Dying in Another’s Place: The Renunciation of St. Xenia

The concrete shape of Xenia’s renunciation, told from the sources and read with them. She gave away her house to Paraskeva Antonova; her relatives petitioned to have her declared insane, and the examiners found her sound and free to dispose of her property; she wore her husband’s military uniform until it fell to rags, then red-and-green clothing echoing it; she refused all alms but the “Tsar on horseback” kopeck, which she gave away at once. This file pins each detail to its earliest written attestation and sets out the theology the interpreters read in it — bridal-baptismal death-and-exchange, and the kenotic tradition of Russian sanctity per Fedotov.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (glorified ROCOR 1978, Moscow Patriarchate 1988)

A Note on Attestation Before the Narrative

Everything narrated below is hagiographical tradition, transmitted orally in the poor parishes of St. Petersburg and first written down in the devotional lives of the second half of the nineteenth century — a century after the events — the fullest early account being Dmitry Bulgakovsky’s Xenia the Servant of God, or Andrei Feodorovich the Holy Fool (1890). None of it rests on a contemporary document. Per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, it is reported here as what the tradition holds, with the earliest accessible written attestation named, never as established fact. The documentary basis and its limits are laid out in full in Known vs. Inferred; this file presents the renunciation as the tradition tells it, and then as the interpreters read it.

Giving Away the House: Paraskeva Antonova

The first and most consequential act of Xenia’s renunciation was to give away her house. The tradition names the recipient: she made over the house to her friend Paraskeva Antonova — a gift outright, not a loan or a trust — and gave away her remaining possessions to the poor until she had nothing (American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, “St. Xenia of St. Petersburg,” acrod.org; Orthodox Church in America, “Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg,” oca.org: she “gave away her house and possessions to the poor … refusing family assistance”). The naming of Paraskeva Antonova is a stable feature of the tradition and recurs across the lives; the house is the concrete pivot on which the whole renunciation turns, since to part with it was to make herself permanently homeless by choice — the precondition of her forty-five years of wandering.

The Relatives’ Petition and the Finding of Sanity

The house-gift provoked the episode the tradition most insists upon as vindicating Xenia’s freedom. Her relatives, judging her mad, petitioned the trustees of her late husband’s estate to block her from disposing of her property, on the grounds that grief had unhinged her mind. The trustees summoned Xenia for examination — and the outcome is the load-bearing detail: “after a long and careful examination, [they] ruled that she was perfectly sound of mind and had every right to dispose of her property as she pleased” (the episode as related in acrod.org and orthochristian.com, “St. Xenia Fool-for-Christ”).

The point the tradition draws from this is precise and worth stating: Xenia’s foolishness was not insanity. An official inquiry, conducted by the very people with an interest in finding her incompetent, found her sane and competent — so that her renunciation was the free act of a sound mind, a chosen podvig, not the involuntary collapse of a grieving widow (cf. The Yurodstvo Tradition on feigned versus real madness as the defining mark of the salos). The examination is the tradition’s own internal guarantee that what follows is sanctity, not pathology. It is, again, a hagiographical claim attested in the late lives, not a surviving court record; but it is integral to how the tradition understands her.

The Uniform and the Red-and-Green Rags

Having given away the house, Xenia clothed herself in her dead husband’s military uniform and took his name (see Xenia’s Place in the Tradition). The tradition follows the garment’s fate as a kind of relic-in-progress: she wore Andrei Feodorovich’s uniform “until it fell apart” — until the actual clothes of the dead man disintegrated on her body from years of weather and wear (oca.org; Holy Trinity Life). When the uniform was gone, she did not abandon its sign: she went on dressed in red and green — a red jacket and green skirt (or the colors reversed in some tellings) — clothing chosen to echo the colors of the regimental uniform she could no longer wear (the red-and-green detail as given in oca.org and the devotional lives; the precise arrangement of the colors varies among tellings).

The clothing is thus not incidental but doctrinal: by wearing the uniform and then its colors to the end of her life, Xenia kept the bodily sign of the identity-exchange permanently before the eyes of the city. She did not merely say she was Andrei Feodorovich; she wore him, until the cloth itself wore out, and then wore his colors after. [Disputed only in detail: the lives agree she wore the husband’s uniform until it disintegrated and thereafter dressed in red and green to recall it; they differ on whether the jacket was red and the skirt green or the reverse (oca.org; orthochristian.com). The fact of the uniform-then-its-colors is stable; the arrangement of the colors is not.]

