Our Woman of the Week has been doing important work about Orthodox practices that are vital in reconciling each of us to God. She is church historian Nadia Kizenko! We asked her to tell you about herself:
"The single most important factor in making me who I am is growing up as the daughter of an Orthodox priest. The core feature was liturgical consciousness. It is one thing to say that one gets an intuitive sense for the movement of any given service, especially Vespers and Matins. It is another to be trained to get it right. My parents were the opposite of the doting ‘Oh, it’s so nice to see children participating just for the sake of participating, and aren’t they adorable even if they make a mistake.’ No. There was nothing cute about mistakes. Before being allowed to read even the shortest of texts—Holy God, Holy Mighty; Vouchsafe, O Lord; O Theotokos and Virgin, Rejoice—we had to pass the strictest of examiners: my mother, who knew the Hours, the Six Psalms, and maybe even the Eighteenth Kathisma by heart. Only when every Church Slavonic stress and intonation was spot-on (practiced while my mother cleaned or made dinner) were we pronounced ready to read in public. (Although Church Slavonic might seem particularly difficult, English poses its own challenges: it still drives me crazy when people say comPASS, and not COMpass, us about with thy holy angels. And so on.)
"This, I now realize, carried several things with it. Ustav and technical accuracy mattered. A seven year-old could do as well as a seminarian. Although being corrected at home was no fun, approving nods in church were. And graduating to finally reading the Six Psalms meant that you had arrived. One of the projects I’d like to pursue is the references in the diaries, letters, and memoirs of students in imperial Russian girls’ schools to reading those Psalms in their Institute services: the ones I have seen so far all talk about the spiritual rise and fall and rising again the texts express, and how the girls who performed them took seriously both the internal content and their technique in reading them. Only the ‘Let My Prayer Arise’ trio at the Liturgy of Presanctified Gifts comes close to how often and how eloquently they describe the start of Matins.
"This raises an interesting question. Is there something specific about the piety or devotional practices of girls as opposed to boys? I wonder how much boys’ attitudes to Orthodoxy are shaped by being able to go behind the icon-screen and serve at the altar. How much does it matter when something is forbidden?
"From learning how to read correctly, the next step was learning how and why the various parts of the service fit together. Because my father tended to be assigned to smallish parishes, choir responsibilities on Saturday nights tended to fall to our family. My father would regularly dart out to join us on kliros to point things out, and sometimes to sing along for the sheer love of it.
"That part is key. The sheer love of it. I remain enchanted by the gorgeous rhythms and sibilance of vesperal and matins texts. This may be all the more striking because the last thing I wanted to do at age fifteen on a Saturday night was to stand doing the service in a near-empty church. When I tried to announce I might stop going for a while, my mother said calmly, “When you move out and support yourself you can do whatever you want. As long as you live under this roof you’ll be in church.” The only solution was to look for things that did interest me. By looking at texts as texts and structures as structures, I began to grow into becoming a liturgics nerd." Axia!
We asked Woman of the Week Nadia Kizenko how her background as a priest’s daughter affected her choice of career as a church historian:
“My background explains how I came to academia and especially the project I am now working on: a study of confession, the sacrament of repentance, in the Russian empire from the seventeenth century to 1917. In looking for a dissertation topic, I tried to think of something I knew more about than the average graduate student. That one thing was Orthodoxy. But what aspect of it?
“Then and now, I wanted to pick topics that will be impossible to marginalize or ignore. I want to pick topics that include liturgy. I wanted to pick topics that involve texts—and how people experience texts. Finally, I wanted to make clear that the experiences of women and men may well be different and that therefore neither is somehow normative or representative or universal; both have to be included so that we can have a better sense of how people actually understood and practiced Orthodoxy.
“So—why confession? Because in working on my first book on St John of Kronstadt, among the tens of thousands of letters to him that survive in Russian archives, I came across a file labeled ‘written confessions.’ I understood immediately that this was a gold mine, and devoted a chapter of my dissertation to it. When it came time to rework the dissertation into a book, however, one of my colleagues said: “It’s too good. Take it out. Don’t let it get lost in the shuffle. Do something special with it later. Has anyone ever looked seriously at confession in Russian Orthodoxy, anyway?”
“That was the beginning. More than twenty years and months in the archives of Moscow, Rome, the Vatican, Kiev, St Petersburg, and Kazan, I am now revising what I hope will be the last draft of a massive study of confession from the point in the seventeenth century at which both tsars and hierarchs decided that encouraging the Orthodox Christians in their care to go to confession and communion at least once a year would make them better subjects as well as better Christians. They were helped in this pursuit by Orthodox theologians from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who had seen firsthand the benefits of more frequent confession among Roman Catholics after the Council of Trent. As in Reformation-era Europe, a major religious schism—that of Old Belief—gave confession new importance: it helped to define who was Orthodox, and who was ‘other.’ Confession thus became the point at which several goals—education, discipline, control, salvation—met.
