Islands of Prayer
Solovki by Roy Robson, Touching Heaven by John Oliver
Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands
by Roy Robson
Yale University Press, 2004
(302 pages, $30.00, hardcover)
Touching Heaven: Discovering Orthodox Christianity on the Island of Valaam
by John Oliver
Conciliar Press, 2003
(179 pages, $13.95, paperback)
reviewed by Richard J. Mammana, Jr.
In the first centuries after Christ, men and women withdrew from the world in droves to lead lives of ascetic discipline and holiness. One important center of this incipient monastic movement was the desert of Egypt’s Thebaid—the background against which such important saints as Anthony, Paul the Hermit, Pachomius, and Athanasius lived and prayed.
In Russia, their spirit of prayer, work, striving, and unceasing ascetic effort crystallized centuries later as podvig, a word with no exact English equivalent. Its natural setting was the waste-places of Russia’s north, a Northern Thebaid in which the islands of Solovki and Valaam stand out as shining examples of Russia’s inheritance of the Christian faith in the fullness of its vitality and power.
These two fascinating books tell the stories of Solovki and Valaam from different perspectives. Robson writes as a historian, careful about dates, individual biographies, and the grand sweep of a nation’s history through the lens of one holy place. Touchstone contributor John Oliver does not mention the history of Valaam in any depth, but writes movingly and lucidly about his own encounter with the riches of Orthodox Christianity on Valaam while working to restore its buildings on a summer work-pilgrimage of three weeks in 1994. Oliver picks up where Robson leaves off, and the result is a delightful, moving, noteworthy publishing coincidence.
Saints & Salt
Monastic life on the remote White Sea island of Solovki began in the early fifteenth century with the arrival of Saints Herman and Savvatii from other monasteries in which they had been unable to find the spirit of monastic simplicity, seclusion, and discipline they desired.
Pilgrims and monks began to arrive in due course, and the monastery’s economic supremacy in the region—based on salt production and fishing—helped it to become a thriving center of Russian culture and religion. Coenobitic and eremitic monasticism existed side by side on the island, reflecting what Robson calls “the complementary philosophies” of Solovki’s most important saints, Savvatii and Zosima.
In times of national turmoil on the mainland, Solovki’s isolation allowed it to serve as an anchor of stability and authority when Moscow or Novgorod succumbed to invasion and Tartar domination, or when disputes about succession to the throne in the sixteenth century paralyzed both Church and crown. Solovki’s strategic importance led to the construction of impregnable defenses around the main monastic compound, walls so well constructed that they withstood heavy bombardment by English warships during the Crimean War.
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