Elizaveta Pilenko: Poet and Revolutionary

Before she was Mother Maria she was Elizaveta Yuryevna Pilenko (1891–1945), a Symbolist poet who moved in the circle around Alexander Blok, the first woman to study at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and twice a wife — first to Dmitri Kuzmin-Karavaev and then to Daniel Skobtsov. This file follows that unconventional early life and the slow, interrupted road to faith that ran through it, from the standard biography and her own words.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

Birth and Childhood

Mother Maria was born Elizaveta (Liza) Yuryevna Pilenko on 8/20 December 1891 in Riga, then a city of the Russian Empire (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). Her father, Yuri Pilenko, managed vineyards and served for a time as director of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden near Yalta; the family had an estate at Anapa, on the Black Sea coast of the northern Caucasus, and it was there and in the Crimea that Liza spent much of her childhood (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1). Her father’s death in 1906, when she was fourteen, was a wound she later connected with a temporary loss of belief: the God who had let so good a man die seemed to her, for a time, not to exist (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003).

After her father’s death the family moved to St. Petersburg, and Liza was drawn into the intellectual and artistic ferment of the capital in the last decade before the Revolution — the world of Symbolist poetry, religious philosophy, and radical politics that historians call the Russian religious and cultural renaissance (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3).

The Symbolist Milieu and Alexander Blok

As a teenager Liza came under the spell of the poet Alexander Blok, the presiding genius of Russian Symbolism. She sought him out, and a correspondence and acquaintance began that lasted, at intervals, for years and left a mark on both (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). Blok’s answering verses to the young woman, and her memory of him, belong to the documented literary record of the age; she would later write a memoir of him. The encounter set the register of her early life: she was a poet among poets, and the questions that pressed on her were posed first in the idiom of Symbolism — beauty, the eternal feminine, the longing for an absolute — before they were posed in the idiom of the Gospel (Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3).

She published her first collection of verse, Scythian Shards (Skifskie cherepki), in 1912, and a second, Ruth, in 1916, under her first married name, Kuzmina-Karavaeva (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). She was, in these years, a recognized if minor figure of the Symbolist and post-Symbolist scene — young, gifted, and restless.

Theological Study

One detail of these years points forward to everything that came after. Liza enrolled at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, studying by the external route open to her — and is generally described as the first woman to study there (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). [Disputed: the exact form of her enrollment is described variously in the popular literature — as auditor, as external/correspondence student, as the first woman admitted in any capacity; Hackel’s biography treats the substance (that she pursued formal theological study, unusually for a woman of her time) as established while the administrative particulars are reported loosely in later accounts.] Whatever its precise form, the fact is telling: at a time when few women had access to academic theology at all, the future nun was already drawn to study the faith she had for a period lost.

Socialist-Revolutionary Politics

Liza’s restlessness was political as well as poetic. She was drawn to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR) — the agrarian-populist, and in its left wing terrorist-tolerant, party that was the great rival of the Bolsheviks on the Russian left (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 2; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Her sympathies were with the peasantry and the poor, and her politics were of a piece with her later Christianity in one respect at least: an unwillingness to keep a safe distance from suffering. In the revolutionary years these commitments would carry her into real and dangerous public office (see From Russia to Paris).

Two Marriages

Liza married twice, and both marriages belong honestly to her story.

Her first marriage, in 1910, was to Dmitri Kuzmin-Karavaev, a lawyer of Social-Democratic (Bolshevik-leaning) sympathies who moved in the same Petersburg artistic and radical circles (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1–2; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). The marriage was of its bohemian moment and did not last; the couple separated within a few years. From it came her first child, a daughter, Gaiana, born in 1913 (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 2).

Her second marriage, in 1919, was to Daniel Skobtsov, a Kuban Cossack schoolteacher and public figure whom — in one of the memorable turns of her life — she first met when he presided as judge over a tribunal that tried her during the Civil War (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 3). From this marriage came two more children, Yuri (George) and Anastasia (Nastia) (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 3–4). It is from this marriage that she took the name Skobtsova by which she is most often known. This second marriage, too, would eventually break down in the emigration, and its canonical dissolution was the precondition of her later tonsure (see The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister).

That the future saint was twice married, once to a man of the revolutionary left and once to a White officer, and that she was a mother three times over, is not a detail to be hurried past. It is central both to the shape of her later “worldly” monasticism and to the reservations some have voiced about her glorification (see The Contested Saint — Methodology).

The Slow Road to Faith

The return to Christ was gradual and is best described in her own retrospective terms rather than dramatized as a single conversion. The loss of faith after her father’s death (1906), the Symbolist search for an absolute, and the populist compassion of her politics were, on her own telling and her biographer’s, the ground from which a distinctively active, incarnational Christianity grew (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 1–4; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Two later blows — the horrors of revolution and civil war, and above all the death of her small daughter Anastasia in Paris in 1926 — brought the return to its crisis and its resolution (see From Russia to Paris). What is important for reading her sanctity is that it did not descend on a blank slate: it grew through, and kept the marks of, the poet’s hunger for the absolute and the revolutionary’s refusal to look away from the poor.

References

Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, 1891–1945. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981. (The standard biography; ch. 1–4 for the birth at Riga, the father’s death and loss of faith, Blok and the Symbolist milieu, the theological study, the SR politics, the two marriages, and the children.)
Skobtsova, Mother Maria. Essential Writings. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Jim Forest. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003. (Forest’s introduction for the biographical outline; her essays and poetry for her own retrospective account.)
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, situating Elizaveta Pilenko in the Russian cultural and religious renaissance.)