Optina and the Russian Intelligentsia

Optina is unique among Russian monasteries for the depth of its encounter with the country’s writers and thinkers: Ivan Kireevsky and the Slavophiles, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, and Konstantin Leontiev — who became a monk — all came to the elders. This file describes that encounter soberly, and treats from both sides, without adjudicating, the famous claim that Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima is a portrait of St. Ambrose.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Optina synaxis glorified 1996 local / 2000 general)

An Unusual Meeting

That a remote forest monastery near Kozelsk should become a place of pilgrimage for the leading minds of nineteenth-century Russia is one of the striking facts of the country’s cultural history. It happened because Optina offered educated Russians something they could find almost nowhere else: a living, non-rationalist Christianity of manifest depth and integrity, embodied in men — the elders — whose holiness was evident and whose counsel was practical, at a moment when the educated class was torn between a Westernizing rationalism and a hunger for spiritual and national roots (Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, Peter Lang, 1995, on why the intelligentsia came to Optina; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970). The encounter began institutionally with the Kireevsky partnership in the publishing work of the 1840s–1850s, which bound the founding Slavophiles to Elder Macarius and gave educated Russia the fathers in print (see St. Macarius and the Publishing Work). Through that door came the writers.

Gogol, Soloviev, Leontiev

Nikolai Gogol visited Optina in his last years (around 1850–1851), in the period of his religious crisis, and was deeply affected by the elders and by the atmosphere of the monastery; his letters record his veneration for the place, and his visits are part of the story of his tormented late turn to religion (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Gogol at Optina; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970).

Vladimir Soloviev, the philosopher, visited Optina — notably in the company of Dostoevsky in 1878 — and the monastery figures in the background of his religious thought, though Soloviev’s relation to institutional Orthodoxy was complex and often strained (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Soloviev; on the 1878 visit with Dostoevsky, see below).

The most complete case of the intelligentsia’s meeting with Optina is Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891), the writer, philosopher, and reactionary thinker, who, after a life of aestheticism and diplomatic service, underwent a religious conversion, became a spiritual son of the Optina elders, settled for years near the monastery under the direction of St. Ambrose, and finally, shortly before his death, was secretly tonsured a monk with the name Kliment (Clement) at Ambrose’s blessing (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Leontiev at Optina and his tonsure; Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Leontiev). Leontiev is the intelligentsia’s Optina story carried to its furthest point: not a visitor but a convert who ended his days as an Optina monk, dying in 1891, the same year as his elder Ambrose.

Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy presents the opposite and equally revealing case. Tolstoy, whose sister Maria became a nun at Shamordino, visited Optina repeatedly over decades, drawn to it and repelled by it in turn; he spoke with St. Ambrose and later with St. Joseph, and he wrestled all his life with the Orthodoxy the elders embodied, which he admired in the persons of the monks even as he rejected the Church’s dogma and was eventually excommunicated (1901) for his religious teaching (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Tolstoy’s visits and his ambivalence; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; for the fuller account see St. Ambrose of Optina: Tolstoy Visits). The final and most poignant episode came in 1910, when the dying Tolstoy, having fled his home, came to Optina and to Shamordino where his sister was — and, according to the accounts, hovered at the edge of a reconciliation with the Church he had left, without in the end entering the monastery gate, before dying at the railway station of Astapovo (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Tolstoy’s last journey to Optina in 1910; the details of the 1910 episode are reported variously and with much later legend, and are best treated with caution — see St. Ambrose of Optina: Tolstoy Visits).

Dostoevsky and the 1878 Visit

Fyodor Dostoevsky made a single, brief, but momentous visit to Optina in June 1878, in the company of the young Vladimir Soloviev, shortly after the death of his little son Alyosha; grief-stricken, he came to see Elder Ambrose, met with him, and was — the sources agree — profoundly moved by the encounter (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima, Nordland, 1972, on the 1878 visit; Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995; for the full treatment see St. Ambrose of Optina: Dostoevsky 1878). Within the next two years he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, whose Elder Zosima is the great literary portrait of a Russian starets — and the question of the relation between Zosima and the historical Ambrose has been debated ever since.

The Zosima Question — Both Sides

This is the point at which sobriety is most needed, because the popular claim — “Zosima is Ambrose” — is both partly true and seriously misleading. The scholarship is best represented, and the caution is essential.

[Disputed: how much of Dostoevsky's Elder Zosima is drawn from St. Ambrose of Optina. (a) The case for a substantial debt: Dostoevsky visited Optina and met Ambrose in 1878, immediately before writing the novel; the setting of Zosima's monastery, the institution of eldership Dostoevsky describes, the phenomenon of the crowds seeking the elder, and something of the elder's manner plainly draw on what Dostoevsky saw and learned at Optina; John Dunlop's *Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky's Staretz Zossima* (Nordland, 1972) argues for Ambrose as a real and important model, and the connection is affirmed across the scholarship (Dunlop, 1972; Stanton, *Optina Pustyn*, 1995). (b) The case against a simple identification: Zosima is a literary and theological creation, not a portrait; Dostoevsky himself indicated that the chief inspiration for Zosima's teaching was the eighteenth-century St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, whose writings and personality shaped Zosima's discourses far more than any single meeting with Ambrose; Zosima's biography (a worldly youth, a duel, a conversion) is not Ambrose's; and much of Zosima's theology — the universal responsibility, "each is guilty before all," the active love — is Dostoevsky's own, worked out across his corpus (Dunlop, 1972, who is careful to distinguish the model from the character; Stanton, *Optina Pustyn*, 1995, stressing that Zosima is an "iconic" literary construction drawing on multiple sources; and the Ambrose collection's treatment, [St. Ambrose of Optina: Dostoevsky 1878](../../st-ambrose-of-optina/05-dostoevsky-and-tolstoy/dostoevsky-1878.md)). This collection does not adjudicate the proportions; it records that Ambrose is a genuine and significant source for the *figure* and *setting* of Zosima, while Zosima's specific biography and theology draw substantially on St. Tikhon of Zadonsk and on Dostoevsky's own thought, and that the historical elder must not be collapsed into the fictional one.]

The wider point about Optina and the intelligentsia is well captured by this debate. Optina genuinely marked Russian literature and thought — through Kireevsky’s philosophy, Gogol’s crisis, Leontiev’s conversion, Tolstoy’s lifelong wrestling, and Dostoevsky’s Zosima — and its influence on the country’s spiritual imagination was real and deep (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995). But the temptation to inflate the connection, to read the novels back into the monastery and the monastery forward into the novels until the two blur, is exactly what a sober account must resist. The elders were not literary characters; the writers were not disciples in the monastic sense (save Leontiev); and the meeting of the two, real as it was, is most truthfully described when its actual proportions are kept — which is what the scholarship, at its best, does (Dunlop, 1972; Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970).

See Also

References

  • Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (The principal English study of the 1878 visit and the Zosima question; careful to distinguish the model from the character and to note St. Tikhon of Zadonsk as a chief source.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Others. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. (Optina and the intelligentsia; Gogol, Soloviev, Leontiev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; Zosima as an iconic literary construction.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (Kireevsky and the Slavophiles; Leontiev’s conversion and tonsure; the elders and the writers.)
  • The full treatment in St. Ambrose of Optina, Section 05, on which this file draws for the Ambrose-specific detail.