Maria of Diveyevo

The orphan

She was born in 1870 in the village of Goletkovo, in the Yelatma district of the province of Tambov, and was named Maria Zakharovna Fedina. She lost both parents by the age of thirteen and was passed among relatives who used her badly. She left with a party of pilgrims going to Sarov and never returned to any settled life.

She was known afterwards, like the other blessed women of Diveyevo, as "Ivanovna." Asked why, since her father's name was Zakhar, she gave the answer that has been remembered: "All of us who are blessed are Ivanovnas — after John the Baptist." It is the neatest existing statement of what the Russian tradition thinks a fool for Christ is: not an eccentric but a forerunner, sent ahead of the word to disturb the ground.

Wandering

For years she went on foot between Sarov, Diveyevo and Ardatov — "hungry, half-naked, persecuted," in the phrase of the Russian account — sleeping in the forests, in winter as in summer, taking whatever was given and asking for nothing. The exposure destroyed her health and eventually her legs. She never complained of it, and the sources note that she was frequently beaten, both by villagers who took her for mad and, later, by the authorities who took her for a nuisance.

At Diveyevo

She settled at last at the Seraphim-Diveyevo convent, the house that St Seraphim had directed to be built and whose whole later history is read in Russia through his prophecies of it. She was given a cold, damp room and lived in it for eight years, until her legs failed altogether and she could no longer walk.

Her manner was the classic one: she spoke in obscenities and riddles, drove visitors away with insults, and answered questions no one had asked aloud. Under it she carried the two gifts that the tradition ascribes to her without hesitation — clairvoyance, by which she told people what they had come to ask about before they asked, and healing. She stands in a line of four: Blessed Pelagia Ivanovna Serebrennikova (†1884), whom St Seraphim himself had sent to Diveyevo; Blessed Paraskeva Ivanovna, "Pasha of Sarov" (†1915), who received the last Tsar and his family in 1903; Maria Ivanovna; and Blessed Martha, of whom a separate entry is made. Each was understood by the sisters to have handed the office on to the next.

The closure and the last years

The convent was closed in 1927. The sisters were dispersed into the surrounding villages and, in the years that followed, into the camps; Maria, crippled and now openly dangerous to shelter, was moved from house to house by those who were left, in Elizaryevo, in Pochinki, at last in Cherevatovo. She was arrested and interrogated more than once and was let go as an invalid and a madwoman — which was, in the exact sense, the protection her vocation had built for her.

She died at Cherevatovo on 26 August (8 September) 1931. Her relics were afterwards recovered, and in 2004 she was glorified together with the other blessed women of Diveyevo, and her relics were translated to the restored convent, where they lie in the church of the Nativity of the Mother of God with those of Pelagia, Paraskeva and Martha.