In the seventeenth century a whole category of works arose that were independent of official literature and became known as “democratic satire” (The Tale of Ruff Ruffson, The Tale of Savva the Priest, The Kalyazin Petition, The ABC of a Poor and Naked Man, The Tale of Foma and Erema, […]

Church life of the 1640s and 1650s is reflected in The Tale of Savva the Priest which makes use of rayeshnik verse. At this time there were no schools for training priests in Russia. Peasants and townsfolk selected candidates who were sent for training and ordination to the towns that […]

The characters inhabiting the burlesque anti-world live by special laws. If they are monks, they “turn inside out” the rigid monastic rules that demand strict observance of fasts and attendance of church services, hard work and vigils. The Kalyazin Petition is a satirical complaint by the monks of” the Trinity […]

The Utopian ideal of the “world inside out” had nothing in common with the Kingdom of Christ on earth or in Heaven. It was a dream of an imaginary land of plenty which is free for all. This paradise of gluttons and drunkards is described in The Tale of the […]

This work, which appeared not later than the middle of the seventeenth century, has come down to us a number of very different redactions, but all of them are constructed according to the same plan: the remarks of the nameless hero, which taken together form a kind of monologue, are […]

The comic Tale of Foma and Erema, a fable about two unfortunate brothers, is full of despair.46 Here use is made of the most widespread device in mediaeval art, that of contrast. When a zealot is contrasted with a sinner, for example, they are portrayed in two colours only, black […]

The model of the church service is used in The Tavern Service, the oldest manuscript of which is dated 1666. It is about drunkards, frequenters of the tavern. They have their own religious service, which is held not in church, but in the tavern. They compose hymns and canons not […]

The Tale of the Cock and the Fox is pointedly anti-clerical. This work, which is mentioned in sources as early as 1640, has survived in prose and verse redactions, and also in mixed and folk-tale versions. The oldest is the prose redaction. It parodies the subject of the religious legend. […]

Who wrote the works of democratic satire? To what sections of the population did the anonymous authors of these works belong? We can assume that at least some of the satirical works came from the lower clergy. In The Kalyazin Petition we read that a Moscow priest served as a […]

Whereas mediaeval literature is characterised by a relative unity of artistic system and artistic taste, a kind of “style of the age”, in the seventeenth century this unity is destroyed. The individual element is felt increasingly strongly in art. Literature turns into an arena for conflicting ideas, and the writer […]