Just dis­cov­ered an excel­lent piece by Daniel Kalder over at the Guardian — “Russians: the World’s Hardest Writers.”

Russian scribes were real men. The last hard men, per­haps. There were no Matt Taibbi or Max Blumenthal pip­squeaks among them. These guys were rough ducks who died in duels; fought in wars; lan­guished in Siberian prison camps; laughed in the face of can­cer.

But, Kalder sin­gles out one ornery bas­tard in par­tic­u­lar as the bad­dest of them all — Avvakum Petrov, a.k.a. Avvakum the Archpriest. Writes Kalder (empha­sis mine):

In Russia in 1666 – 67 there was a schism in the church which arose from a dis­pute over aspects of rit­ual, such as how many fin­gers to use when cross­ing one­self. Avvakum led the Old Believers who insisted on using two (tra­di­tional for Russia) instead of three (a Greek cus­tom enforced by a reformist church hier­ar­chy). For his pains, he was flogged, exiled to Siberia, impris­oned for 14 years in a hole in the ground in the Arctic Circle and finally burnt at the stake. And yet Avvakum never recanted his beliefs. His faith was that strong. He was that hard.

And the writ­ing! This pas­sage — a descrip­tion of the Tsar burn­ing in Hell — shits pun­gent flames all over today’s trans­gres­sive rhapsodists:

“Are your eunuchs fan­ning you to keep the flies from bit­ing the great sov­er­eign? And when you shit, do you wipe your bot­tom with that hell­fire? The Holy Spirit tells me … there’s no need to shit away what you’ve eaten since the worms are slowly eat­ing the great sov­er­eign him­self … into the bow­els of the earth with you, son of a bitch!”

Such per­fect hostility…and venom…bring feel­ings of joy into my silly parts. Kalder hits all the right notes with his praise:

This is the kind of priestly writ­ing I can admire. You see, Avvakum and his fel­low Old Believers thought that Russia had suc­cumbed to the Antichrist and that the world was about to end. Millions fled into the forests, and thou­sands incin­er­ated them­selves to escape the tri­als described in Revelation. Thus his auto­bi­og­ra­phy is far more than an obscure his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment – it is also a truth­ful account of life in the End Times as he expe­ri­enced it. Avvakum’s goal was to demon­strate via his own mis­er­able life story how to endure the Last Days with faith in Christ. His book is an epic tale of fero­cious resis­tance against evil.

Some day, some­one will write like this again. But it will take hell­ish cir­cum­stances and some seri­ously hard times to imbue anyone’s prose with that kind of barbed wire. A final excerpt from Kalder:

In 1971, nearly 300 years after he was burned alive, the Orthodox Church admit­ted that he wasn’t a heretic after all and the whole tor­ture and exe­cu­tion thing had been a tad exces­sive. And yet, so hard was Avvakum that I think he would have told them where to shove their par­don – for the Orthodox Church not only still advo­cated cross­ing your­self with three fin­gers instead of two, but was now col­lab­o­rat­ing with the God-hating Soviet state. In Avvakum’s eyes they would have been ultra-Antichrists and he would have fought them to the death. Like the man said: “I would gladly die and come back to life to die again for Christ, our Lord.”

If there is a man of God any­where in the world with such devo­tion to the so-called divine, I wish to meet him ASAP. Atheism be damned!

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