Mother Maria Skobtsova, Philosopher, Poet, Nun on the Streets

7/27/2019 Mother Maria Skobtsova, Philosopher, Poet, Nun on the Streets

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Mother Maria Skobtsova, Philosopher, Poet, Nun on the StreetsChapter excerpted from the book Sisters in Wisdom, all rights reserved

Historical and Philosophical Background of the Early Socialist Movement

Rare is that soul, which having faith, accepts the most deadly peril and suffering,beholding in them something divine. Suffering was to become, in Mother Maria’s life,bound up with both a visceral awareness of her own vulnerability and with the humanbrokenness which was the ground in which she found herself. She was born in aturbulent era and her short and poignant life would end in martyrdom. Because Maria’slife in Russia was intimately bound to the destiny of the Russian soul prior to therevolution, it is important to understand the historical milieu from which she emerged.

During the latter part of the 18th century, it was becoming apparent to much of theRussian public that serfdom was not compatible with Russia’s claim to being either acivilized country or a powerful state. Yet the monarchy, under both Alexander I and

Nicholas I, held an agonizing fear of losing the support of the 100,000 serf-owingdvoriane, on whom it relied to staff the government and command the armed forces.Emancipation of the serfs under Alexander II in 1861 did not solve the deeper problemsaffecting the economic, social, and political structure of the nation. The new legislationhad not freed many of the peasants from external constraints or great debt; and manypeasants were free but landless. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated and social unrestcontinued to grow.

In addition, the population of Russia doubled by the end of the 19 th century. In 1858Russia had 68 million inhabitants; in 1897, 125 million (1). The combined pressure ofsocial and economic burdens and an uncontrollable population created a situation in

which it was nearly impossible for the Russian peasant to support himself throughagriculture. The revolutionary intelligentsia were filled with a generous indignation at theplight of the peasant, but they were often as far removed from peasant life as was thebureaucracy. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina describes the suspicion and gulf ofincomprehension that existed between the peasants and their often well-meaninglandlords.

Alexander II was succeeded by a reactionary Alexander III and the government becameseverely repressive. Behind the new tzar stood his tutor, Constantine Pobedonostser, soonto be head of the Holy Synod and one of the most powerful men in the nation. In his, A History of Russia, John Lawrence describes him as “gaunt, tight-lipped, high-principled

and not inhumane, Pobedonostser despaired of humanity. He saw clearly the forces ofchaos growing among the younger generation, and he believed that nothing could restrainthe evil propensities of man except the strongest government.” (2) In 1894, Alexander IIIdied and his son Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, succeeded him.

‘Intelligentsia’ was a term that became widely used in Russia in the middle of the 19 th

century. James Billington notes that, “Moderate liberals, romantic Slavophiles, andrationalistic Westernizers no less than revolutionaries all seized on the term.” (3) For the

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most part, the intelligentsia arose from a discrepancy between social status and socialfunction generated by the failure of the imperial state to create a workable civil society.Although most of the intelligentsia were educated, the term came to include not justpeople who had completed a higher education, but who held a particular ideologicalattitude. The tendency to turn philosophical idealism into materialism and abstract

philosophy into praxis typified the second half of the century.

A prevailing concern of philosophers in the early 19 th century was that Russia laggedbehind European culture and intellectual life because serfdom degraded the whole ofsociety. How, the question was posed, is serfdom compatible with respect for the dignityof individual human beings? As many of these Russian thinkers became aware of thedepth and breadth of European philosophy, they realized that their first priority ofspreading enlightenment in Russia was to oust the autocracy and propagate a liberaleducation. Many of the writers and thinkers like Peter Chaadaev, Alexander Herzen andVissarion Belinsky, were anti-tsarist and early socialist pioneers. Influenced by Hegel,Herzen believed that history moves in a three-stage progression: from medieval

Catholicism to philosophic Protestantism to a ‘New Christianity’ which was morehumanistic and renovative, and which was to take place in Russia. It was Hegel whocaptured the minds of the Russian philosophers of the 1830’s and 1840’s. These were thefirst generation of philosophers to theorize in pre-Marxist terms about the future ofRussia. From German metaphysical theory they felt a calling to motivate Russia to movefrom tsarism toward a better life.

During the period that Western views were taking hold in Russia, a quite differentphilosophy was emerging, known as the Slavophile movement. Although the Slavophileview of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism, it tended to stress apietistic glorification of Russia, which would be regenerated from within. InitiallySlavophiles sought to organize around the idea of conciliarity, which denotes a specialkind of unity, allowing for maximum freedom; but members of such sobor are boundtogether by the principle of unity. Sobornost or conciliarity was the idea which madeRussian philosophy and knowledge possible. Ideally, it was believed, this intuitiveRussian knowledge arises not from struggle or confrontation but through a comingtogether. Reflecting the Orthodox belief that through theosis humans enter a sort ofcognitive love, the individual becomes one with that which she encounters or perceives.Ideally, the most perfect form of sobornost was the Church:

“The Church is called one, holy, sobornyi…because she belongs to the wholeworld….because she hallows all humanity and all the earth…because her essenceconsists in the harmony and unity of the Spirit.” (4)

This idea of sobornost was to become an important force in Mother Maria’s life.However, the tight bond between Church and state in Russia had emerged after Peter theGreat’s abolition of the Patriarchate in 1721, which made the Orthodox Church in Russialargely subordinate to the state, and it was increasingly becoming the object of greatcriticism. The Holy Synod was viewed as uncanonical, since it breached the principle ofsobornost and subordinated the Russian Church to secular power.

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Both the Slavophiles and the ‘Westernizers’ can be characterized as reactionary, i.e.,against a neighboring (European) civilization which perceived itself as ‘superior.’Herzen, for all his flirtations with the West, believed that Russia, because it was stillundeveloped, had the capacity to synthesize the best of the West and create a new social

form, hitherto unknown in Europe or anywhere else in the world. This new social form— Russian socialism—soon split into two camps, the Populists, who were more ethnic andwho looked to the revolutionary potentialities of the peasant masses (scouted aspolitically imbecile by many of their contemporaries); and the Marxists, (who laterformed the Social Democratic Worker’s Party) who stressed the integration of peasantsand the proletariat into an international movement.

Populism hoped to establish a better Russia but its romantic and alternative lifestyle was“akin to Slavophile communalism and the simple Christian community preached by LevTolstoy.” (5) Unfortunately, the Populists lacked success as a reform movement becausepeaceful campaigning yielded only frustrated results, despite the idealism of its activists.

