The Volga by Janet M. Hartley

Author:Janet M. Hartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300245646
Publisher: Yale University Press

The sentimentalism of the Volga bordered on sacralization, in literature, poetry and art. Certainly, depictions in poetry and art of the Volga as the true Russian river linked it inextricably with Orthodoxy. This was an early theme in Russian poetry, and was linked to Russia’s unique history and culture. As early as 1793, Nikolai Karamzin characterized the Volga, in a poem of the same name, as ‘The river, the holiest in the world/ The tsarina of crystal waters/ the mother!’39 The poem by Petr Viazemsky, ‘Evening on the Volga’, written in the early nineteenth century, links the river with Russian history and Orthodoxy:

Utterly fascinated, I love of an evening

To listen, O great Volga!

To the poetic voice of your holy waves;

In them is heard Russia’s ancient glory.40

Orest Somov’s literary essay ‘On Romantic Poetry’, written in 1823, refers to the Volga ‘with its distant flow and its blessed banks’.41

Many of the paintings of the nineteenth century depicted an Orthodox church or monastery on the banks of the river. And indeed many churches were built on the river Volga, in particular, to commemorate St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. The well-known painting The Rooks Have Returned, by Aleksei Savrasov (which was displayed at the Vienna International Exhibition in 1873), features a Russian church (although the Orthodox cupolas are not depicted) in the foreground and the river Volga in the distance. Of course, the churches could be used simply to frame a landscape; but they also asserted the distinct Russianness of the scenery, as opposed to other river views in Europe.

Some of this spiritual characterization is part of the sentimental depiction of the Volga. Nor is it unique to characterize a river as ‘holy’: both the Ganges and its tributary, the Yamuna, are regarded as holy, as are rivers elsewhere in the world – for example, the Osun in Nigeria and the Whanganui in New Zealand. However, the source (or supposed source) of the Volga is clearly linked with Orthodoxy.42 A chapel was constructed on the site in the mid-seventeenth century, but this burned down in 1724. A small, crumbling chapel remained, ignored by most people. The source is positioned between St Petersburg and Moscow, but it was not visited by travellers in the eighteenth century (it is not easy to reach, even today). The chapel was rebuilt in the 1870s, just at the time when the Volga was being ‘discovered’ in art, poetry and, as we shall see below, tourism. In 1870, the municipal administration of Tver (the town nearest to the source) determined that a new church should be built on the site, in addition to the small chapel, and advertised for donations beyond the province to aid in the construction. In other words, in this case the move to have a church at the source stemmed from educated society, and was not an initiative from above on the part of the Orthodox Church or the tsar. The Church of the Transfiguration opened in 1910 near the source.

In post-Soviet Russia, the source has become not only a protected monument, but a sacralized site.

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