Early Life and Family

The origins and formation of St. John of Shanghai, born Mikhail Borisovich Maximovitch on June 4, 1896, in the village of Adamovka in Kharkov province — his descent from the noble Maximovitch family to which St. John of Tobolsk also belonged, his sickly and pious childhood, his education at the Poltava Cadet Corps and the law faculty of Kharkov University (1918), the early influence of Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky), and his evacuation to Belgrade in 1921 during the Russian Civil War.

Tradition: ROCOR (glorified 1994; Moscow Patriarchate veneration affirmed 2008)

Birth and Name

The future archbishop was born Mikhail (Michael) Borisovich Maximovitch on June 4, 1896 (Old Style), in the village of Adamovka, in the province of Kharkov in southern Russia — territory now in Ukraine (Mileant, Life and Miracles, orthochristian.com/54575.html; the bare date “June 4, 1896” is given in nearly all the lives, with the Old Style/Julian reckoning noted at OrthodoxWiki, used here only as a locator). He was baptized Michael, after the Archangel Michael.

The standard lives are careful in their wording about his secular name and place: Bishop Alexander Mileant’s life, which is the most widely reproduced English account, opens, “Archbishop John was born on June 4, 1896, in the village of Adamovka in the province of Kharkov in southern Russia” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The same particulars appear in the Canadian Orthodox History Project’s entry, which gives the secular name as “Mikhail Borisovitch Maximovitch” and the place as “the village of Adamovka in the Kharkov Governorate” (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint John (Maximovitch)). Some popular accounts call Adamovka the “family estate”; the authoritative lives say “village.”

The Maximovitch Family and St. John of Tobolsk

He belonged to the Maximovitch family, a family of the Little Russian (Ukrainian) nobility. The connection to St. John of Tobolsk (Maximovitch, Metropolitan of Tobolsk, †1715) is stated by the standard lives as a shared family membership rather than a precisely traced descent. Mileant’s life reads: “He was a member of the Little Russian noble family of Maximovitch, to which St. John of Tobolsk also had belonged” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html); the Vita Prima repeats the wording nearly verbatim (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org).

This is the careful formulation worth preserving. The popular renderings that St. John of Tobolsk was his “ancestor” or “distant relative” are simplifications of the “same noble family” claim; no source consulted documents a precise degree of kinship, and the connection is best treated as the attested family tradition the saint himself held [Disputed: the standard lives (Mileant; Vita Prima) assert common membership in the Maximovitch noble family; some devotional accounts speak instead of his “resembling” St. John of Tobolsk, without asserting blood relation — the precise genealogical link is not documented]. When he was tonsured in 1926, he received the monastic name John specifically in honor of this kinsman-saint (see Belgrade and Tonsure), a choice that gave a lifelong shape to his self-understanding.

The kinship was not a matter of antiquarian pride alone. St. John of Tobolsk had himself been a missionary hierarch — a metropolitan who labored at the eastern edge of the Russian world, founded schools, sent a mission into China, and was renowned for almsgiving and for a hidden ascetic life — so that the name carried, in effect, a vocation. The boy who venerated the relics of one Kharkov wonderworker and bore the name of another would in time become a missionary bishop in the Far East, builder of schools and orphanages, almsgiver and hidden ascetic: the resemblance to the Tobolsk metropolitan, which one source frames as the substance of the connection, was lived out rather than merely claimed.

Childhood and Piety

Michael was a sickly child who ate little — a detail the lives report consistently and which prefigures the extreme abstemiousness of his maturity (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). From early childhood he was marked by an unusual devotion: he was drawn to the lives of the saints and to the things of the Church, and he venerated the relics of the local wonderworker, Archbishop Meletius (Leontovich) of Kharkov, whose own ascetic reputation impressed the boy (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html).

His father, Boris Maximovitch, was a marshal of the nobility in one district of Kharkov province — a position of local leadership among the landed gentry (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org). His mother was Glafira (Glaphira); the Orthodox Church in America’s life describes the parents simply as “the pious aristocrats Boris and Glafira Maximovitch” (oca.org, Saint John (Maximovitch)). An uncle was a rector of Kiev University, and the family produced educated and capable men: his brothers later graduated from Belgrade University, one in a technical field and one in law (Vita Prima; Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The much-repeated anecdote that the young Michael dressed his toy soldiers as monks and made his toy fortresses into monasteries appears in popular biographies rather than in the Mileant life or the Vita Prima, and is reported here as a traditional childhood story rather than a documented fact.

What the lives do document is the early gravity of his religious life. Near the family lands lay the great Sviatogorsk (Holy Mountains) Monastery on the Donets, and the boy’s imagination was formed by monastic and hagiographic reading rather than by the pursuits expected of a gentleman’s son. His health was poor, his appetite small, and his disposition inward — a temperament that, in a less devout household, might have passed for mere frailty, but which his pious family read rightly as a vocation forming early. The biographers are unanimous that the things of the Church drew him from the first, and that this drawing only intensified through his schooling.

