-
What Was Chernoknizhestvo? Black Books, Foreign Writing, and Literacy in Muscovite Magic
- Slavica Publishers
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey. Chester S. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2008, 459–72. What Was Chernoknizhestvo? Black Books, Foreign Writing, and Literacy in Muscovite Magic Valerie A. Kivelson On April 17, 1635, two brothers, the priest Druzhin and the priest Kondratii, sat in conversation at a social gathering, drinking brew (braga) at Cossack Khorlamka Mastiskov’s house. Having drunk themselves to the point of in-‐‑ toxication, as their neighbors testified they did on a regular basis, the two got into a fight, also a routine occurrence between them, and began exchanging insults. In the heat of the drunken brawl, Priest Druzhin shouted at his brother: “You ate sixteen pigs at my house, and you’re a heretic too! You keep heretical black books at your house!”1 Aside from reducing the modern reader to fits of incredulous laughter (or at least, that’s its consistent effect on me), this passage raises some puzzling questions. What is the association among these various charges? What did each of these accusations mean to the accuser, the accused, the assembled wit-‐‑ nesses, and the court authorities who eventually heard the case? What did Priest Druzhin have in mind when he added “heretical black books” to the list of his brother’s offenses? And finally, and most to the point of this article, what did these inebriated priests or any of their contemporaries think “black books” were? The brief answer to the last question is that we really don’t know. “Black books” (chernye knigi) and the related terms of “black book magic” (chernokni-‐‑ zhestvo) and “black book magicians” (chernoknizhniki, chernoknizhtsy) appear with some regularity in the official texts condemning magical practice from the beginning of the 16th century on. David Goldfrank identifies perhaps the earliest usage of the term in Iosif Volotskii’s introduction to his Prosvetitel’, written around 1502–04. Here Iosif condemns the seductions of astrology, magic (charodeistvo), and black book magic as leading the credulous astray.2 1 RGADA (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov, Moscow) f. 210, stolbtsy razriadnykh stolov, Prikaznyi stol, stlb. 91, fols. 293–302. 2 I am deeply grateful to David Goldfrank for this reference. Skazanie i novoiavivshesia eresi novogorodskikh eretikov, as quoted in N. A. Kazakova and Ia. S. Lur’e, Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV–nachala XVI veka (Moscow-‐‑Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1955), 471: “Toliko zhe dr’znovenie togda imeiakhu k derzhavnomu protopop Aleksei i Fedor Kuritsyn, iako nikto in. Zvezdozakoniiu bo prelezhakhu, i mnogym basno-‐‑ 460 VALERIE A. KIVELSON Will F. Ryan cites another early use of the term in the condemnations of Mak-‐‑ sim Grek in 1525 and 1531, when he was charged with “employing sorcery against the Grand Prince, of heresy, judaizing, and practicing Hellenic and Jewish book magic [black book magic] and witchcraft.”3 These early appear-‐‑ ances were followed swiftly by the condemnation in the Domostroi, a 16th-‐‑ century household handbook, of “black book magic” (chernoknizhie), along with the use of spells, “sorcery and witchcraft as propounded in Rafli and al-‐‑ manacs [and other astrological and prognostic texts], censured books, The Seraph, … and any other Devil-‐‑inspired art.”4 “Black books” make an appear-‐‑ ance again in Grigorii Kotoshikhin’s account of legal practice in Muscovy in the 1660s. In law, the “black book magic” terminology appeared again in Peter the Great’s Military Statute of 1716. Known as a path-‐‑breaking piece of European-‐‑ izing legislation, in the area of chernoknizhestvo, the law perpetuated rather than altered the general set of associations with dangerous, heretical, book-‐‑ based magic. It also maintained the traditional Muscovite vagueness of defini-‐‑ tion. Assuming we know what it is talking about, the new law opens by ad-‐‑ dressing a general category: “Whoever is a CHERNOKNIZHNIK OR IDOL-‐‑ WORSHIPPER.” In its lengthy explanatory introduction, the first article of the code explains that it is the duty of a Christian subject to serve the Sovereign and Fatherland. Consequently, “because all blessing, victory and good for-‐‑ tune originates with the one all-‐‑powerful God,” any deviation from the path of Christian righteousness threatens to undermine the blessed condition of the Fatherland. In other words, dealing with the forces of evil, as presumably chernoknizhniki and idol worshippers did, jeopardized Russia’s good standing in the scales of divine justice, and would have immediate ramifications on the battlefield. The whiff of treason that had long characterized Muscovite...