This study explores a novel type of Russian women in the 17th century, drawing on the Old Believer Saint’s Life 〈The Tale of Bojarinja Morozova (Повесть о боярыне Морозовой〉 by an anonymous Old Believer writer. The Life is a realistic, documentary, and biographical narrative of three noble Old Believer women, namely., Feodosija Morozova as main heroine and the other two co-sufferers, her sister princess Evdokija Urusova and Marija Danilova. For a thorough textual investigation, correspondences between Morozova and Avvakum as well as the latter’s Lament for the three women martyrs are compared. Subscribing to Boris Uspensky, I interpret that Schism between Old Belief and Nikon’s liturgical, ritual reforms and revisions of church books has semiotic, cultural foundations. Further, I argue, that Old Believer culture rediscovered women’s voices and self-identity, since the fundamentals of the culture are oriented toward deep-rooted orality in Russian tradition, in which women could participate with equal rights, unlike in the literacy-oriented, male-dominated culture.
Morozova’s Life presents new portraits of the 17th-century Russian women through Morozova’s directly-quoted utterances in terms of articulation, argumentativity, and rhetoric, as well as her charisma in the public sphere. Unlike previous Lives and women saints therein, Morozova’s martyrdom is substantiated by her verbal display of spiritual commitment to Old Belief as well as her devotion to ascetic life through female domestic duties, as prescribed by Domostroi. Not only Morozova and her Old Believer co-martyrs, but all the female characters and onlookers in Life are portrayed as morally supporting and emotionally sympathetic, whereas most male characters including the tsar and Nikonian high priests and officials as tormentors and tempters, which implies invisible spiritual sisterhood among all the underprivileged women in the 17th century patriarchal Muscovite Russia. In this transitional period, under the sociocultural upheaval triggered by the western influences and religious dissent in the Orthodox church, Morozova, as a symbolic female figure of that period, shows a possibility to recover women’s long-lost verbal subjectivity and sense of self or identity as an independent, autonomous individual.
Avvakum, however, shows an ambivalent attitude toward Morozova and women in general, and his evaluations are strikingly variable depending on literary genres and contexts. While in his Lament, Avvakum praises and commemorates her verbal revelations testifying to Old belief, in his private letters he demonstrates a very condescending and patriarchal attitude toward Morozova and women in general.