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The Unmerry Widow: The Blessed Kseniia of Petersburg in Hagiography and Hymnography Sergei Shtyrkov My story is for common people. The saint does not need a splendid ode1 - Irina Brekhuntsova Saints are often called "pillars of faith" in the Orthodox hymn tradition and they serve as such for believers. While the image of pillars implies steadiness and immutability, the saint's image may undergo significant evolutions as social contexts change and different political and spiritual needs arise. These influences on a saint's hagiographical tradition can give rise to a dramatic proliferation of images that are actively constructed and may share and exchange semantic nuances. This paper will point out a few important instances that illustrate the tension and even discontinuities within the hagiographical tradition of one of Russia's most highly esteemed saints, the Blessed St. Kseniia of St. Petersburg. The first officially recognized female fool for Christ in Russia, she lived in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century and was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1978 and by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988. (See figs. 21 and 22 in the gallery of illustrations following p . 224l Her feastday is 24 January, old style and 6 February, new style. When we talk about St. Kseniia's hagiography, it is important to remember that we have little reliable information on her life. Most of the data on her life comes from oral tradition, or has been reconstructed from indirect evidence. It is believed that she lived in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg and died there, probably at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. According to the account that 1 Povest' rnoia dlia prostago naroda, / Ne dlia sviatoi raznotsvetnaia oda. Irina Brekhuntsova , Ksel1iia blazhel1l1aia: Matushka Ksel1iia. Istoricheskaia poema (51. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 1998), 14. 2 No.1 is an icon of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad painted by Deborah Morrison , as reproduced in Russkii Paloml1ik, no. 20 (1999): 112, back cover; no. 2 is a plastic icon from the 5molensk Cemetery, acquired by the author in 2010, and measuring 135x110 m. Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives. Priscilla Hunt and Svitlana Kobets, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publi shers, 2011 , 281 - 304. 282 SERGEI SHTYRKOV had become standard by the early twentieth century,3 Kseniia Grigor'evna was married to a court chorister, Colonel Andrei Fedorovich Petrov4 When she was twenty-six years old, the unexpected death of her husband led to changes in her behavior: she took the name of her husband and refused to be called by her own; she dressed in his uniform; she gave away her possessions (including her house); and she began to roam the streets of St. Petersburg, collecting alms and enduring the summer heat and winter cold. She would give advice and tell the future to some of her acquaintances, always speaking in riddles. After Kseniia's death, her grave in the Smolensk cemetery in St. Petersburg became an object of veneration and pilgrimage. Scholars have already addressed some aspects of her cult. V. N. Toporov has written a very perceptive and useful ethnographical description of the veneration of St. Kseniia's shrine in the Smolensk cemetery in late Soviet LeningradS O. N. Filicheva has described the practice of writing notes with pleas to Kseniia6 N. S. Gordienko was the first to address the changing nature of Kseniia's vita, especially during the twentieth century? Nadezhda Kizenko has observed that hagiographical texts more or less directly reflect the image of a saint that exists for his or her devotees, - in St. Kseniia's case, lower-class women8 My thesis is that the hagiographical tradition about St. Kseniia also influences the way the saint is worshipped. The present article looks at the variations in St. Kseniia's hagiographical tradition spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. I will demonstrate that authors of her vitae actively participated in building her cult, responding to their own changing perceptions of who the people were, as well 3 D. Bulgakovskii, Raba Bozhiia Kseniia iii lurodivyi Andrei Fedorovich. Pogrebena na Smolenskom kladbishche v Sankt-Peterburge (SI. Petersburg: Tipografiia arteli pechatnogo dela, 1904). 4 This information derives from different sources. See, for example, E. Grebenka, "Peterburgskaia storona," in Fiziologiia Peterburga, sostavlenl1aia iz trudov russkikh literatorav , ed. N. A. Nekrasov (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo A. Ivanova, 1845), 1: 219-21. In its "canonical form," that episode comes from the epitaph on Kseniia's tomb. See N. S. Gordienko, Novye provoslavnye sviatye (Kiev: Ukraina, 1991), 260. 5 V. N...

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