“But—and this is crucial—this is not only a top-down story. While the initial purpose of requiring annual confession was to control and catechize a large, undisciplined flock, that flock showed itself capable of surprising enterprise. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. Courtiers used confession to advance their own side in an intrigue. Peasants became adept at using the requirement to go to confession against their landlords, insisting that they were entitled to their full week off for the weeklong observance of Lenten church attendance, fasting, and confession followed by communion. Similarly, people might make a show of resisting going to confession to call attention to other grievances (or, indeed, reporting those grievances at confession). What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a legitimate way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their spiritual lives.
“This was especially important for women. Mothers prepared children for the all-important first confession, first writing their own texts and prayers and then turning to the growing genre of children’s stories and Young Adult novels depicting govienie (that is, the entire fasting-church attendance-confession preparation for communion: for my own first confession, my mother traveled with me by train to a monastery). More women than men put their confessions (and examinations of conscience in preparation for confession) in writing. For many women of different class backgrounds, confession came to be a form of meaningful self-expression and autobiography.
“This brings us to an interesting problem. Confession in the Russian empire became simultaneously a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. But what did it look like in historically Orthodox nations that did not have an empire and did not have a police? How different was confession in Greece? Serbia? Romania? Bulgaria? Georgia? Syria? Lebanon? Egypt? Is it even possible to speak of a unified Orthodox practice of confession? I suspect not. But I cannot be sure. It has taken me long enough to work using the Russian, Church Slavonic, and Ukrainian primary sources—I fear a full comparison is beyond me. But I very much hope that the detailed study I have done of the Russian empire may inspire others with the relevant languages and archival access to do similar studies. Then perhaps we will be able to speak more confidently about the Orthodox approaches to confession—in practice as well as in theory—and to see how much the sacrament of repentance has shifted depending on time and place. Join me, please!"
Nadia Kizenko, our Woman of the Week sometimes rehearses her lectures outside, here at St Vladimir's Cemetery in Jackson NJ. She’s wearing the “coronation” tunic she mentions below. Her thoughts about mornings:
“My morning routine depends entirely on whether I am teaching and/or going to church or working from home. If I am working from home, I set no alarm and pull my hair back and wear an ancient wool Balmacaan and think of the day’s balance of housework and writing. If I am to be out in public, I set an alarm clock, blow out my hair, and give some thought to what I am going to be wearing: if you lecture to an audience, especially an audience of undergraduate students, you owe them something worthwhile and thematically appropriate to look at. (The Hermès tunic depicting the coronation of Alexander II is always a hit, as are the 19th century Uzbek caftan and the embroidered Ukrainian vyshyvanka.) It is also fun to demonstrate the different ways in which peasant and factory women tied scarves around their heads when at work.
“I wish I were committed to a real prayer rule. But what I do is to venerate an icon of the Savior, and a little lithograph of St. Nadezhda (Hope) from the Fesenko printing house in Odessa my grandmother gave to me, and a wooden cross. When I venerate the cross, I let one of the many liturgical texts to the cross float up, and say or sing whichever it happens to be. When it is the icons, I ask that I may see Christ in everyone who comes my way and try be Christ for everyone who comes my way. Given that I tend—alas!—to sarcasm, swearing, and surliness, to try to keep myself in check, I look at an image from the Bose monastery of a woman with her finger to her lips, and think, in Slavonic, ‘Set, o Lord, a watch before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.’ Not much success on that front, but oh well.
“As I grow older, I take heart in the example of how my own mother’s prayer life has changed thanks to (and I deliberately say thanks to, not because of or due to) modern technology—modern technology, and the new forms the post-communist institutionalization of Orthodoxy in Russia has taken. Without them, her widowhood, increasing frailness, and the loss of my father’s jolly company, would have been far harder to bear. But the iPad my brother gave her has changed her life. Now when she cannot make it to church on Saturday nights, she will stream the services. She reads the daily devotions on a variety of Russian websites. If she has worked so hard during the day it hurts to stand, she will play a recording of the evening prayer rule. When I am visiting her, I find it strangely soothing to hear the words piped in from the next room. And I think: how good to know that, from the days when I sang the Christmas troparion surreptitiously as a four-year-old (because the afterfeast had ended and I had the sneaking suspicion that doing it out of season was sinful), or when I fall asleep to ‘Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us,’ the words of Orthodox liturgy keep me ever in happy company.”
Thank you, Nadia!