Education: Poltava and Kharkov

Michael was educated at the Petrovsky Poltava Cadet Corps (rendered in the lives as the “Poltava Military School”), which he attended from 1907 to 1914 and remembered with affection in later years (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org; OCA gives “Poltava Military School (1907–14)”). Even as a cadet his religious seriousness was conspicuous; the lives record that his inclination was always toward the Church rather than toward arms, though they do not document the dramatic father-son conflict over his vocation that some popular tellings supply.

After the cadet corps he entered the law faculty of Kharkov Imperial University, from which he graduated in 1918 — “before it was seized by the Soviets,” as Mileant notes (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). The year 1918 is given consistently across Mileant, the Vita Prima, and the OCA life. The Vita Prima preserves the memorable detail that, as a student, “Vladyka spent more time reading the lives of the saints than attending classes” (Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org) — a law degree earned almost in spite of itself, by a young man whose heart was already given to the Church.

The Influence of Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky)

The decisive human influence of these years was Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kharkov (Archbishop of Kharkov 1914–1918), one of the towering churchmen of the late imperial period and the future first-hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad. The lives record that Antony “took special pains to become acquainted with him, and then kept the youth close to him and guided his spiritual formation” (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html). This relationship, begun in Michael’s student years in Kharkov, would carry through the whole arc of his formation: it was Antony who tonsured him, ordained him, and ultimately consecrated him a bishop.

Antony (Khrapovitsky) was no ordinary diocesan. A leading candidate at the 1917 election for the restored Moscow Patriarchate, a theologian of large influence, and soon to become the founding first-hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, he had a particular gift for discerning and cultivating young vocations. That such a man “kept the youth close to him” is itself a measure of what others would later see in John. The bond was the human thread that ran through his whole rise — from Kharkov student, to Belgrade reader and monk, to bishop — and it gave his ministry from the outset its rootedness in the ecclesial mind of the émigré Church. For Antony’s place in the Church Abroad, see Orthodoxy Guide — ROCOR Formation and Karlovci.

Emigration (1921)

The Revolution and Civil War shattered the world into which Michael had been born. In 1921, during the Russian Civil War, Michael — together with his parents, his brothers, and his sister — was evacuated to Belgrade in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the future Yugoslavia) (Mileant, orthochristian.com/54575.html; Vita Prima, stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org). The year 1921 and the destination of Belgrade are documented consistently in the lives.

The route through Constantinople, often supplied in narrative tellings, fits the general pattern of the great White evacuation of 1920–1921 — in which roughly 150,000 refugees were carried from the Crimea across the Bosphorus to Gallipoli and the Aegean before dispersing into the Balkans — but the lives of St. John state only the destination, Belgrade, and do not specifically document a Constantinople leg for the Maximovitch family (the Constantinople route is therefore presented here as the probable path of the wider evacuation rather than an attested detail of his personal journey).

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes received this Russian flood with unusual generosity. King Alexander I, raised in Russia and sympathetic to the émigrés, opened his realm to them; the Serbian Orthodox Church gave the refugee hierarchs and clergy a home, and it was on Serbian soil, at Sremski Karlovci, that the Russian Church Abroad held its founding council in 1921 under Metropolitan Antony himself. For a displaced Russian with a vocation to the Church, no destination could have been more providential. What is certain is that the young law graduate arrived in Serbia as one refugee among a flood of them, and there, in the Serbian Church’s hospitable lands, his vocation would at last find its form — first as a theology student, then as a monk, under the same Metropolitan Antony who had guided him in Kharkov. That story is taken up in Belgrade and Tonsure.

See Also

References

  • Mileant, Bishop Alexander. The Life and Miracles of St. John (Maximovitch), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco. orthochristian.com/54575.html. (The most widely reproduced English life; gives birth, family, the “same noble family” wording for St. John of Tobolsk, the sickly childhood, the 1918 Kharkov law degree, Archbishop Antony’s mentorship, and the 1921 evacuation to Belgrade.)
  • Vita Prima of St. John the Wonderworker. Hosted at stjohnofshanghaibelfast.org. (Gives the Poltava Military School 1907–1914, the father Boris as marshal of the nobility, the Kiev University uncle, and “more time reading the lives of the saints than attending classes.”)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John (Maximovitch), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco.” oca.org. (Parents Boris and Glafira; Poltava 1907–14; Kharkov law degree 1918.)
  • Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (Secular name Mikhail Borisovitch Maximovitch; Adamovka in the Kharkov Governorate.)
  • Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Abbot Herman (Podmoshensky). Blessed John the Wonderworker. 3rd rev. ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987.
  • Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral / Nikodemos, 1994/2015.
  • “John (Maximovitch) the Wonderworker.” OrthodoxWiki. (Used only as a locator for the Old Style designation of the birth date.)