Marxism offered political organization, coupled with the expectation of historicalinevitability. Their vision of history was impersonal and objective, stressing thescientific positivism of Comte, but eventually hardening into the Marxist vision ofHegelian progress, which would wreak such havoc on Russian soil. But then, the lastbeacon of utopian hope was born: the Silver Age, and with it came the advent of a newera in Russian art and creativity, a movement in which Maria would flourish before, likea light, the last flicker of hope would be extinguished for individual creativeconsciousness in the motherland.

Maria’s Early Life and Poetry

Born Elizabeth Yuriseva Pilenko in 1891, Maria was known to her family as Liza. Herfather, Yury, was the public prosecutor in the Baltic town of Riga. He moved his familyto Anapa, to manage a large estate he inherited on the death of his father. Outside thegates of their estate was an ancient burial ground where Liza and her brother liked toplay. They moved again when Liza was 13, when her father became director of the famedBotonical Gardens near Yalta. As a child of 7 or 8, she asked her parents if she couldtravel with the pilgrims who perpetually trekked to monasteries and holy sites in theirsearch for God. From an early age, she seemed to have a pre-occupation with death andeven predicted to her perplexed parents that she would die by burning. Her mother,Sophia, attributed these strange presentiments to the unusual incident which occurredwhen she was baptized: while being immersed, she choked on water and came very closeto drowning. Whatever the cause, she once confessed to a friend, Konstantin Mockulsky,that death had always held an inexplicable preoccupation for her. “I wrote poems anddreamt of death. When I was young, I always wanted to die.” (6)

Liza’s father had a strong, but gentle nature, and was known for his generosity. Lizaadored him passionately. And although death was something that Liza spoke freely andmatter-of-factly about during much of her childhood, when her own father diedprematurely when she was only 14, Liza was so devastated that she hurled words of

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apostasy into the universe in her unbearable grief. She reasoned: “Poor world in whichthere is no God, in which death has dominion…poor me, who has suddenly grown adultsince I have uncovered the adult secret that there is no God, and that the world is riddenwith grief, evil and injustice. So ended childhood.” (7)

After her father’s death, her mother moved the family to St. Petersburg, where, in thechilly fogs of this northern city, Liza first witnessed the unjust poverty pervasive in thedank, dirty side streets of Russia’s great cultural city. Identifying with the poorest anduneducated, she soon found herself in school by day and giving evening classes toilliterate workers at night.

It was in St. Petersburg that her artistic and literary gifts began to flourish. The years ofsocial unrest which culminated in the Revolution of 1917 saw her publish her first twovolumes of poetry. She moved in the rarified world of the Russian artists andintelligentsia, where she met, among others, the famous Alexander Blok, Alexei Tolstoy,and Nikolai Berdiaev (with whom she would have a long colleagueship in Paris.) She

was drawn to the symbolism of Blok’s poetry which seemed to perceive the spiritualreality behind the physical. For himself, Blok, forever in search of the Eternal Feminine,found something soothing in Liza. Perhaps it was her strong maternal nature. They shareda mystical affinity which pivoted around the themes of suffering, meaninglessness anddeath. They wrote each other several poems; he described her as

“so vitalso beautifulyet so tormentedspeaking only of sad thingsthinking of deathloving no oneand scornful of your own beauty…” (8)

She wrote, even as a child, and her passion for poetry was goaded by KonstantinBalmont, an early Russian symbolist; later she found herself swept up in the symbolistmovement. She began to gravitate toward the revolutionary Social Democrats and, at age18, married a university student, Dimitri Kuzmin-Karavaiev, who was a member ofLenin’s group called the Bolskeviks. At the same time, although she still claimed to bean atheist, she was fascinated by religion, and enrolled in the Ecclesiastical Academy,where she studied theology (the first Russian woman to do so) and eventually regainedher faith. However, it was while she was praying at the holy shrine of the Mother of God,Joy of All Who Sorrow, the wonder-working icon which consoled so many of the Russiansorrowful, where the strength of her faith was renewed. Suddenly everything becameclear to her: “Jesus is over all. Unique and expiating everything!” (9) She wrote:

“Will I listen to quiet prayers?Your hands knocked on the window,You came to me, bright MotherFrom the starry and blessed distance… “ (10)

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Much of the work produced by the early Symbolist school was steeped in the atmosphereof mysticism and radical messianism. They were the ‘God-seekers.’ In addition, theRussian intelligensia was, by the end of the 19 th century, not only pre-occupied with itsown intellectual development but deeply concerned with that of society at large, and by

the 1890’s “to be an intelligent meant as much as to be a revolutionary.” (11) When Lizapublished her poetry collection called The Road, it was part of a genre that wasflourishing of its own volition. For the mystical symbolists, poetry was a vision of otherworlds, almost a form of prophecy, and this often seems to be the case with Maria’spoetry. The poem entitled Yes fate I believe in you seems to presage her future vocationto be a mother of many:

“And I will continue along this wide grain fieldI was called in life to be a shearerTo reap with my hasty handThe harvest of earthly hearts.” (12)

In her poem, Long-Borrow Princess, she seems to be reminiscing about the burialmounds of her youth, now connected to the bloody revolution surrounding her:

“I stood upon the heights and saw the valleyWhere once I galloped with my caravan….They reaped more men than wheat upon that cornfield,Think of your bride, friend sleeping in the mound!” (13)

In time, Liza began to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe facing Russia, and shebecame more disenchanted with the dreams of the intelligentsia, which appeared to herincreasingly theoretical, impractical and vacuous. As she beheld the reality of destroyedvillages, massive dislocation, terror, hunger and chaos, the Revolutionary grail began tofade. She wrote: “Am I with Christ? Or am I among irresponsible words which I begin tofeel are a sacrilege, an offence…I must fly away. Liberate myself. But this is not soeasy.” (14) And yet her friendship with Blok remained: “Petersburg was no more…Awaywith culture, the rusty smog…philosophy! But I kept there one hostage, a man symbolicof the terrible world, a point of contact with its whole torment… maybe its onlytormented justification—Alexander Blok.” (15)

She intuited the cloud that would descend on her mother country in her poem, My dearest mother, I love your ashes:

“My dearest mother, I love your ashesYou were princess of the kurgansI am losing my life in the midst of enemiesI am full of murky poison.Bless me with your hand,I am screaming, I am crying at the funeral feast…”

(16)

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In a collection The Road ( Doroga) written approximately 1912-1914, she returns to thetheme she is a companion to, You told me about death:

“And greedily will I listen to his wordsI will feel with all of my scarlet blood,That in front of me lies the earth - my native mother.And that a prayer – is the road along the harvest.” (17)

Michael Plekon, who has written much about Mother Maria, has said “The BolshevikRevolution was for her, as for Fr. Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and many others, a tragedy— but also a true liberation. It forced Russian Christians to reject the support of monarchyand fashion a new democratic and pluralistic social order. Here she clashed profoundlywith the conservative monarchist Russians of both the Synod as well as those in Pariswho adhered to the Moscow patriarchate despite state manipulation of the church.” (18)

In her comparison of early and contemporary martyrdom, Liza saw around her a brokenpeople in a broken Church.

