Retirement to Vyritsa

Around 1930, his health broken and the Lavra closing around him, the schemamonk Seraphim withdrew to the small town of Vyritsa, some sixty kilometers south of Leningrad, where he would spend the last two decades of his life. This file describes the move, the wooden house and household in which he lived, the presence of his former wife the schemanun Seraphima, and the bedridden form his life now took — the setting in which the elder of Vyritsa was made.

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

The Move

The biographies place Seraphim’s departure from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and his settlement at Vyritsa around 1930, driven by the convergence of two pressures: his own failing health — the Life speaks of severe rheumatism and the exhaustion of years of ascetic labor and confessor’s work, which increasingly confined him to bed — and the closure of the Lavra, which by the end of the 1920s had ceased to function as a monastery (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim; on the closure, The Lavra under Assault). On medical advice he was moved to the country air of Vyritsa, a dacha settlement on the Oredezh river favored as a place of convalescence (Filimonov; Moscow Patriarchate notice, 2000).

The exact date is given variously in the literature — the move is generally placed around 1929–1930, with the household settling at the address on Pilny Prospekt (and later other Vyritsa addresses) where the elder would receive visitors for the rest of his life (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). The precise chronology of the Vyritsa years rests on the devotional Life and the recollections of disciples, and is not everywhere firm (see The Biographies).

The House and Household

At Vyritsa the elder lived not in a monastery but in a private wooden house, of the ordinary dacha type, cared for by a small household. The biographies describe a household centered on his spiritual children and family connections: the Life relates that he was attended by his daughter-in-law’s family and by close disciples, who managed the practical life of the house and helped receive the visitors (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). The granddaughter, Margarita, and other relatives figure in the accounts of the household and are among the sources for the later biographies.

The arrangement — a bedridden schemamonk in a wooden house in a dacha town, supported by a small circle — is itself a portrait of the dispersed monasticism of the Soviet period. With the monasteries closed, monks and nuns lived where they could, in private houses, continuing their monastic life unofficially; the elder’s house at Vyritsa was, in effect, a tiny hidden monastery of one (on the wider pattern, Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2003, ch. 1; Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1984, vol. 1).

The Schemanun Seraphima

His former wife, now the schemanun Seraphima (the former Olga, tonsured Christina), came in time to live near him at Vyritsa, and the biographies present the two former spouses as living out their parallel monastic vocations in the same town until her repose (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). The Life places her death in 1945, during the war years, predeceasing the elder by four years (Filimonov). The picture of the aged monk and nun — once husband and wife, now each in the schema, ending their lives in prayer in the same small place — is one of the most characteristic images the biographies give of him, and a fitting close to the joint vocation begun in 1920 (see The Renunciation of Wealth).

The Bedridden Elder

The defining physical fact of the Vyritsa years is that the elder was largely bedridden. The Life presents him as confined by illness, receiving visitors from his bed or a chair, unable to travel or to serve at the altar in the ordinary way, conducting his entire ministry from within the walls of the house (Filimonov, Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim). This immobility shaped the form of his eldership: he became a fixed point to which people came, a destination rather than a traveling preacher — and the stream of those who came is the substance of the Vyritsa story (see The Years of the Great Terror).

It also frames the most famous tradition of his life. The account that, during the war, he prayed nightly on a stone in his garden in imitation of St. Seraphim of Sarov, stands in evident tension with the picture of a bedridden invalid — a tension the biographies resolve by presenting the stone-prayer as an extraordinary ascetic feat undertaken despite his infirmity, at great cost. That famous and contested tradition is treated, attestation-pinned, in its own place (see The Thousand Nights on the Stone).

A Destination in a Dark Time

By the early 1930s, then, the elder of Vyritsa was in place: a bedridden schemamonk in a wooden house in a small town, a former merchant who had become a monk as the empire fell and now lived hidden as the Terror gathered. The retirement had not ended his eldership but transformed it — from the confessorship of a great urban monastery into the quiet, dangerous, sought-out ministry of a country elder. The visitors began to come, and they did not stop coming for the rest of his life.

See Also

References

  • Filimonov, Valentin P. Вырицкий старец преподобный Серафим [Vyritsa Elder St. Seraphim]. St. Petersburg, 1990s–2000s. (The move c.1930; the failing health; the house and household; the schemanun Seraphima and her death in 1945; the bedridden ministry.)
  • Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). Hagiographical notice, glorification of August 2000. (The retirement to Vyritsa.)
  • Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. (Dispersed monasticism after the closures.)
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984. (The condition of monastics in the 1930s.)