From Russia to Paris

The passage from revolutionary Russia to émigré Paris: Elizaveta’s dangerous years of municipal office in Anapa during the Civil War, tried by both Reds and Whites; the flight through Georgia, Constantinople, and Yugoslavia; the grinding poverty of the Russian emigration in France; and the death of her small daughter Anastasia in 1926, which she named as the turning point of her return to God. This file follows that road from the standard biography.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Paris émigré)

Revolution and Civil War

The Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed did not find Elizaveta a bystander. Committed to the Socialist-Revolutionary cause and to her native Black Sea region, she returned to the family’s home ground at Anapa and took on real public responsibility in the chaos of local government as authority collapsed and changed hands (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 2–3; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). She held municipal office there — variously described in the sources as deputy mayor and then, when others fled, effectively mayor — administering a town caught between advancing and retreating armies (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 3). [Disputed: the exact titles and sequence of Elizaveta’s Anapa offices are given loosely and inconsistently in the popular literature (deputy mayor, acting mayor, commissar of health/education under successive regimes); Hackel’s biography establishes the substance — that she exercised genuine and dangerous civic authority in Anapa during 1917–1919 — while treating the precise designations as imperfectly documented.]

Her position exposed her to mortal danger from both sides of the war. Under the White forces she was put on trial, accused in connection with her earlier revolutionary sympathies; the presiding judge was Daniel Skobtsov, whom she afterward married (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 3). That she had earlier been at risk from the Bolsheviks as well places her, characteristically, in the narrow and perilous ground between the warring absolutisms of her age — a position her later Christianity would echo in its refusal of every safe enclosure.

Flight into Exile

As the White cause collapsed in the south, Elizaveta, now married to Skobtsov and with her growing family, joined the vast Russian exodus. The family’s route ran the classic émigré path: out through Georgia and the Black Sea, across to Constantinople, then to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) — where her son Yuri (George) was born — and at last, by about 1923–1924, to Paris, which had become the capital of the Russian emigration (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 3–4; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). Her daughter Anastasia was born in this period of displacement (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4).

Émigré Poverty

Paris in the 1920s held hundreds of thousands of Russian refugees, most of them stripped of property, profession, and place. The former nobility drove taxis; officers worked the Renault and Citroën assembly lines; the educated took whatever work they could find (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4; Plekon, Living Icons, 2002, ch. 3). Elizaveta and Daniel Skobtsov lived this poverty. She took in sewing and made dolls and worked at whatever came to hand; the marriage, strained by exile and by the growing divergence of two very different temperaments, began to fail (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4). It was in this milieu of loss and improvisation — a whole society of the déraciné — that Elizaveta found the field of her life’s work, for she came to see in her destitute fellow émigrés not a problem to be escaped but the very place where Christ was to be met (see The Sacrament of the Brother/Sister).

The Death of Anastasia

The decisive blow, and the one she herself named as the hinge of her return to God, was the death of her youngest child. In the winter of 1926 her daughter Anastasia (Nastia) fell ill and died in Paris — the sources give influenza and its complications, often specified as meningitis (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003). [Disputed: the medical cause of Anastasia’s death is variously reported in the literature (influenza, meningitis, or influenza leading to meningitis); the fact and the year (1926) and its decisive spiritual effect are firmly attested in Hackel, while the exact diagnosis is reported without documentary precision.]

Elizaveta’s long vigil at the child’s hospital bedside, and the death itself, opened onto what she described as a new and wider vision. She wrote afterward of emerging from that grief with a sense that all motherhood, all human suffering, all the world’s abandoned, had become in some way her own — that she must become “a mother to all,” to everyone in need (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4; Forest, introduction to Essential Writings, 2003, quoting her account of the death and its meaning). The private catastrophe was transfigured into a universal maternity. From this point the trajectory toward a life given wholly to the destitute — and, within a few years, toward the veil — becomes legible.

It is important, per the repository’s method, to report this as she and her biographer report it: as her own retrospective account of the meaning of a real event, not as a documented miracle. The event is fixed (a child died in Paris in 1926); the interpretation — that it was the death out of which her vocation was born — is her testimony, and it is on her own words and Hackel’s careful narration that it rests (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4; cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Toward the Veil

The years immediately after Anastasia’s death saw Elizaveta drawn ever more deeply into the religious and charitable life of the emigration. She worked for the Russian Student Christian Movement, travelling to the destitute Russian communities scattered across France, and came under the influence of the theologians and pastors of the Paris school — above all Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, who became her spiritual father (Hackel, Pearl of Great Price, ch. 4–5; see Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the Circle). Her marriage to Skobtsov was by now effectively over. The road from revolutionary Russia had led, through exile, poverty, and the loss of a child, to the threshold of a wholly new life — one she would enter, in 1932, not by withdrawing from the world’s misery but by plunging further into it (see The Nun Who Would Not Stay in the Cloister).

See Also

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. (Ch. 2–5 for the Civil War and Anapa offices, the White trial and Daniel Skobtsov, the flight through Georgia/Constantinople/Yugoslavia to Paris, émigré poverty, the death of Anastasia in 1926 and its meaning, and the turn toward the religious and charitable life.)
  • 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 emigration and the death of Anastasia; her own retrospective account of the death as the turning point.)
  • Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. (Ch. 3, on the Russian emigration in Paris and Elizaveta’s place in it.)