AVVAKUM (162o?-1681), Russian archpriest and author, famous as the leader of the conservative party in the Russian church in the 17th century, son of a village priest, was born at Grigorovo, near Nijni Novgorod. He became protopope or rector of a Moscow church, and a conservative reformer of the discipline of the church. He declined to accept the revision of the ritual of the Russian church according to Greek practice, proposed by Nikon (q.v.) and was exiled to Siberia in 1653, where he joined the expedition of Pashkov in 1655, returning to Moscow in 1664 after the fall of Nikon. But the Synod of Moscow (1666-67), though it deposed Nikon, condemned Avvakum's doctrines, and he was compelled to take the tonsure and was sent to Pustozersk, in the extreme north of Russia. His autobiography (written c. 1673), was one of the most popular books of the Russian schis matics or Old Believers. He urged martyrdom on his followers and was himself burnt at the stake in April 1681.
Avvakum was the first writer to use colloquial Russian for a literary purpose. Prince Mirsky says of his Life that it is "the only work of really intrinsic significance in the whole space sep arating the Old Russian Lay of Igor in the 12th century from the first expressions of modern poetry in the odes of Lomonosov and Derzhavin in the later 18th." See Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, trans. by Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees (1924).