A Holy Fool at Loose in Leningrad

Idiocy

10.1093/oso/9780190871208.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joseph N. Straus

Keyword(s):

Modernist Literature ◽

Holy Fool ◽

Musical Representations ◽

Natural Man ◽

Musical Modernism ◽

The Village ◽

Music Representations ◽

Deep Interest

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise. In literature and in music, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types: the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature). Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.

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Appendix: The Gospel According to a Holy Fool

The Universe Behind Barbed Wire ◽

10.1017/9781787448322.017 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 437-442

Keyword(s):

Holy Fool

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God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h10020084 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 84

Author(s):

Karl Shankar SenGupta

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Problem Of Evil ◽

The Other ◽

French Army ◽

Holy Fool ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Problem Of Evil ◽

Utopian Thought ◽

Primary Focus

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

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WHY DID AVVAKUM PLAY THE HOLY FOOL? AN АNALYSIS OF THE ARCHPRIEST AVVAKUM’S CREATIVE PROCESS IN WRITING HIS "LIFE"

Studia Religiosa Rossica: Russian Journal of Religion ◽

10.28995/2658-4158-2021-3-13-39 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 13-39

Author(s):

Priscilla Hunt ◽

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Life Experience ◽

Personal Life ◽

Creative Evolution ◽

Knowledge Of God ◽

Experiential Approach ◽

Holy Fool

The article studies the polemical orientation of the hagiographical Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself in relation to the author’s earlier works, The Answer of the Orthodox, and other texts that were included together with the Life in the Pustozersk Collection. An analysis of the creative evolution of Avvakum’s thought will demonstrate that the Life’s appeal to holy foolishness at its narrative climax was its strongest ideological weapon against the new Church elite (the Nikonians). This appeal gave rise to an unprecedented emphasis on the author’s personal life experience that was meant to be proof of the “theoretical” arguments against Nikonian rationalism in the The Answer to the Orthodox. As a demonstration of a mystical-experiential approach to knowledge of God, his dramatized holy foolishness justified his choice to present his own biography as a publicistic hagiographical narrative.

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