The Killing of Gleb

Gleb, the younger brother, was at Murom when Svyatopolk lured him toward Kiev with a false message that their father lay ill and was asking for him — concealing both that Vladimir was already dead and that Boris had been killed. Setting out by way of the Dnieper, Gleb was overtaken by his brother’s men near Smolensk; warned too late, in the Skazanie‘s account, by a message from Yaroslav, he met his death pleading with his killers for mercy, and was slain by his own cook, Torchin, who cut his throat at the assassins’ order. His body was left on the riverbank between two logs and recovered only later. This file narrates that death as the tradition tells it, pinned to its three sources, with attention to the portrait of Gleb’s youth and meekness.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

Gleb at Murom

When Vladimir died, Gleb was far from Kiev, at his provincial seat of Murom on the Oka, at the northeastern edge of the Rus’ lands (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; on the appanage, see The Sons of Vladimir). His distance from the capital shapes the whole episode. Where Boris died near Kiev, within reach of Svyatopolk’s hand, Gleb had to be drawn out — brought from his remote seat into the open, where he could be reached. The tradition’s account of his death is, accordingly, an account of a deception.

The hagiography presents Gleb throughout as the younger brother, and as notably young. The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie dwell on his youth and his guilelessness, and the literary portrait that emerges — Gleb almost boyish, tender, undefended, easily deceived — is one of the most affecting in early Rus’ literature (Hollingsworth 1992, translating the Skazanie and Chtenie; Fedotov 1946, on the portrait of Gleb’s youth and meekness). George Fedotov took Gleb’s portrait, especially his childlike pleading with his killers, as the purest expression of the passion-bearer ideal — the saint who meets death not with the defiance of the confessor but with the helplessness of an innocent (Fedotov 1946). That this is a literary portrait, shaped to the ideal, is not concealed here; it is exactly the tradition’s reading of the death, and it is offered as such.

The False Message

In the tradition’s account, Svyatopolk drew Gleb to his death with a lie. He sent word to Gleb that their father Vladimir was gravely ill and was asking for him, summoning him to come quickly to Kiev — while concealing both that Vladimir was in fact already dead and that Boris had already been murdered (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The cruelty of the device is precisely its filial pull: Gleb is summoned by what he believes is a dying father’s wish to see him, and his haste to obey is his undoing. He set out at once, the sources say, with a small company, traveling by the river route — down toward Smolensk and the Dnieper — in his anxiety to reach his father (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992).

The Skazanie makes the journey a small passion in itself: Gleb hurrying south, ignorant of the deaths behind the summons, riding and then taking boat, while the trap closes ahead of him (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The hagiographer’s irony is deliberate — the reader knows what Gleb does not — and it deepens the pathos the tradition has invested in him.

The Warning That Came Too Late

Before the killers reached him, the tradition says, Gleb received a warning — but too late to save him. In the Skazanie‘s account the warning came from Yaroslav, Gleb’s brother at Novgorod, who had himself been told of Vladimir’s death and Boris’s murder by their sister Predslava at Kiev; Yaroslav sent to warn Gleb not to go on, that their father was dead and Boris had been slain by Svyatopolk (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946). The message reached Gleb on the river, and the sources give him a great outpouring of grief at it: he wept for his father now known to be dead and for his brother Boris murdered, lamenting that he would rather die with them than live (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992).

The agent and route of the warning differ enough among the sources to be flagged rather than smoothed. [Disputed: the Skazanie (in Hollingsworth 1992) attributes the warning to Yaroslav, informed from Kiev by their sister Predslava, who then sent word ahead to Gleb; the Primary Chronicle (s.a. 1015) presents the sequence of Gleb’s summons and interception more compactly and does not develop the warning in the same way; the warning-by-Yaroslav is thus a feature most fully attested in the hagiographical Skazanie, and the precise channel by which Gleb learned of the deaths cannot be fixed beyond what that text reports.] What the sources agree on is the effect: forewarned or not, Gleb did not turn back to safety in time, and the killers overtook him.

The Killers on the Dnieper

The assassins sent by Svyatopolk caught Gleb on the water, near Smolensk, where his boat had come down toward the mouth of the Smyadyn into the Dnieper (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The Chronicle and the Skazanie agree on the river setting and on the manner in which the killers came up against Gleb’s vessel and seized control of it (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The men in Gleb’s own company, the Skazanie indicates, offered no effective resistance; the prince was delivered into the killers’ hands almost without a struggle, consistent with the tradition’s whole portrait of a death undefended (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992).

