Polotsky, Simeon

POLOTSKY, SIMEON

(1629–1680), major religious and cultural figure at the Russian court from 1664 until his death in 1680.

Simeon Polotsky, born Samuil Petrovsky-Sitnianovich, was a Belorussian monk from Polotsk. He introduced new forms of religious literature derived from Western models, and created the first substantial body of poetry in Russian.

Native to a largely Orthodox area of the Polish-Lithuanian state during a period of intense Catholic-Orthodox rivalry, Samuil Sitnyanovich entered the Kiev Academy around 1650, where he received a typical Western education from Ukrainian Orthodox teachers. He mastered Polish and Latin as well as the neo-Aristotelian curriculum dominant in Polish and Ukrainian schools. He continued his education at the Jesuit academy in Wilno. The Russo-Polish War of 1653–1667 that followed on the Ukrainian Cossack revolt of 1648 restored Orthodoxy to power in Polotsk, and Samuil returned to his native town. In 1656 he became a monk with the name Simeon in the local Bogoyavlenie Monastery; he also became a teacher in a school for Orthodox boys. During these early years he wrote both verse and declamations in Polish and Latin as well as Slavonic. On his first trip to Moscow in 1660 with a delegation of Polotsk clergy he presented Tsar Alexei Mikhaylovich with a series of verse greetings and other compositions for court occasions. Long commonplace in Poland and the West, such court poetry was unknown in Russia. With the revival of Polish military fortunes toward the end of the war, Polotsk returned to Catholic rule and Simeon left for Moscow in 1664, never to return.

In Moscow Simeon played a major role in the cultural and religious life of the court. After the Church Council of 1666–1667, he prepared the official reply to the claims of the Old Ritualists that that liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon were heretical (Zhezl pravleniia/The Staff of Governance, Moscow, 1668). In 1667 and 1670 he was tutor to the heirs to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei (d. 1670) and the future tsar, Fyodor (1672–1682), and also kept a school in the Zaikonospassky Monastery on Red Square. Simeon continued to write occasional verse for the court and church, celebrating important events and people. Many of these poems seem to have been declaimed in public, though they remained unpublished at his death. He was also a prolific writer of sermons, two large volumes of which appeared after his death, one of sermons at church festivals (Obed dushevny/The Soul's Dinner, Moscow 1681) and the other of sermons for particular occasions, such as funerals of prominent boyars (Vecheria dushevnaya/The Soul's Supper, Moscow, 1683). The sermons, delivered in churches in and around the Kremlin to the Russian elite, encouraged a shift in religious experience away from the central preoccupation with liturgy toward the inner experience of Christianity and its moral teachings.

Simeon's work introduced new genres to literature, poetry to court life, and a new style to Orthodox spirituality in Russia. His most important pupil was Silvester Medvedev (1641–1691), and he was popular both at court and in the church. Patriarch Ioakim (1674–1690), however, was less favorable, apparently distrusting the religious implications of his Western orientation. Simeon was a major influence for a generation after his death, but his baroque forms and Slavonic style soon rendered him too old-fashioned for later Russian poets and preachers. Nineteenth-century literary scholars, who looked askance at baroque style and genres such as court poetry, paid little attention to Simeon. Twentieth-century appreciation of the Baroque allowed him recognition as a major cultural figure, and the broader publications of his poetry have given him a greater audience. Historians of religion have recognized his pivotal role in the reorientation of Orthodoxy in the years preceding the great cultural changes of the time of Peter the Great.

See also: orthodoxy

bibliography

Bushkovitch, Paul. (1992). Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vroon, Ronald. (1995). "Simeon Polotsky." In Early Modern Russian Writers: Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus C. Levitt (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 150). Detroit: Gale Research.

Paul A. Bushkovitch