The Alexander Nevsky Lavra

The Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Petrograd, the premier monastery of the Russian north, where the former merchant Vasily Muravyov was tonsured a monk with the name Varnava (Barnabas), ordained, and later received the great schema with the name Seraphim — taken in honor of St. Seraphim of Sarov. This file describes the monastery and the tonsure, and fixes the names by which he is known.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Soviet period)

The Lavra

The Holy Trinity Alexander Nevsky Lavra was founded by Peter the Great in 1710 on the eastern edge of his new capital, to house the relics of the great prince and warrior-saint Alexander Nevsky (1221–1263), translated there from Vladimir in 1724 (on the saint, see St. Alexander Nevsky). Raised to the dignity of a lavra — the highest rank of Orthodox monastery — in 1797, it became the foremost monastic and ecclesiastical center of St. Petersburg: the seat of the metropolitan of the capital, a great house of learning and liturgy, the burial place of statesmen, generals, and artists, and one of only four lavras in the entire Russian Empire (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984; standard accounts of the Lavra). To be tonsured at the Lavra was to enter at the very center of Russian monastic life.

By 1920, when Muravyov entered it, the Lavra was already under siege from the new regime. It had been the scene of one of the first violent church-state clashes of the Revolution: in January 1918 Red Guards had attempted to seize the Lavra, and in the confrontation a priest, Fr. Pyotr Skipetrov, had been shot and killed — an event that helped provoke Patriarch Tikhon’s anathema against the persecutors (on this, see The Lavra under Assault; Pospielovsky 1984, vol. 1; on Tikhon, St. Tikhon of Moscow). The monastery Muravyov joined was thus not a refuge from the persecution but a frontline of it.

The Tonsure and the Name Varnava

The biographies relate that Vasily Muravyov was received into the Lavra and, after a period as a novice, tonsured into monasticism with the name Varnava (Barnabas) (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate notice, 2000). He was subsequently ordained — to the diaconate and then the priesthood — and given monastic responsibilities within the house. The Life relates that he served as the Lavra’s sacristan (responsible for the church’s vessels and vestments) and, importantly, as a confessor; it is in this latter capacity that his eldership begins (see Spiritual Father in the Time of Terror).

The name Varnava is significant in its own right: the biographies connect it with the elder Varnava of Gethsemane Skete (near the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra), a renowned starets of the late nineteenth century whom the Life numbers among Muravyov’s spiritual influences (Filimonov). As with the other named spiritual connections of his early life, this association is the Life’s framing and is treated source-critically in The Biographies.

The Schema and the Name Seraphim

At a later point — the biographies place it in the late 1920s, as his health failed and as he prepared for the hidden life that would follow — Muravyov received the great schema, the highest degree of the monastic state, and with it the name by which he is known to history: Seraphim (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; Moscow Patriarchate notice). The Life relates that he took the name in honor of St. Seraphim of Sarov, the great Russian saint canonized in 1903 whom he venerated — and whose thousand nights of prayer on a stone he is later said to have imitated during the war (on which see The Thousand Nights on the Stone).

This is the point at which the two Seraphims must be kept firmly distinct. St. Seraphim of Sarov (born Prokhor Moshnin, 1754–1833) is the eighteenth–nineteenth-century Sarov hermit, the saint of the Motovilov conversation and the Diveyevo sisterhood (see St. Seraphim of Sarov). St. Seraphim of Vyritsa (Vasily Muravyov, 1866–1949) is the subject of this collection — a twentieth-century elder who took the earlier saint’s name in devotion and consciously modeled aspects of his ascetic life upon him. The name is a deliberate homage; the conflation of the two is a common error this guide is built to prevent.

The Wife Becomes a Nun

In parallel with her husband’s tonsure, Olga Muravyova was tonsured a nun at the Novodevichy Resurrection Convent with the name Christina, and later, the Life relates, received the schema with the name Seraphima (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). The symmetry — Seraphim and Seraphima, monk and nun, former husband and wife — is part of the Life’s portrait of a marriage transfigured into a double monastic vocation. The schemanun Seraphima later lived near her former husband at Vyritsa and reposed there in 1945, predeceasing him (Filimonov; see Retirement to Vyritsa).

See Also

• The Renunciation of Wealth — the renunciation that brought him to the Lavra
• Spiritual Father in the Time of Terror — his work as confessor at the Lavra
• The Lavra under Assault — the Soviet closure of the monastery
• St. Seraphim of Sarov — the saint for whom he was named, not to be confused with him
• St. Alexander Nevsky — the patron saint of the Lavra

References

• Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (Tonsure as Varnava; ordination; sacristan and confessor; the schema and the name Seraphim; Olga as Christina/Seraphima.)
• Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Hagiographical notice, glorification of St. Seraphim of Vyritsa, August 2000. (Names and monastic stages.)
• Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The Lavra; the January 1918 clash and Fr. Skipetrov; the rank of lavra.)