Gleb’s Pleading

What follows is the scene Fedotov singled out as the heart of Gleb’s passion. Where Boris in the Skazanie meets death with the settled resolve of a man who has reasoned his way to non-resistance, Gleb pleads. The sources give him an entreaty to his killers for mercy — the sense of it, paraphrased, that they should not harm him, his dear and beloved brothers, that he had done them no wrong; that if there were some offense, they should bring him to their prince; that they should spare his youth and not reap him before his time, an unripe ear of grain (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Nestor, Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the “unripe grain” image is drawn out by Fedotov 1946). The plea is reported here as what the Skazanie and Chtenie attest — composed by the hagiographers as the speech of a martyr in the manner of their genre, not as recorded words (Lenhoff 1989, on the literary character of these speeches; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Theologically, Gleb’s pleading is not a failure of the passion-bearer ideal but, in Fedotov’s reading, its tenderest form. He does not curse his killers, does not resist, does not invoke his rank to threaten; he begs as a child begs, and he submits (Fedotov 1946). The tradition makes the very helplessness of the plea part of the sanctity — the innocent who cannot save himself and will not strike back (on the theology, see A New Category of Sanctity).

Torchin the Cook

The killing itself the tradition assigns to an intimate of Gleb’s own household, which sharpens its horror. At the killers’ order, Gleb’s own cook — named Torchin in the tradition, the name marking him as a Tork, one of the Turkic steppe peoples in Rus’ service — took a knife and cut his master’s throat (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). That a man of the prince’s own table was made the instrument of his death is a detail both the Chronicle and the Skazanie preserve, and it carries, in the tradition’s reading, a deliberate echo of betrayal by one’s own — the servant turned against his lord (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the motif of betrayal). The Skazanie renders Gleb’s death in the imagery of sacrifice: he is slaughtered “like a spotless lamb,” an innocent offering (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the sacrificial figure noted by Fedotov 1946).

The Body on the Riverbank

The killers did not honor the body. Gleb’s corpse was left on the riverbank, in a deserted place, cast down “between two logs” (or between two hollowed tree-trunks), without burial (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The detail is one of the most concrete and unsentimental in the whole narrative, and its very starkness — a murdered prince left unburied in the wilderness by the Dnieper — is part of why the tradition reads the later honoring of the relics as a vindication. The Skazanie reports that the body lay there for a long time, neglected, before it was found and recovered, and that wonders — a pillar of fire, candles, the singing of angelic voices seen and heard by passers-by — marked the spot, signs by which God did not let His servant’s body stay hidden (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). These wonders are reported here as the Skazanie’s testimony, the claims of the hagiography, not as independently asserted fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

In the tradition, the body of Gleb was eventually recovered and, after a search, brought to Vyshgorod to be laid beside Boris, so that the two brothers who had died apart — one near Kiev, one near Smolensk — were united in a single shrine (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The joining of the brothers in death and in cult, though they were killed in different places and manners, is one of the defining features of their joint veneration.

What the Narrative Rests On

As with Boris, the death of Gleb survives only in the three works composed to venerate him, and the account keeps that in view. The Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015, supplies the connected narrative — the false summons, the interception near Smolensk, the cook Torchin, the body left between the logs (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953). The Skazanie gives the fullest devotional version, with the warning from Yaroslav by way of Predslava, Gleb’s laments and pleading, the sacrificial imagery, and the wonders at the riverbank (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). Nestor’s Chtenie recasts the same events in the more elevated idiom of the Byzantine vita (Nestor, Chtenie, in Hollingsworth 1992; on the relationship of the texts, see The Primary Chronicle). Beneath the hagiography, and behind the unanimous tradition that lays both deaths at Svyatopolk’s door, lies the same contested historical question raised by Boris’s killing — whether Svyatopolk or, on the saga-based reading, Yaroslav was the author of the murders. What the tradition narrates of Gleb is the passion of a young and meek prince, deceived to his death and dying without resistance; what history can affirm beneath it is that the younger son of Vladimir was lured from Murom and killed on the Dnieper in the war for Kiev.

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The entry s.a. 1015: Gleb at Murom; the false message that Vladimir was ill and asking for him; the journey by the river route; the interception near Smolensk; the cook Torchin cutting Gleb’s throat; the body left on the riverbank between two logs.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie i strast’ i pokhvala: the deception; the warning from Yaroslav by way of Predslava; Gleb’s laments and his pleading with his killers; the sacrificial “spotless lamb” imagery; the wonders at the riverbank and the recovery of the body to Vyshgorod. Nestor’s Chtenie: the Byzantine recasting of Gleb’s passion.)
Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The portrait of Gleb’s youth and meekness; the pleading and the “unripe grain” image; the motif of betrayal by the cook; Gleb as the purest expression of the passion-bearer ideal.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. UCLA Slavic Studies. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The literary character of the martyrs’ speeches; the relationship of the texts; the cult that joined the brothers at Vyshgorod.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The political setting of the killings in the succession war; the historical kernel beneath the hagiographical narrative.)