“The blood of martyrs flowered once on this infertile earth.A hungry lion licked their woundsAnd they went forward to their torture freelyAs by God’s grace shall we as well.” (19)

Her first marriage, which was impulsive, did not last long and they separated in 1912.The next year, her first daughter, Gaiana (named after mother earth) was born.In Doroga (1916) she recorded the voice of a solitary figure trying to discern her true

calling:

“Not for me the sanguine dreamOf clever husband, life of normal bride.A dark cross weighs my shoulder down,My way grows straighter stride by stride” (20)

At the onset of World War I she returned with Gaiana to her family estate in Anapa,where she had spent so many happy years with her brother, who had recently died in thecivil war. There she was elected mayor, opened up a medical center for refugees,protected the town from bandits, and spoke up against Bolsheviks, whom she perceivedas abusive. Nevertheless, because she was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary party,when the Whites regained power in 1918, she was arrested and faced execution as aBolshevik collaborator. In 1919 she successfully defended herself at her own trial, andwon the attention of Daniel Skobtsov, an important government figure who was acting as judge. They married a few months later. Because Daniel was a White, when the tideturned again for the Bolsheviks, the Skobtsovs, with many thousands of theircompatriots, left Russia. Liza was again pregnant and her son Yuri was born when the

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family reached Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. A year later they traveled to Istanbul andYugoslavia, where Liza gave birth to a third child, Anastasia.

It was a bleak and unsettling period in their lives. Daniel was unable to find suitablework, and the family was often on the edge of hunger and sickness. In 1923, they arrived

in Paris, where thousands of Russians had fled, and there they found lodging with somefriends. In 1926 the whole family contacted a serious flu, from which Anastasia (Nastia)never recovered. Later she was diagnosed with meningitis. She died at only 4 years ofage and for Liza, it was a dagger far exceeding the loss of her father or her brother. Shewrote:

“At Nastia’s side I feel that my soul has meandered down back alleys all my life. Andnow I want an authentic and purified road, not out of faith in life, but in order to justify,understand and accept death…” (21)

It seemed that Liza had come to understand that suffering itself is a choice: it is the place

where one either encounters or turns away from God. She must have realized that thedeath of her daughter was the greatest challenge of her faith. It would be so simple toslide back into desperation (she later wrote) where “the whole of natural existence haslost its stability and its coherence…[and] meaninglessness has displaced meaning…” (22)Instead, she perceived that what was being revealed to her at that time was not only “themortality of all creation [but] simultaneously…the life-giving, fiery, all-penetrating andall-consuming Comforter, the Spirit.” (23)

She also began to glimpse her calling toward an expansive motherhood, in which sheshould be “a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance or protection.”(24). But this calling, she understood, would elicit a radical renunciation: “And I amconvinced that anyone who has shared this experience of eternity, if only once;…who hasperceived the One who precedes him, if only once: such a person will find it hard todeviate from this path; to him all comforts will appears ephemeral, all treasures valueless,all companions superfluous…” (25)

She began to feel a deeper vocation. Her marriage to Daniel unraveled soon afterward.

Liza becomes Mother Maria

In 1932, six years after her daughter Anastasias’ death, and despite the fact that she hadtwo children and two ex-husbands, she managed to overcome all obstacles and fulfill adream she had been nurturing of becoming a nun in the world. She had little inclinationtoward the contemplative life or the normal routine of Daily Office. Her only goal was tooffer herself to those in the desert of human suffering; in particular, to the catastrophe ofthe unwanted Russian émigrés surrounding her in Paris. Now ‘Mother Maria’, she stroveto find value in service alone, discerning that God was nudging her to move beyond herown pain in order to witness and attend to the suffering of others.

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It is believed that her oldest daughter, Gaiana, entered boarding school during this time.Her son, Yuri, contacted tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatorium, where his mothervisited him frequently. Eventually he would support her in her work in Paris, becomingone of her greatest allies. Between 1916 and 1936 she published little poetry but manyarticles for the YMCA press. She wrote about the great Russian thinkers and published a

book on the lives of the saints. Together with Mother Maria, many of the intelligentsiawho emigrated to France formed a unique diaspora that laid the foundation of what wasto become a dynamic and integrated Russian Orthodox community.

Mother Maria’s attitude about the Russian Church and society were reflected in many ofher scribbled writings, which were later collected and recorded by Sergei Hackel. (26 )She wrote: “We have no enormous cathedrals, no encrusted gospels or monastery walls…[so] we must deny ourselves any stylizations or aesthetic reformulations…[and] mustscrupulously distinguish Orthodoxy from all its décor and its costumes. In some sense weare called to early Christianity.” (27)

The number of refugees fleeing Russia at the time was more than 1,160,000. By 1924,there were approximately 400,000 in France. They were often crowded into the poorestareas of the city and many no doubt developed a nostalgia for their homeland. MotherMaria formed the Orthodox Action group, which engaged in re-settlement work amongthe émigrés, primarily through the provision of hostels and a soup kitchen. Her spiritualfather, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, became the dean of St. Sergius Theological Academy andNikolai Berdyaev founded the Religious-Philosophical Academy, in part, to “awaken thereligious spirit and to further religious education among the younger Russian generation.”(28)

One of the objectives of such programs was the promotion of the “ otserkvlenie” or‘churchification’ of life and also the “ozhivlenie” or ‘enlivining’ of the church. In otherwords, it’s purpose was a “Christianization of life.” (29) Out of this movement emergedmeetings and conferences attended by clergy, intellectuals and youth leaders, where awider ecumenical movement was born. The fellowship of St. Sergius and St. Albans,under the direction of Maria’s close friend, Sergius Bulgakov, formed bridges betweenthe Anglican and Orthodox churches. The YMCA, which was then a very ProtestantChristian organization, gave concrete form to the needs of Russian émigrés to publish.Many of the intellectuals and writers of the Russia Abroad movement that werecolleagues of Mother Maria, including Father Bulgakov, George Florovsky, NicholasZernov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Nikolai Berdiaev, had found Paris to be a welcomingnew home.

