The Cell at Zadonsk

Retired from Voronezh in December 1767, Tikhon lived first at the Tolshevsky monastery and from March 1769 at the Zadonsk Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery, where he remained until his death on 13 August 1783. This file describes the outward shape of the fourteen Zadonsk years — the cell, the rule of life, the radical almsgiving, the prison visits to Yelets, and the writing — which made a retired provincial bishop the most beloved spiritual figure of his century in Russia.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

From Tolshevsky to Zadonsk

On his release from the see on 17 December 1767 (see The Reforming Episcopate), Tikhon withdrew first to the Tolshevsky Transfiguration Monastery, some forty versts from Voronezh — a remote house whose solitude suited him but whose marshy situation did not: the climate aggravated his illness, and in March 1769 he moved to the Zadonsk Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery (Zadonsky Bogoroditsky monastyr) in the small town of Zadonsk on the Don, where he lived for the remaining fourteen years of his life (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13; Tikhon Zadonskii, ru.wikipedia.org, giving March 1769 and the climate as the reason for the move; en.wikipedia.org, Tikhon of Zadonsk; on the monastery, zadonsk-monastyr.ru).

The establishment was small: a couple of cells, a cell-attendant, the simplest furnishing — the Lives dwell on the straw-stuffed mattress, the plain cassock, the leather-bound prayer rope — and a rule of life the attendants recorded in detail because they lived inside it: rising early, the appointed services and long private prayer with prostrations, the Psalter and New Testament read continually (he knew the Psalter by heart), manual work in the garden, the writing that filled the middle hours, and at evening the reading of the Fathers and the Lives of the saints (Chebotarev’s and Yefimov’s memoir accounts as digested in the standard Lives: OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, St. Tikhon (Sokolov, born Kirillov); Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, ch. 4, working directly from the attendants’ memoirs). He attended the monastery’s liturgy but, notably, did not concelebrate as a hierarch, standing in the altar or the kliros as a simple monk — a renunciation of episcopal state that contemporaries found the most striking thing about him (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 4).

Twice, the Lives record, he considered leaving — once contemplating a return to active service when a see was mooted, once drawn to the stricter solitude of a northern monastery — and both times remained, on the counsel of the elder Aaron of the monastery, whose word to the cell-attendant, “The Mother of God does not will him to leave,” Tikhon accepted as an answer (Sapaeva, “St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Victor Over Melancholy,” trans. Jesse Dominick, OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/105992.html, recording the Aaron episode; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; per METHODOLOGY §3.5 the episode is the attendants’ testimony, reported as attested).

The Almsgiving

The economics of the cell are among the best-documented facts of the life, because the attendants kept the accounts. Tikhon’s synodal pension — the Russian sources give 500 rubles — and the gifts that admirers increasingly sent him were given away in their entirety: to the poor of Zadonsk and the villages, to prisoners, to peasants ruined by fire or requisition, to the raising of orphans (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org: “He gave away his pension, as well as gifts from his admirers, to the poor”; drevo-info.ru on the pension; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 4, on the accounts and the systematic character of the giving). The giving was personal and unsystematized in the modern philanthropic sense — beggars came to the cell window; he went out to them; he kept nothing — and the Lives insist that it emptied him literally: at his death his property was a few books and the worn necessities of the cell (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life; compare the identical poverty-at-death of St. Dimitri of Rostov, Repose 1709).

Most distinctive was the prison ministry. Dressed as a simple monk, Tikhon traveled to nearby Yelets — the second city of his old diocese, whose people he had loved as bishop — to visit those confined in the prison: he talked with the prisoners, heard their stories, disposed them to repentance, and left alms (stjohndc.org, Life, describing the Yelets prison visits in the simple monastic garb; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org). The image of the incognito bishop among the convicts passed into Russian spiritual culture; readers of Dostoevsky will recognize the lineage — it is among the traits of the retired bishop Tikhon in Demons and of the Zosima strand that Dostoevsky drew, by his own account, from Tikhon’s example (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, on the prison visits and their literary afterlife; see Section 07).