The “Tsar on Horseback” Kopeck

Xenia’s poverty was guarded by a rule about alms that the tradition records with unusual specificity. The faithful of the Petersburg Side, coming to love her, pressed clothing, warm things, and money on her; she refused nearly all of it. The one thing she would accept was a single kind of coin: the small copper kopeck the people called the “Tsar on horseback” (or “king on horseback”) — so named because it bore the figure of a horseman struck on it (in fact St. George, the rider on the coin) (orthochristian.com, “St. Xenia Fool-for-Christ”: she “took only the small copper pennies, which were called the king on horseback because there was a horseman — actually, St. George — struck on them”; and the saint-on-horseback detail in the parish lives).

And the rule’s second half is the point: the kopeck she accepted she gave away at once, distributing the copper coins to the poor, “at times, apparently, with some prophecy” (orthochristian.com). She would receive only the smallest coin, and hold even that for no longer than it took to pass it to someone needier. The detail seals the completeness of the renunciation: Xenia let nothing accumulate, not even the least coin, refusing to be, even for a moment, anything but propertyless. The continuity from house to kopeck is exact — what began with giving away the house ended with giving away the single penny.

The Theology the Interpreters Read In It

The devotional and scholarly interpreters read this renunciation through two converging frames, each attributed here.

Bridal and baptismal death-and-exchange

The first frame is the death-and-exchange the tradition sees enacted in the assumed identity (developed in Xenia’s Place in the Tradition). The interpreters read Xenia’s gesture in baptismal-bridal terms: as Christian marriage makes the two “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; Ephesians 5:31), and as baptism is a dying-and-rising in which the old self is buried that a new one may live (Romans 6:3–4), so Xenia — declaring that she had died and Andrei lived — enacts a death of her own self in order that her husband, who died unprepared, might live before God through the penance she now does in his name. Her renunciation is read as a wife’s offering of her very identity for her husband’s salvation, a death-and-exchange in which she takes his place. This is the interpretive frame of the published lives and the devotional tradition (Holy Trinity Life; Bulgakovsky, 1890); it is, per §3.5, the tradition’s reading and not a recorded self-interpretation of Xenia, who left no words.

Kenotic sanctity per Fedotov

The second frame is the broader one supplied by G. P. Fedotov’s analysis of Russian holiness as fundamentally kenotic — patterned on the kenosis, the self-emptying, of Christ “who, being in the form of God … emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). Fedotov reads the deepest strain of Russian sanctity as the voluntary imitation of Christ’s self-humiliation, his abandonment of dignity and possession, his descent to the lowest place — and identifies the yurodivye, who “distributed their possessions to the poor” and embraced contempt, as among its purest expressions (Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, on Russian kenoticism and on yurodstvo; and see The Yurodstvo Tradition). On this reading, Xenia’s renunciation — the house, the uniform worn to rags, the single coin held only long enough to give it away — is a sustained, lifelong act of kenotic self-emptying: she makes herself nothing, after the pattern of the One who made himself nothing, and finds in that nothing the freedom of the holy fool. The two frames meet: the death-and-exchange for her husband is her particular form of the kenotic descent Fedotov describes as the genius of Russian sanctity.

References

Bulgakovsky, Dmitry. Xenia the Servant of God, or Andrei Feodorovich the Holy Fool. Russia, 1890. English translation: Nick Mayhew, trans., TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 7.1 (2020).
Fedotov, G. P. The Russian Religious Mind. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946, 1966 (on Russian kenoticism and yurodstvo).
The Life and Miracles of Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg (Great Ascetics of Russia). Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery / Holy Trinity Publications.
Orthodox Church in America. “Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg.” oca.org (the house, the uniform, the red-and-green clothing, the death without confession).
American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of North America. “St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, Russia.” acrod.org (Paraskeva Antonova; the trustees’ examination; gravestone text).
“St. Xenia Fool-for-Christ.” orthochristian.com/90400.html (the trustees’ finding of sanity; the “king/Tsar on horseback” kopeck given away at once).
Scripture: Genesis 2:24; Romans 6:3–4; Ephesians 5:31; Philippians 2:6–7.