St. Seraphim of Vyritsa

Vasily Nikolaevich Muravyov was born on March 31, 1866, in the small village of Vakhromeyevo in the Yaroslavl region of central Russia, into a peasant family of modest means. His father died when he was ten, and the boy went up to St. Petersburg to work — first as a shop boy, then as a clerk in the trading houses of the imperial capital. He had wanted from childhood to enter the monastic life; on a pilgrimage as a young man to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra he opened his heart to the schemamonk Barnabas of Gethsemane Skete, who told him plainly that he was to remain in the world, marry, build a family and a fortune, and only at the appointed hour to take the habit.

He obeyed. He married Olga Ivanovna Nayedenova in 1890; he opened his own fur business; and within a generation he had become one of the principal fur merchants of St. Petersburg, with offices across the empire and trading houses as far as Berlin, Paris, and the great Leipzig fair. He and Olga lost their infant daughter, and the loss bound them more closely to the Church. Through all these years of prosperity they kept the rule of the Lavra in their household — daily prayer, weekly confession, regular almsgiving on a scale that astonished those few who knew of it; he supported monasteries, paid the dowries of poor brides, fed entire orphanages quietly, and never advertised any of it.

The revolution came in 1917 and within three years took everything. He had foreseen it. By 1920, when his trading firm was nationalized, he had already distributed almost his entire remaining fortune to the monasteries of Petrograd and the surrounding region — the Lavra alone received a sum that allowed the brotherhood to feed the city's hungry through the famine years. With Olga's agreement he entered the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and was tonsured to the rassophore in 1920 with the name Barnabas, after his old elder. Olga at the same time was tonsured a nun at the Voskresensky Novodevichy Convent and took the name Christina. In 1926 — a year of arrests of bishops, the closing of churches, the catacomb Church taking shape — he was tonsured to the great schema with the name Seraphim, after the saint of Sarov.

He was made father confessor of the Lavra at the worst possible moment. Day and night the line of those seeking counsel filled the corridors — clergy facing arrest, mothers whose sons had vanished, the wives of the deported, scholars and workers and the simply terrified. By 1930 his health had broken; the brotherhood moved him to a small wooden house in the town of Vyritsa, some forty miles south of Leningrad in the wooded country toward the Finnish border. There he remained for the last nineteen years of his life, scarcely able to walk, taking communion daily, receiving an unending procession of visitors — and praying. Many later said that the great fire of Petrograd never burned the city only because the elder of Vyritsa knelt every night through the bombardment before the icon of the Mother of God in his garden, doing on his bare knees the thousand-day rule that St. Seraphim of Sarov had done before him in the forest at Sarov.

The German occupation reached Vyritsa in 1941. The elder remained. The occupiers, who were Romanian troops in this sector, were Orthodox; their officers came to him for confession. The Soviets returned in 1944. He prayed for both sides; he prophesied to many visitors what would happen to them in the years to come, often in great and specific detail that was found true a quarter-century later. He reposed at his Vyritsa house on April 3, 1949 (March 21 by the Old Style), with the Jesus Prayer on his lips. Olga had reposed in 1945. He was buried in the small churchyard of the Kazan church at Vyritsa.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him at the Jubilee Council of August 2000, together with the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Pilgrims now come from across Russia and the diaspora to the small wooden Vyritsa house, preserved as it was at his repose, and to his grave. A great-hearted prayer composed in his own hand — "From Me This Has Been," in which the Lord Himself answers all the suffering soul's complaints — circulates in every Russian parish. His feast is kept on March 21.