The most characteristic form the Russian intelligentsia took during this period was calledthe ‘kruzhok ’ and it was alive in the emigration, as intellectuals and young students cametogether and formed discussion groups at the YMCA.(30) These groups of young people,together with the elders to whom they turned for spiritual direction, eventually served asthe seedbed for the Russian Christian Student Movement (RCSM). The RCSM wasestablished in 1923 and helped organize life in the émigré community where, nowbeyond the reach of persecution so prevalent in the growing Bolshevik terror, it was

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granted freedom of speech. The Russia Abroad movement also argued for the resistanceto Hitler’s expansion, which posed a threat both to Russia and to Western democracies;and they were some of the most vocal voices condemning the aggressive policies ofFacist and Nazi regimes, including anti-Semitism.

The major philosophical concerns of the émigré movement continued to be theimportance of the individual personality as creator of true cultural values and theintegration of the material and spiritual dimension of life. The intelligensia were verymuch interested in coming to grips with the ‘social question’ of their age: humanisticsocialism. While many philosophically analyzed it from different perspectives, MotherMaria turned to the practical problems of tending for the needy.

After Maria had opened up two hostels, she rented a large dilapidated house which firstserved as a sanatorium for émigrés with tuberculosis and later as a home for the elderly.She herself lived in quiet poverty most of the time, inviting others to her hostel, while sheslept in a tiny space under the stairs. With Fr. Lev Gillet (31) she provided the unwanted

homeless, the depressed, and lonely with a warm meal, a meeting place, a network ofsupport, and a place to worship. She saw in them not unruly beggars and vagrants butfellow wayfarers in Christ. The whole world became her church and she saw the face ofChrist in everyone she met: Christian, Jew, or those uncommitted to a religiousaffiliation.

Her ecumenical outlook was expressed in her Types of Religious Life, where Mariainvites us to extend the concept of liturgy into life itself, not just a ritual reserved forSundays. This understanding is built on her need to see the “sacrament of brother/sister”within her daily life on the streets. (32) Fr. Plekon’s commentary on this is that “MotherMaria’s vision, one shared by so many in our time, is not just of the cosmic expanse ofthe Liturgy, that the prayer of the church encompasses the entire world. She alsorecognizes the implications of this. It is not so much that ‘secular’ or profane life andactivity are somehow sanctified, baptized or blessed by the church and the individualChristian. Rather, a more ancient and biblical realization is recovered, namely, that all ofcreation is holy…Teilhard de Chardin also achieved this cosmic vision…which unitesus….not only in the communion of saints but also with all the creatures of theLord...”(33)

As a nun living ‘in the world’ Maria was nonetheless dedicated to the communitySacraments. In an environment where Orthodox Christians found themselves misplaced,Mother Maria made part of her hostel into a church, made vestments, and embroideredicons. At her house at the Rue de Lourmel she made the stained glass windows for thechurch services, following the medieval tradition. Many came to her for free funerals andMaria embroidered the names of all the misplaced deceased on a large piece of cloth.

Together with Berdiaev and others, Mother Maria was instrumental in initiating thesomewhat controversial journal Novyi Grad (the New City,) the goal of which was toaffirm the Christian values of freedom and justice, and reconcile the principles ofnationality and universality. They were often accused of infusing the current social and

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political struggles into Orthodoxy. Although it held much potential, the YMCA Russianwork came to a halt in 1940 with the German occupation of France, although after thewar the RSCM took over some of the principle YMCA’s enterprises. Through the RSCMshe could attend to the huge number of émigrés working in inhumane conditions in steelfactories or mines. Through Orthodox Action she and her close colleague Fedor Pianov

were able to secure desperately needed funds for the Commission of Refugees of theLeague of Nations. Much support also came from Anglican sources, and the relationshipbetween the Anglicans and Orthodox drew extremely close together during the émigrémovement, especially with the founding of St. Sergius and St. Albans.

After she became a nun, Mother Maria raised many eyebrows by spending more time onthe streets than busy with her prayers, either begging for food leftovers at any market shecould find or fraternizing with vagrants and outcasts of all kinds. She clearly defined hergoal when she wrote: “Open your gates to homeless thieves, let the outside world sweepin to demolish your magnificent liturgical system, abase yourself, empty yourself [and]…accept the vow of poverty in all its devastating severity…” (34)

One of the Paris intelligentsia describes meeting her:“I met her in many different places. She was large, red-cheeked, very Russian, with a

nearsighted smile and equable demeanor, as if she were outside our conflicts, our noiseand agitations. Yet she herself moved quite a bit, made noise with her heavy boots andlong dark skirts, slurped tea and argued.” (35)

The rebel in her was alive and well, and she was often considered too left-wing to be arepresentative of the religious life. Sergei Hackel has proposed that because of the bittercriticism of her during her lifetime, the role of deaconess might have suited her betterthan the vocation of a nun. (36)

When she opened her second shelter, she joyously proclaimed: “At present, I am feedingtwenty-five; there I’ll be able to feed a hundred. At times I just feel as if God is taking meby the scruff of the neck and forcing me to do His will.” (37) She wrote that theseémigrés were trapped in institutions simply because they suffered from depression,shock, or the inability to speak the language. “Probably in the whole emigration none aremore abandoned than those who are committed in the madhouses,” she wrote (38) andshe tried repeatedly to re-integrate them into the community, or sometimes she would justgo and listen to their problems. She once told a colleague that human spiritual intercoursewas the theme of her very life.

When Gaiana was old enough she came to help her mother in the soup kitchen and toattend the university in Paris. Not long afterwards, however, she dealt a devastating blowto Maria when she announced that she had fallen in love with a soviet student atSorbonne and wanted to return with him to Russia. Initially Maria pleaded, then relented,seeing her own deep love for Russia reflected now in her daughter. When Gaianaexcitedly told her that Maria should join the movement, returning to the Soviet Unionherself, she only replied wryly, “I will wait until I can return in my nun’s habit.” (39)

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The next year, in June of 1936, she received a short curt letter from her son-in-lawannouncing that Gaiana had died, purportedly from thyphus. The shock was devastatingand Maria was inconsolable. The priest who was with her at the time describes her initialdisbelief: “I shall never forget that painful moment…She rushed out into the streetwithout a word, running…only much later did she return, astonishingly pacified.” (40)

She later said that it was a period of utmost spiritual desolation for her. One of her poemsat that time recorded her grief:

“Uproot from my exhausted heartall earthly hope, elation, fear,Whatever feeds or fills me.And leave the anguish in command.” (41)

In her poem, I scrape my scabs with pottery shards, she identifies with Job:

“I scrape my scabs with pottery shards

I sit on the mound of ashes, like Job.My naked limbs are covered with lesionsBut this is nothing….That’s my daughter in a grave…

My friends, we’ve got an account to settle with the Pre-eternal One.But he is merciful even in his wrath.So be it that he cursed Eve,And ordered her to carry life in her womb,--But now he takes that life away.” (42)

And yet somehow she began to intuit that:

“The King of Glory is getting closerTo bless his servant by suffering.” (43)

The publication in 1937 of more than 80 new poems came as a surprise to many and it isclear that the tragedy of Gaiana’s death was the catalyst of much poetic catharsis duringthese years.

She saw the hostel as a metaphor for the mysterious Visitor of Mt.: 25: 1-13:

“Spirit, intensify the struggle at this timeQuiet: a knock. Soon time for day to break.My icon lamp is lit, the wick well primed with oil.My guest is at the door. A vast wind in his wake.” (44)

She threw herself into her work, sleeping so little that one person who worked with her atthe time remarked, “…she does not know the meaning of cold, she goes without food orsleep for 23 hours at a time, she ignores illness and tiredness…knows no fear and hatesany form of comfort.” (45)

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After working in the hostel canteen all day she would visit the local insane asylum ortrudge over to the sanatorium. At night she went out into the streets of Paris’ darkestslums to encourage whomever she could find to come to her hostel. Fr. Lev Gillet recallsher once saying, “I would like to swaddle them and rock them to sleep.” (46)

During the period she was visiting Russian mental patients, she published an articlealerting the émigré community to the large number of fellow Russians who had endedtheir Diaspora in the local asylum and she wrote:

“I hear their intermittent laughter-tearsand their demented speech.Though overwhelmed by bitter griefI want to give my life for each.” (47)

Suffering and the Mother of God

After the Nazi occupation of Paris, Mother Maria became involved with the Jewishresistance movement, first smuggling food to those already in camps, and then hidingthem in her own residence. She forged documents, cared for orphans, re-located families,and took many personal risks. She remained steadfast through threats of adversity andgreat personal danger. What was characteristic of the Jewish people to Maria was its self-definition: “Everything may change, external forms may disappear, lands may be takenaway, but the personality of the people remains, for God created it immortal and eternal.”(48)

Even in Russia, when Maria was a member of the Social Revolutionaries, many of hercolleagues were Jews. What was important for those promoting the Revolution was thepromise of a new social order, not its ethnic make-up. Maria believed that the Churchshould reach out and support the Jewish people and also the Nazi resistance movement,not only because it was supportive of human dignity; but she knew full well thatmessianic Nazism was a threat to all, including her own Russian people, and the Jewswere but the first victims. One of the purposes of Orthodox Action in her understandingwas to align, protect, and support the Jews in any way possible, including issuing fakebaptisms, which she and Fr. Pianov were sometimes viciously criticized for.

Philosophically, Maria’s insight into the Jewish problem may have also have beeneschatological: “The Cross of Golgotha is laid upon the shoulders of all Israel. And thisCross lays down an obligation,” she said, simply but affirmatively. (49) In herunderstanding, it was this obligation which should become the catalyst to transform thefear and misunderstanding of many of her own fellow Russians into the sacrificial lovefor all humanity which Christ himself had done. The sacrificial love of one’s neighborwas Maria’s imitation of Christ, what she even called, at times, her personal Golgotha.She once wrote:

“Christ did not know measure in His love for people…in the sense that He teaches us byHis example not of a measured limit in love, but rather an absolute and immeasurable

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surrendering away of oneself, by definition a laying down of one’s soul for others.” (50)As Michael Plekon has well expressed it, the whole world became for Maria her Church,and every single individual an image of God for her. Mother Maria was radical becauseof a piety that made asceticism secondary to charity. (51) For suffering is the leaven thatis shared by all of us. She saw all persecuted victims in the concentration camps, whether

Jewish or Russian, as “crucified with Christ in the person of his saints.” (52)

Part of Maria’s theological task was to respond to the call of Christ: “Do this inremembrance of me,” in those martyred around her, and to recognize the voice of Christanew in their voices. Just as Jesus asked his disciples to love one another as he had lovedthem, to be for one another what he was for them, so also those suffering and dyingcontinue to hand over their own lives as a legacy. The certainty of a death freely given foranother becomes a heritage entrusted to the survivors. She saw in them an opportunity torelate to the suffering of Christ and thereby be strengthened: because the Son of Godsuffered, there remains a hope of humanizing our own suffering. In Maria’s growingunderstanding, Christ continues to die in those suffering and dying around us—his death

is not over. If we ignore the dying of Jesus in the present, we deny the Passion itself.

During that time she wrote an article called the Mysticism of Human Communication,where she said, “I think that the fullest understanding of Christ’s giving himself to theworld, creating the one Body of Christ…is contained in the Orthodox idea ofsobornost ….In communing with the world in the person of each individual…wecommune with God.” (53)

The idea that she developed in that essay is that if we really believe that the Lamb of Godis offered as a sacrifice for the whole world—which is what the Liturgy states—then,“being in communion with the sacrificial Body, we ourselves become offered insacrifice.” (54) This participation in Christ’s suffering is nowhere more evident than inthe person of the Mother of God. Maria believes, with her spiritual Father, SergiusBulgakov, (55) that the Theotokos plays a special part in the mysticism of divine-humanity. Through the mysterious Wisdom (Sophia) of God divinity and humanity havepenetrated each other. And the greatest human sensitivity to suffering was the portalthrough which the God-man came into the world—His Blessed Mother. Maria explains:“In the glory of the Mother of God is revealed the glory of creation, and the glory namelyis of all the whole creation, since…such an attitude towards the Mother of God definesnot only faith in the deification-theosis of mankind, but also faith in the deification-theosis of all the whole world, the cosmos, the earth.” (56) Elsewhere she says, “It isprecisely on this path of God-Motherhood that we must seek the justification andsubstantiation of our hopes,” (57) and following Bulgakov, she states explicitly, “She isthe point of conjunction of both creaturely and non-creaturely nature.” (58)

In one of her meditations on the Mother of God, Maria speaks of the misuse of thesymbol of the “cross-like sword,” which adorned many of the graves in a militarycemetery she had visited, reflecting how the combination of the cross and sword is oftenused to justify the violence of war. But, she insists, the cross and sword should mostproperly be a symbol of passive suffering, for “the sword deals a blow, it pierces the soul,

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which passively receives it. According to the Gospel (Luke 2: 35)…the cross of the Sonof man, accepted voluntarily, becomes a two-edged sword that pierces the soul of theMother.” (59) For the Theotokos willingly accepts the sword as it is plunged into herheart, as it was in Maria’s. Thus the Christian imitates not only Christ, the God-Man, buthis mother, who is also a symbol of the archetype of the Church.

In a poem entitled, The God News. It is—the Sword, she writes:

“Bearing the Good News. It is—the sword.It is—the hail and plague in peaceful fields.It is—a fiery and fearsome angelWho sounds the ancient alarms.” (60)

Much later, when her dreams of a new Russia had all but shattered, she still saw apromise in the cross, juxtaposed with the hammer. “By the name of Christ, by the crossof Christ, the hammer and the sickle can be given their authentic meaning; by the cross

labor can be sanctified and blessed…It is clear to everybody that we must seek a path tofree, purposeful, expedient labor, that we must take the world as a sort of garden that it isincumbent upon us to cultivate.” (61)

Mother Maria explains how Russian consciousness has always associated the Mother ofGod not only with the human mother standing at the foot of the cross, but as the Queen ofHeaven. She is “the Mother of all that lives,…the living and personal incarnation of theChurch, as the human body of Christ. The veil of the Mother of God protects the worldand she is also the ‘moist mother earth.’” (62) Catriona Kelly notes that in the set ofpoems in the Riga List, (numbers 89-93), the Virgin Mother appears as a “wingedwoman, pattern of self-sacrifice to be imitated by those on earth, symbol of creativityserved by human bees, Queen of heaven…and eagle saving the new-born from themountain-tops.” (63)

This, then, takes on even deeper significance when returning to the image of the swordand the cross, for “the earth is Golgotha with the cross set up on it, piercing it…red withblood—is it not a mother’s heart pierced by a sword?” The Theotokos is now the Motherof the Church, and as such, she continues to “co-suffer with each human soul, as…onGolgotha.” (64) In her poem entitled, I won’t keep anything, she says,

“Desolate is the dead firmamentAnd the dead earth is desolateAnd eternally the Mother gives awayHer Son to eternal Golgotha.” (65)

The ecclesiology of Eastern Christianity does not find itself, as the Churches in the West,struggling with the concept of Mary as co-redeemer. (66) Indeed, this attribution is foundin many of the early church Fathers. Maria notes that, “He bears the sins of the world— she collaborates with him, so co-participates, she co-feels, co-experiences. His flesh iscrucified—she is co-crucified. Let us not measure the degree of suffering on Golgotha.

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It’s measure is given to us…these two torments are equally measureless.” (67) Thedifference is that the Son’s suffering is voluntary and active; the Mother’s is passive, butwillingly accepted. On Golgotha, she becomes the handmaid of her Son’s suffering, andas her heart is pierced, so is the heart of mother-earth, for “the rocks split, the earthcracked open, the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” (68)

It is because Mother Maria could see the Theotokos in this way that she could finallymake meaning of the suffering of losing, not one or two, but finally all three of herchildren. It was the God-motherly part of her human soul which then wanted to adopt thewhole world, for all their crosses, and sorrows, and deaths became double-edged swordspiercing her own heart.

She has proclaimed her identity with Job, but it is with a dignified acceptance and gracethat she now identifies with Jacob:

“At night you will overtake me in battle

And you will break my ribsBut I won’t let you go until you bless meMy good adversary.” (69)

This unification of the Mother and the Son’s willing acceptance of suffering is reflectedin their word of assent: “Thy will be done” and “Be it done to me according to yourword.” Perhaps this was the image which Mother Maria was ruminating on when sheembroidered her last icon, which was the Mother and Infant, with the marks ofcrucifixion already imprinted in Christ’s baby hands and feet. The Mother of God “couldnot even pray that she might avoid the bitter chalice of her own path. She could onlyconsign herself to accept the Golgotha of her Son.” (70)

The Sacrifice

Mother Maria continued to write poems and articles, using the venues provided by the journals published by the YMCA press. The group of émigrés principally associated withthe Orthodox Russian intelligentsia played a very important role in the construction of analternative national-popular reality. For Maria, in particular, the RSCM, for which shewas the traveling secretary, gave her the opportunity to witness the economic andspiritual wretchedness in which many of the émigrés lived, and it spurned her to providesympathetic and non-judgmental care whenever she could. She once wrote: “I searchedfor thinkers and prophets, who wait by the ladder of heaven…and I found people whowere restless, orphaned, poor, drunk, despairing, useless…homeless, naked, lackingbread.” (71)

Sergei Hackel describes her overall poetry as characterized by integrity and anguish, butalso with a “piety…superceded by faith.” (72) Her task is to “quench the suffering of theworld in my own self.” (73) She asks for “angelic might, and… oration of the prophet…In every deed be my rod and guide, my unsetting sun from the East.” (74)

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She has little need for the ultimate answers to the many questions she had for God in heryouth. Rather, as she nears her own fateful end she almost seems reconciled:

“At the bottom [of my soul] is a nothing but a black-orange coal,She must be low, to be quiet for a bit.

But you branded my heart with Your pre-eternal fire,With the stamp of a death-giving baptism.” (75)

Although she did not attend as many intellectual events as in the more ideological era ofher youth, (she had no time!) she did make appearances on occasion to lecture about themost pressing things on her mind. When the German forces were moving swiftly throughthe country, she reminded her audience that, yes, they lived in critical times, but “timeand history can be defeated by a gust into eternity by a religious deed. Time is ahorizontal line, the religious flight upward a vertical one. Their meeting is a cross—theCross is Liberation.” (76)

All of the Orthodox in Paris were deeply concerned during the German invasion ofRussia, yet Maria held hope that her country would successfully resist the Nazis. Itbecame apparent that there were numerous Jewish groups in Paris who needed helpescaping; thus her hostel was a logical stopping off place. Maria said, “if the Germanscome looking for the Jews, I’ll show them an icon of the Mother of God.” (77) Shesmuggled food for them and hid them while she found new clothing. For on June 3, 1942,all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David, with the inscription identifyingthem. This so appalled Maria that she published a poem which undoubtedly helped toseal her fate:

“Two triangles, a star,The shield of King David, our forefatherThis is election, not offenceThe great path and not an evil…Thou art persecuted again, O IsraelBut what can human ill will mean to thee,Thee, who hast heard the thunder from Sinai?” (78)

Soon, her largest hostel at Lourmel was so overcrowded, refugees were sleeping on floorsin every room, including the entrance hall. Jews would be given shelter until they couldbe farmed out someplace safer. After mass arrests, where 7 ½ thousand people wereinterred at the famous sports stadium, Vel d’ Hiv, she smuggled children in and out in adustbin. Her son Yuri was as fearless as she was reckless, thinking always of thosearound him who were in such desperate need. It became increasingly evident that theywere under suspicion; indeed, there were probably spies at the Lourmel hostel. In herpoetry, Maria hints that she suspects that the end might be drawing near. But she neverslackened her pace.

“I am your message. Like a torch, toss me into the night.So that everyone will see, suddenly know,

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What it is you want from humanityAnd what sort of servants you send out to gather the harvest.” (79)

On Feb. 8, 1943, her 23 year old son Yuri was arrested while she was away from homeand she received a message that he would be held until she and Fr. Pianov presented

themselves. They had been identified as the top two officers of Orthodox Action.Although she went immediately and hoped with an agonizing hope that they would freeYuri, it was not to be. Sadly, only a few days before Yuri had told his mother of his wishto join the priesthood.

Both Yuri and Maria were sent to concentration camps. When she arrived atRavensbrueck, she found 16,000 of other inmates stuffed into living quarters that shouldhave accommodated four thousand. Despite the stench, the lice, the starvation, and theterror-filled drills—where they had to stand for hours while being counted—Maria isreported to have done everything in her power to be a light in the midst of the impendinggloom. She organized lectures and discussion groups on anything that might help distract

the attention of the women in her barrack, if only for a few moments. On Sundays she gotout her small, well-worn New Testament, and preached a message of hope to whomeverwould listen. Yuri managed to smuggle out a letter to his grandmother, Sophia, that hehad seen his mother once, a visit that must have been very precious to Maria, knowingthat it would probably be their last.

Maria’s spiritual father, Sergius Bulgakov, likewise received a smuggled note from her,where she admitted, “My position is this. I submit completely to suffering, even to thesacrifice of my life. If I die, I shall see in this a Blessing from Above.” (80) For her healthwas failing fast and reports of those who saw her were that, because she gave much ofwhat little food she had away, she was rapidly becoming skin and bones. But even towardthe end she managed to trade bread for enough colored thread to embroider her last icon.

It is believed that Maria took the place of someone else in line for the crematorium. Shedied on Good Friday, March 30, 1945, and according to one eye-witness “she wentvoluntarily to martyrdom, in order to help her companions to die.” (81)

Dorothy Soelle once said,“If people experience their life as destined by fate, they aredealing with a mute God.” (82) Maria’s God was not mute. Her losses, and the lonelinesswhich came after them, were transformed by an awareness of the accessibility of herGod, a closeness she tried to share with others. One Ravensbrueck prisoner remembers acomment Maria made to a woman who was frightfully staring at the chimney smoke fromthe camp’s newest crematorium. She compared the black smoke to the freedom of thesoul: “when they rise higher they turn into light clouds…in the same way, our souls, oncethey have torn themselves away from this sinful earth, move by means of an effortlessunearthly flight into eternity.” (83)

Victor Frankl has observed that if meaning can be applied to suffering, it seems lessunjust. (84) Maria had long since resolved the problem of theodicy; for her there was noquestion of how a just God can exist in the face of so much abominable cruelty and

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suffering. Through Christ, the transformation of this bitter root had led her into theunderstanding that God is present in heaven, in hell, in the heart of matter, in everyhuman soul. Like the psalmist who had asked, “Where can I flee from your presence?”(Psalm 139), Maria had come to understand that it was nowhere. Long ago she had seenthe uselessness of directing her bitterness toward the very One whose existence she

sought to deny. She wrote, “for if we cannot understand and justify [Him], we can nolonger live…Under the dome of our low, smoke-filled, cloudy sky, everything is givenover to the absurd if we believe that death is just death.” (85) Faith alone could supplyher with any kind of meaningful answer, but, she said, “not the kind of faith whichconsists in saying that God makes what is into what is not…but the faith whichannihilates death.”(86)

She had grown to understand that earthly sufferings are but the birth-pangs of a newlonged-for life which has been transfigured in Christ. She therefore cried out in her soul,“Grow stronger, pulverize me, be unbearable, merciless and swift, because I wish to beborn into eternity, because I already feel constricted in the sub-heavenly womb, because I

want to go home…” (87) For Maria, the morality of suffering came not only from thepurpose she assigned to it philosophically; the value and purpose of suffering emergedbecause of suffering itself. Suffering sharply polarizes the inside/outside view of the self;thus Maria was a mystic in the world, for she suffered in, with, and through those aroundher. And in this way, the activity of suffering, the mourning, the questioning, and thechoice of surrender was synonymous with vitality. In embracing the Cross, in beingattentive to its incomprehensible seriousness, life no longer held an absurd ugliness.

“The light is deadeningYet the heart feels wingedNo separation any more between the ‘here’ and the ’there.’Perished the conflicts which belong to time.The sacred hands which hold us are the Lord’sI heard the guard who said to me, ‘Arise O soul:This is the judgment, the reward, the hour, the goal.’” (88)

She saw the soft light of heaven beyond the form of this world, and hope was her lanternin the darkness. She remains a witness for us that, when one clings to hope, Christ picksup the yoke, and no burden is too heavy.

