Archpriest Avvakum Petrovich should be numbered among the most commanding, self-assured, and influential figures of seventeenth-century Russian culture. By conviction a profoundly conservative man, he came to be associated, contrary to his own intentions, with much that was new in Russian life. In his most widely read work, the Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma im samim napisannoe (1861; translated as The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum By Himself, 1924), composed between 1669 and 1675, he passionately championed the liturgical and scriptural practices that had been cultivated for centuries on Russian Orthodox soil. He was militant in his rejection of compromise with foreign innovations, whether imported from the West or from the Greek Orthodox world, and, by his own example of martyrdom, he did much to encourage the division in the Russian Orthodox church known as the Schism. At the same time, through his Zhitie protopopa Avvakuma, he introduced a great many novelties of both...