciation; where other saints are known by their vestments or their books, Basil is known precisely by his lack of them. Early images cluster around the cathedral and the cult of the relics from the late sixteenth century onward, and the iconographic type — the naked, chained, praying fool of Moscow — was fixed early and remained stable (Preobrazhensky, in PE, vol. 7). The icon thus preserves, in devotional form, exactly what the contemporary witness Fletcher recorded from life: the naked, chained ascetic of the winter streets (Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth, 1591, ed. Pipes and Fine, Harvard, 1966; see The Naked Ascetic of the City).

The Cathedral as Emblem of Russia

Basil’s deepest hold on the national memory is not through his icon but through his name — the name fixed, by the accident of a corner chapel, on the Cathedral of the Intercession, and through that cathedral on Russia itself. The building’s astonishing silhouette — the cluster of nine differently-coloured, differently-patterned domes rising over Red Square — became, over the centuries, the single most recognizable image of Russia, reproduced endlessly as the visual shorthand for the nation, from nineteenth-century paintings to twentieth-century posters to the modern tourist’s photograph (Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4, on the cathedral as the emblem of Russia). No other Russian building carries this symbolic weight, and it carries a fool’s name: the emblem of the nation is known to the world as “St. Basil’s” (on the naming see The Name and the Cult and The Cathedral of the Intercession on the Moat). There is a quiet irony worth naming: a man who spent his life refusing every place, possession, and honour of the world has become, through his name on this building, inseparable from the visual identity of the Russian state and nation — an outcome the fool himself would surely have regarded as the world’s folly.

The Fool in Russian Culture

Beyond the cathedral, Basil belongs to the broad cultural presence of the holy fool in Russia, a figure that runs from the medieval Lives deep into modern literature and art. The yurodivy became one of the enduring types of the Russian imagination — the truth-telling fool who appears in Pushkin’s and Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, confronting the tsar with the guilt of innocent blood, and whose descendants populate Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture, University Press of America, 1987, on the fool as a cultural type shaping Russian literature; Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, 2006, on the fool’s afterlife in Russian culture). Basil, as the most famous historical fool, stands behind this cultural figure as its supreme real exemplar: when Russians imagine the fool who rebukes the powerful, it is Basil before Ivan, and Nikola before Ivan, that supply the historical memory (see Basil and Ivan the Terrible; Basil Among the Russian Fools). The holy fool as a mode of speaking truth to power, of exposing the hypocrisy of the great, of embodying the Gospel’s reversal of worldly values, is one of Russia’s distinctive contributions to the Christian imagination, and Basil is its face.

The Fool Before the Tsar in the Arts

The most concentrated cultural distillation of the type Basil embodies is the Holy Fool of Boris Godunov — the yurodivy who, in Pushkin’s drama (1825) and Musorgsky’s opera (1869/1874) after it, confronts the guilt-ridden tsar in the public square, refusing to pray for a Herod and lamenting over Russia (Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture, University Press of America, 1987, on the fool in Pushkin and Musorgsky as the literary crystallization of the historical type). The scene is set in the Time of Troubles, a generation after Basil, but its whole force draws on the sixteenth-century reality that Basil and Nikola of Pskov made famous: the fool as the one voice that could reproach the autocrat and survive, the powerless innocent who speaks the truth the powerful cannot bear (see Basil and Ivan the Terrible). Through such works the figure of the holy fool passed into the permanent repertory of Russian art, and Basil stands behind it as the supreme historical instance. Dostoevsky’s fascination with the holy innocent — Prince Myshkin, the pilgrims and God’s-fools of his novels — belongs to the same long shadow, the yurodivy as a Russian image of a wisdom the world calls madness (Thompson, 1987; Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, 2006, on the fool’s literary afterlife).

Image and Reality

There is a final point of method in Basil’s afterlife in image. The cathedral-as-emblem and the fool-as-cultural-type can, if one is not careful, replace the saint himself — Basil becoming merely the name on a famous building, or a literary trope, rather than a man the Church glorified for his holiness. The value of the source-critical and devotional work of this collection is to hold the real saint together with his enormous symbolic afterlife: to remember that behind the tourist’s icon of Russia stands a corner chapel, and behind the chapel a grave, and in the grave the relics of a naked fool whom Moscow venerated as a wonderworker and the Church received as a saint (see What Can Be Known). The image is vast and the man is hidden — which is, in the end, entirely fitting for a fool-for-Christ, whose whole vocation was to hide his holiness under a scandal, and whose fame, when it came, came in a form he never sought and would have counted as nothing. The sober weighing of that whole is the work of the final section.

See Also

References

  • Preobrazhensky, A. S. “Василий Блаженный” (iconography section). In Pravoslavnaya Entsiklopediya, vol. 7, 123–131. Moscow, 2004. pravenc.ru/text/150789.html. (The iconographic type: the naked, white-bearded fool against Moscow; the early fixing of the type.)
  • Brumfield, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, ch. 4. (The Intercession Cathedral as the emblem of Russia.)
  • Thompson, Ewa M. Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. (The holy fool as a cultural type in Russian literature.)
  • Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford University Press, 2006. (The fool’s afterlife in Russian culture.)
  • Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Commonwealth (1591). Ed. Pipes and Fine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. (The naked, chained persona the icon preserves.)