The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland

Whoever does not drink to the end, he wishes evil: Ritual Drinking and Politics in Early Modern Russia

The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland. Valerie Kivelson, Karen Petrone, Nancy Shields Kollmann, and Michael S. Flier, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2009, 107–24. Whoever does not drink to the end, he wishes evil: Ritual Drinking and Politics in Early Modern Russia* Nikolaos Chrissidis Introduction While in England in 1614, the Muscovite Ambassador Aleksei Ivanovich Ziuzin attended a dinner with several of the English nobility and courtiers. After his return to Russia, Ziuzin described the event in some detail and related the following incident: And Ivanovic [Ziuzin] spoke a cup of health for his Tsar’s majesty and for his sovereign’s long last health to Sir Thomas, and the gentlemen , and the merchants and to all sorts of people who were at that time in the room: ‘The cup of our Great Sovereign given by God and endowed by God, just and merciful Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fyodorovich, Autocrat of all Russia and sovereign and possessor of many states, his Tsar’s Majesty. May the Lord grant that our Great Sovereign, his Tsar’s Majesty, should be healthy and happy in his great state of the Russian tsardom, and terrible to his enemies; and also we, his servants, pray our all generous God, glorified in the Trinity , that God should lengthen life to him the Great Sovereign, and give him victory over his enemies, and that he should finally complete his grace and establish the root of his just Tsar’s descendants for the heredity of his sovereign family forever unmoved.’1 * Kto ne dopivaet, tot zla zhelaet: Russian saying. This article is partly based on research conducted during the 2006 National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on early East Slavic visual culture held at the New York Public Library. I am grateful to Ed Kasinec, Robert Davis, Val Kivelson, and the NEH for their support and to participants of the May 2008 symposium in honor of Daniel B. Rowland at the University of Kentucky, Lexington for their comments. I am also grateful to Professor Ol’ga Dmitrieva (Moscow State University), through whose extraordinary help I was able to visit the Kremlin palaces and access the holdings of the Moscow Armory. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the director and staff of the Gennadeios Library (Athens, Greece). All remaining errors are mine. 1 Maija Jansson and Nikolai Rogozhin, eds., England and the North: The Russian Embassy of 1613–1614, trans. Paul Bushkovitch (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 156. Ziuzin pronounced the speech standing and having removed his hat, as did 108 NIKOLAOS CHRISSIDIS Ziuzin’s cup to the health of the tsar was one of the many different occasions of ritualized drinking called for by Muscovite diplomatic protocol. Toasting the tsar (whether he was present or not) constituted an indispensable and minutely choreographed part of tsarist hospitality shown to foreigners in Russia. Thus, we find it performed during the sojourns of both Orthodox and non-Orthodox guests at the tsar’s court.2 Although drinking in honor of the Russian sovereign as part of diplomatic protocol has long been the subject of historians’ attention, it was not the only occasion of officially prescribed consumption of drinks connected to the tsar.3 In fact, there was another ritual, this time of monastic origin, which was called zazdravnaia chasha or, more formally in the trebniki (service books) of the 17th century, “Service and Order for A Refectory Meal [on the Occasion] Of the Pouring to the Health of the Tsar.”4 This article is an attempt to describe this ritual, to analyze its message, Sir Thomas Smith (the 1604 English ambassador to Russia and one of Ziuzin’s main companions during the visit) and the other dinner guests. He then drank from the cup and gave it to Sir Thomas and the other guests. Sir Thomas also pronounced his own toast to the tsar’s health and then drank together with the others. Subsequently, they all sat down. The Englishmen started drinking the cup of their sovereign, but they did so sitting, which provoked critical remarks of the Muscovite ambassadors to the effect that their drinking while sitting did not show respect to their monarch. The Englishmen responded that they showed respect through their service, only to get a similar answer from the Russians (156–58). 2 See, for example, the occasion of visiting prelates from the Greek East for the case of Patriarch Makarii of Antioch (1647...