SKOBTSOVA, MOTHER MARIA

SKOBTSOVA, MOTHER MARIA, poet, monastic, Christian social activist, martyr (8 December 1891–31 March 1945). Named Elizaveta Iur’evna Pilenko at birth, her father was landed gentry and she was university educated, mixing well in the cultural elite of St. Petersburg. In 1917 she was a delegate from Novorossiisk to the Third Congress of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, held in Moscow. Then in 1918 she was involved in conspiratorial activities against the new Bolshevik government as acting mayor of the town of Anapa on the Black Sea. Married twice, she had three children, none of whom survived her.

She and her family fled the Revolution in 1920 and settled in Paris in 1923, where she became very involved in the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM). In 1930 she became secretary for the Movement, traveling around France to give aid to Russian emigres. She was close to Fr. Sergius Bulgakov and Metropolitan Evlogii (qq.v.), and under their guidance she prepared for monastic profession. Yet, her friend Nicholas Berdiaev (q.v.) opposed her decision as superfluous to her calling. On 7 September 1932, she received an ecclesiastical divorce from her second husband and became a monastic. It was Evlogii’s hope that she become “the founder of convent life in the emigration,” and she continued to serve the RSCM.

In the early 1930s she was responsible for the publication of Georges Florovsky’s four volumes on the Church Fathers (qq.v.). She typed the original manuscripts and persuaded I. Fondaminsky to provide the financial backing. In September 1934, she settled into a house at 77 rue de Lourmel, from which “hermitage” she served the Russian needy for more than thirty years. During the 1930s Archimandrite Lev Gillet (q.v.) lived at Lourmel and served Divine Liturgy on almost a daily basis. From 1936 to 1939 Archimandrite Kiprian Kern (1889–1960) served as resident priest, but he was released from his duties to become a faculty member at St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute (q.v.) in September 1939. On 27 September 1935, Orthodox Action, an independent Christian social action organization, was founded by Mother Maria, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, G. P. Fedotov, K. V. Molchulskii, and others, with Metropolitan Evlogii acting as honorary president. The organization was independent of the Church hierarchy and the RSCM, and was funded by the Anglicans and the American YMCA. Mother Maria was deported to the death camps because of her work to aid Jews through Orthodox Action. She died in the gas chamber of Ravensbruch concentration camp. Her life is recounted in Sergei Hackel’s Pearl of Great Price (rev. 1982).