The Writing

The cell was also a scriptorium: everything in the mature corpus was produced at Zadonsk. On True Christianity was composed in 1770–72, A Spiritual Treasure Gathered from the World in 1777–79, the Cell Letters and the letter-treatises across the whole period; a monastery attendant took dictation when the saint’s hand shook too badly to write (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, chs. 4–6, for the composition chronology; Ivanov, “The Impact of Pietist and Anglican Spirituality in Catherinian Russia: The Works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk,” Vivliofika 5 (2017), pp. 40–72, for the datings; the writings are treated in full in Section 05). Visitors multiplied with his fame — peasants above all, but also merchants, clergy, and the local gentry, whose Voltairean religion gave rise to the most famous scene of the period (see Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy) — and the recluse who had fled administration found himself an unofficial elder to a whole region, taking up in person the ministry of counsel his books were performing in print (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 4).

The cell’s human circle completes the picture. Around the retired bishop gathered a small permanent company — the cell-attendants Vasily Chebotarev and Ivan Yefimov, whose memoirs are the biographical bedrock of everything in this section (see The Boy from Korotsk on the sources); the schema-monk Mitrofan of the monastery, his closest friend, in whose cell he sometimes ate and sang psalms; and the Yelets merchant Kozma Studenikin, partner of the charity (the circle is described in the Lives from the attendants’ accounts: OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; stjohndc.org, Life; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, ch. 4). Children belong in the record too: the Lives dwell on his particular love for the children of Zadonsk, whom he taught, fed, and supplied — the childless orphan of Korotsk surrounded in old age by other people’s children, to whom he was, the accounts say, simply “our father” (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org; per §3.5, as the attendants attest). It was to this circle that the dying bishop dictated his testament and his last instructions, and from it that the first written memory of the saint came.

The Death of 1783

For three years before the end, the Lives record, Tikhon prayed daily, “Tell me, O Lord, of my end,” and received in answer, in a quiet inner voice, “It shall be on a Sunday”; a year before the end he suffered a stroke that confined him; and he died on Sunday, 13 August 1783 (Old Style), aged fifty-nine, at Zadonsk (OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org, recording the prayer, the answer, and the Sunday death; ru.wikipedia.org, confirming the date and day; per §3.5 the foreknowledge narrative is the attendants’ attestation, reported as such). He was buried in a crypt beneath the altar of the monastery’s cathedral church. The date of the death became the date of his feast — and, seventy-eight years later to the day, the date of his glorification (see The Glorification of 1861).

See Also

• Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy — the inner life of the cell: the famous meekness and the honest record of the darkness
• The Reforming Episcopate — the retirement of 1767 that led here
• On True Christianity and A Spiritual Treasure and the Letters — the books written in this cell
• The Incorrupt Relics — the crypt reopened in 1846
• Orthodox Monasticism — the monastic frame of the retired bishop’s life

References

• Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (Tolshevsky; Zadonsk 1769; the rule of life; the almsgiving; the visitors; the death narrative of 13 August 1783.)
• Tikhon Zadonskii. Russian Wikipedia, ru.wikipedia.org (March 1769 and the climate; the Sunday death of 13 August 1783; the pension — as given in the Russian biographical literature).
• St. Tikhon (Sokolov, born Kirillov), Bishop of Voronezh and Eletsk, Wonderworker of Zadonsk. Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, DC, stjohndc.org. (The Yelets prison visits; the cell’s simplicity; the poverty at death.)
• Tikhon Zadonskii. Drevo-info Orthodox encyclopedia, drevo-info.ru/articles/243.html. (The 500-ruble pension.)
• Zadonsky Nativity of the Mother of God Monastery, zadonsk-monastyr.ru. (The monastery’s name and continuity.)
• Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). Chs. 4–6. (The attendants’ memoirs; the rule, the almsgiving, the visitors; the composition chronology.)
• Sapaeva, Elena. “St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Victor Over Melancholy.” Trans. Jesse Dominick. OrthoChristian, orthochristian.com/105992.html. (The elder Aaron episode; the temptations to leave.)
• Ivanov, Andrey V. “The Impact of Pietist and Anglican Spirituality in Catherinian Russia: The Works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk.” Vivliofika: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 5 (2017): 40–72. (The composition dates of the Zadonsk works.)