The life written by himself, paperback/avvakum petrov

Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a distinctly apocalyptic feel.

An outbreak of the plague killed half the population.

A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the sky, causing panic.

And a religious reform movement intended to purify spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Orthodox Church in two.

The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum--a leader of the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms--provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure at their center.

Written in the 1660s and 70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar, Avvakums autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment.

It is also a salvo in a contest about whether to follow the old Russian Orthodox liturgy or import Greek rites and practices.

These concerns touched every stratum of Russian society--and for Avvakum, represented an urgent struggle between good and evil.

Avvakums autobiography has been a cornerstone of Russian literature since it first circulated among religious dissidents.

One of the first Russian-language autobiographies and works of any sort to make use of colloquial Russian, its language and style served as a model for writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky.

The Life Written by Himself is not only an important historical document but also an emotionally charged and surprisingly conversational self-portrait of a crucial figure in a tumultuous time.

About author(s): Avvakum Petrov ich (1620/1-1682) was born near Nizhny Novgorod to a priest and a nun.

He became a leader in the Old Believers movement.

He wrote the earliest version of his autobiography between 1669 and 1672 while imprisoned in Pustozersk, and was burned as a heretic in 1682.

Kenneth N.

Brostrom (1939-2020) was associate professor of Russian at Wayne State University.