The first Russian Bible was printed in Poland in 1580. A few years later a printing office was established at Moscow, and the Russian Church authorities had now to decide which of the written texts then in circulation should be taken for the printing of the Holy Books. The handwritten copies which were in use at that time were full of errors, and it was evidently necessary to revise them by comparing them with the Greek texts before committing any of them to print. This revision was undertaken at Moscow, with the aid of learned men brought over partly from Greece and partly from the Greco-Latin Academy of Kieff; but for many different reasons this revision became the source of a widely spread discontent, and in the middle of the seventeenth century a formidable split (_raskól_) took place in the Church. It hardly need be said that this split was not a mere matter of theology, nor of Greek readings. The seventeenth century was a century when the Moscow Church had attained a formidable power in the State. The head of it, the Patriarch Níkon, was, moreover, a very ambitious man, who intended to play in the East the part which the Pope played in the West, and to that end he tried to impress the people by his grandeur and luxury--which meant, of course, heavy impositions upon the serfs of the Church and the lower clergy. He was hated by both, and was soon accused by the people of drifting into “Latinism”; so that the split between the people and the clergy--especially the higher clergy--took the character of a wide-spread separation of the people from the Greek Church. Most of the Non-conformist writings of the time are purely scholastic in character and consequently offer no literary interest. But the memoirs of a Non-conformist priest, AVVAKÚM (died 1681), who was exiled to Siberia and made his way on foot, with Cossack parties, as far as the banks of the Amúr, deserve to be mentioned. By their simplicity, their sincerity, and absence of all sensationalism, they have remained the prototype of Russian memoirs, down to the present day. Here are a few quotations from this remarkable work: