Description
Book SynopsisArchpriest Avvakum’s autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment, written in the 1660s and ’70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar.
Trade ReviewBrostrom does a good job of representing this stern, intransigent yet oddly vulnerable writer to an anglophone reader, and of conveying his stylistic innovations. Part travelogue, part invective, part autobiography, part auto-hagiography (complete with miracles of healing),
The Life Written by Himself fits no generic convention. -- Simon Franklin * Times Literary Supplement *
[Brostrom’s] translation is exceptionally well done, re-creating . . . the rhythms, stylistic alternations, and vernacular intonations of the original. -- Priscilla Hunt,
Slavic ReviewAvvakum's combination of ecclesiastical and colloquial language transposed into writing the pathos of his oral rhetoric, and has remained a source of inspiration to modern Russian literature ever since the
Life was published. -- Jostein Børtnes,
The Cambridge History of Russian LiteratureThe daring originality of Avvakum's venture cannot be overestimated, and the use he made of his Russian places him in the very first rank of Russian writers: no one has since excelled him in vigor and raciness and in the skillful command of all the expressive means of everyday language for the most striking literary effects. -- Prince Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky,
A History of Russian LiteratureReading
The Life Written by Himself is like meeting a Dostoyevsky or Chekhov character come to life – but Avvakum was alive and kicking long before Russian literature could invent him. -- Robert Blaisdell * Russian Life *
While even Russians struggle to read this story, written in an archaic language, English readers are lucky to be able to read it more easily in the beautiful translation by Kenneth N. Brostrom. -- Alexandra Guzeva * Russia Beyond *
Avvakum’s text [has] authorial individuality and originality in buckets. In other words, the unyieldingly conservative priest was an innovator in his writing. -- Irina Zhorov * Literary Hub *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction by Kenneth N. Brostrom
The Life Written by HimselfNotes
References
