The Singers of Northern Russian Religious Verses

Abstract

Before discussing the singers of North Russian folk religious verses (dukhovnye stikhi), it may be sensible to begin by characterizing not the singers but their songs. Russian folk religious verses are usually based on a Christian literary source: the Bible, a hagiographic tale, the life of a saint or an apocryphal text. The formal characteristics of the verses, composed at different periods, vary so widely that many Russian folklorists consider it impossible to try and group all popular religious verse together into a single folk genre [Nikitina 1993: 45-46]; some scholars suggest dividing dukhovnye stikhi into a separate system of genres parallel to the one used for traditional secular folklore [Selivanov 1995: 8–10, 57–59]. The older type of religious verse, known as “starshie,” are predominantly narrative in form, and in their poetic style close to the Russian byliny and folk ballads; the junior (“mladshie”) dukhovnye stikhi, sung mainly by the Old Believers,(2) are lyrical in nature and frequently imitate literary verse. In the nineteenth century collectors recorded religious poetry in many provinces in the European part of the Russian Empire [Kireevskii 1848, Varentsov 1860, Bessonov 1861 1864]. In the twentieth century, especially the first half, hearing and recording dukhovnye stikhi was still possible in some remote rural areas of the country, but nowadays, although the tradition of performing religious verses lives on, it does so only in Old Believer communities. In this article the focus falls on one particular area, the Russian North, and more specifically on those who sang the dukhovnye stikhi. Apart from references in works by nineteenth and twentieth-century ethnographers and folklorists the article draws primarily on archival material from the folklore collections of the Archive of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozavodsk. This material relates to the period 1911-98. The main bearers of folk religious poetry are usually said to be the kaliki perekhozhie, semiprofessional, often blind or disabled itinerant singers, who sang dukhovnye stikhi in crowded places and asked for alms in return [Fedotov 1935/1991: 14-25]. However, this statement requires amplification when we refer to the situation in the North of Russia, the area in which stikhi were especially popular. In Olonets, Archangel and Vologda provinces, apart from the kaliki, religious verses were sung by the rural population, both Orthodox and Old Believers. Information about the singing of religious verse by North Russian peasants can be gleaned from the writings of various nineteenth-century folklorists and ethnographers [Barsov 1867; Maslov 1905: 13; Miller 1895: 27-28]. In addition, dukhovnye stikhi have been recorded from ordinary villagers by nineteenth and twentieth-century collectors on numerous occasions, with the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century variants being recorded from women. What were the relations between the kaliki and the peasantry in the North of Russia, how did villagers treat the itinerant singers and under what conditions did they take over their repertoire? These questions were almost entirely ignored by nineteenth-century ethnographers [Maksimov