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End-Notes

1. Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime. N.Y.: Charles Scribner. 1974, p. 1672. Lawrence, John. A History of Russia. N.Y.:Plume 1995 .p. 200.3. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. N.Y.:

Basic Books, 1980, p. 400. See also his, The Icon and the Ax: An Interpretative Historyof Russian Culture. Gloucester MA.: Peter Smith Publisher, 1994.

4. Khomiakov, Aleksei and Kireevsy, Ivan. On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader. Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Books. 1998. pp.33-34.

5. Chamberlain, Lesley. Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia.

Overlook/Rookery. 2007. p. 68.6. Ladouceur, Paul. “The Experience and Understanding of Death in Saint Maria of

Paris,” UK: Sobornost (28, 1), 2006. Reproduced on-line, no page number given.

7. Hackel, Sergei. Pearl of Great Price: The Life of Mother Maria Skobtsova 1891-1945. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 1981, p. 76.

8. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, quoted in, Pearl p. 83.9. Smith, T. Stratton. The Rebel Nun. Springfield, Ill.: Templegate. 1965, p. 62.10. Ermolaev, Natalia, Modernism, Motherhood and Mariology: The Poetry and

Theology of Elizaveta Skobtsova, Columbia University dissertation, 2010. p. 39. Iam grateful to Natalia for providing me with her translations of numerous ofMother Maria’s poems.

11. Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, pp.252-253.12. Ermolaev, Natalie, trans. Poems of Mother Maria, The Russian Plain: poems,

mystery-plays, prose, and autobiographical fiction, letters. Edited by A.N.Shustov. St. Petersburg.: Iskusstvo. 2001, # 16.

13. Kelly, Catriona. Ed., An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing. 1777-1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994, p. 233.

14. Smith, Rebel, p. 5115. ibid, p 58.16. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 26.17. ibid., p.38.18. Plekon, Fr. Michael. “Mother Maria Skobtsova” in, Teachings of Modern

Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature. Ed. Frank Alexander and JohnWitte, Jr. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1994. p. 669.

19. Pearl, p. 95.20. ibid., p. 96.21. Pearl, p. 4.22. Pearl, p. 5.23. ibid.24. Pearl, p. 16.25. ibid., p. 6.

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26. Hackel, Pearl; See also his, “Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess Manque?” Eastern Churches Review, 1, (3), Spring, p. 264.

27. Pearl, pp. 72-73.28. Davis, Donald. “American YMCA and Russia Emigration,” Sobornost 9, #1.

1987, p. 27.

29. Raeff, Marc. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939. Oxford.: Oxford University Press. 1990. p. 135.30. ibid.31. Fr. Lev Gillet, also known as A monk of the Eastern Church, is the author of

many writings, including The Jesus Prayer. St Vladimirs Seminary Pr.. 1987.32. “Types of Religious Life” is an essay in, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential

Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books. 2002.33. in Plekon, Michael. Hidden Holiness. University of Notre Dame Press. 2009.

pp.101-02.34. Craig, Mary. Six Modern Martyrs. N.Y.: Crossroad. 1984. p. 226.35. Yanovsky, V.S. Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory. Translated by Isabella

Yanovsky. .DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Ill. University Press. P. 157.36. Hackel, “Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess Manquee,” in Eastern Churches Review, 1, (B), 1967. Spring, p. 264.

37. Motchulsky, Constantin. “Mere Marie Skobtsoff,” Contacts, V. 29 No. 100,1977, p 335, quoted in Ladeoceur, “The Experience,” # 6 above.

38. Rebel Nun, pp. 134.39. ibid. p. 124.40. Pearl, p. 7.41. Stikhi, in Pearl, p. 6.42. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 184.43. ibid.44. Stikhi in Pearl, p. 33.45. Pearl p. 51.46. ibid., p. 52.47. in Pearl, p. 60.48. Benevitch, Grigori. The saving of the Jews: The Case of Mother Maria. Online

article ; http://www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/departments/soc-swk/ree/Benevitch_The%20Saving_Feb%202000.pdf No page number given.

Original publication: Religion in Eastern Europe. 2000. v.XX N1 pp. 1-19.49. ibid.50. online article “The Poor in Spirit” trans by Fr. S Janos. No page number given.

http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/pauperes_spiritu.html51. Plekon, Michael. “The Sacrament of Brother/Sister.” Saint Vladimir’s

Theological Quarterly. 49, #3 2005, pp. 313-34.52. Benevitch, Saving, footnote # 38.53. in, Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings. Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books.

2002. p. 79.54. ibid., p 81.55. see Bulgakov, Sergius. The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the

Mother of God. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2009.

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56. Skobtsova, Maria. Veneration of the Mother of God. Online article:http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/veneratio_Bogomater.html

57. Essential, p. 67.58. Skobtsova ,Veneration.59. Essential, p. 67.

60. Ermolaev, Natalie, trans. The Russian Plain, #176.61. Essential, pp. 86-87.62. Essential, p. 67.63. Kelly, Catriona. “Writing an Orthodox Text: Religious Poetry by Russian

Women, 1917-1940” in Poetics of the Text, ed Joe Andrews, Amsterdam: Rodopi.1992. p. 168-69, # 17.

64. Essential pp. 67-69.65. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 196.66. See my analysis of this problem in, Compton, M.Sophia. More Glorious than the

Seraphim: Byzantine Homilies and Feasts in Honor of the Theotokos. Light andLight Publications, The Raphael Group. 2008, 2011.

67. Essential. p. 68.68. ibid.69. Ermolaev, Russian. # 134.70. Skobtsova ,Veneration (online, no page given)71. in Hackel, Sergei, “What can we say to God? The Poetry of Mother Maria

Skobtsova,” in Sobornost 7, # 5, 1977. p.380.72. ibid, p. 379.73. ibid.74. Ermolaev, Russian, # 133.75. ibid, # 15376. Rebel, p.145.77. In Pearl, p. 115.78. In Paldie Mordecai.,et al. In The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews

during the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House. 1993, p. 33.79. Ermolaev, Modernism, p. 175.80. Rebel, p. 244.81. Craig, Six Modern Martyrs, p. 247.82. Soelle, Dorothy, Suffering, trans., by E.R.Kalin. Phil: Fortress Press. 1975. p. 77.83. Pearl, p. 134.84. Fankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press. 2006.85. in Ladouceur, Paul. “The Experience,”86. ibid.87. in Pearl, p.135.88. in, Hackel, “What can we say to God”…p 381.

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Mother Maria Skobtsova, Philosopher, Poet, Nun on the Streets

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