Saint Moses the Hungarian – One of the First Queer Figures in Russian History?

The Life of the Venerable Moses the Hungarian is one of the most unusual texts in Old Russian hagiography. A monk of the Kyiv Cave Monastery who was taken captive to Poland, he refused for years to marry a wealthy and powerful woman, was castrated for it, and was later canonized as a model of chastity.

For centuries, this story was read as a tale of the spirit triumphing over the flesh. In the early 20th century, the philosopher Vasily Rozanov saw something different: the biography of a person whose nature precluded heterosexual desire. Later, Western Slavicists and gender scholars proposed their own interpretations. Each challenges the conventional reading of this hagiography in its own way.

How Sexuality Was Understood at the Time

The Life cannot be read outside the context of sexual ethics in Old Rus’, particularly the Kyivan period of the 10th–13th centuries.

The Orthodox Church condemned above all the act of extramarital sex itself – fornication – rather than the sex of the participants. The historian Eve Levin emphasizes: Old Russian society described sexuality through the category of action – sin or virtue – rather than through the category of identity. The concept of “the homosexual” as a distinct human type did not exist in Kyivan Rus'.

This did not amount to tolerance in the modern sense. Violations of sexual norms were condemned, but they generally did not lead to physical destruction. The punishments were penance and abstinence, not execution. Compared with England, France, or Spain during the same period, the conditions for people with non-normative sexuality were different.

Monastic literary culture was developing its own ideal: a complete renunciation of all carnal passion, whether heterosexual or homosexual. It is at the intersection of this ascetic ideal and the diversity of human inclinations that the story of Moses the Hungarian unfolds.

The Life of Moses the Hungarian

The main source of information about Moses is the Kyiv Cave Paterikon, a collection of the lives of the earliest Russian monks. As a unified text, the Paterikon took shape in the 1220s, but drew on oral traditions and written records from the 11th century. The Life was later reworked by Saint Dimitry of Rostov in his Menaion. Both versions stand out for their focus on corporeality, sexual coercion, and physical violence.

According to the Paterikon, Moses came from Hungary – hence his epithet “the Hungarian.” Together with his brothers Ephraim and George, he entered service at the court of the Kyivan prince. George served as a squire to Prince Boris. In Dimitry of Rostov’s version, Moses is called the “favorite” of the holy Prince Boris, and George wore a golden torque bestowed on him by Boris himself – a detail underscoring the unusual closeness between servant and lord.

In 1015, during the fratricidal war launched by Sviatopolk the Accursed, hired assassins killed Boris and his retinue. George died defending the prince. Of the entire entourage, only Moses survived. He found refuge in Kyiv, at the court of Predslava, sister of Yaroslav the Wise.

In 1018, the Polish king Bolesław I the Brave intervened in the Russian civil strife. He captured Kyiv and carried off many captives to Poland – among them Moses, reduced from a courtier to a slave without rights.

Captivity in Poland and the Campaign of Seduction

The Polish period forms the core of the narrative. Tall, strong, and physically attractive, Moses became the object of an obsessive passion on the part of a wealthy Polish widow. She purchased him for a great sum and mounted a prolonged campaign of seduction.

The Paterikon presents this as an inversion of the usual gender roles: a woman endowed with wealth, status, and absolute power forces a male slave.

The widow offered Moses freedom, riches, authority over her estates, and the status of a lawful husband. She dressed him in fine clothes, fed him lavish food, tried to win him over through tenderness. The Paterikon records her words:

“I shall redeem you, make you a man of rank, set you as lord over my whole household, and you shall be my husband – only do my will, satisfy the desire of my soul, let me take pleasure in your beauty.”

Moses responded with unwavering refusal. He rejected not only intimacy but the very possibility of heterosexual marriage – invoking the fear of God and his intention to take monastic vows, tearing off the fine clothes, choosing hunger.

“What man ever took a woman, submitted to her, and was saved? Adam the first man submitted to a woman and was driven from Paradise. […] How then shall I, a free man, make myself a slave to a woman, when from the day of my birth I have never been intimate with women?”

Other captives urged Moses to submit: he was not a monk, the widow was beautiful and rich, and marriage was sanctioned by the apostles themselves. Moses answered, comparing their persuasion to the whispers of the serpent in Paradise:

“Let all the righteous have been saved with wives – I alone am a sinner and cannot be saved with a wife.”

And concluded with a direct challenge:

“Let it be known to you who care for me that never shall the beauty of a woman beguile me, never shall it separate me from the love of Christ.”

When neither bribery nor caresses produced any effect, the widow turned to violence. Moses was beaten, locked in a dungeon, and starved.

Castration and Return

The climax came when the widow, driven to a frenzy, resorted to extreme cruelty. The Paterikon describes the punishment with unusual graphic detail:

“The widow ordered that he be given a hundred lashes every day, and then commanded that his private parts be cut off, saying: ‘I will not spare his beauty, so that others may not enjoy it.’ And Moses lay as dead, bleeding profusely, barely breathing.”

The mutilation paradoxically resolved the conflict: Moses was permanently removed from the marriage market.

In 1025, Bolesław the Brave died, uprisings broke out in Poland, and Moses gained his freedom. He returned to Kyiv, took monastic vows at the Kyiv Cave Monastery, and spent about ten years there. In total, he had been in captivity for eleven years: five in chains under his first owner and six in the widow’s house.

The Paterikon presents Moses as an ascetic who received from God the gift of healing monks of carnal temptation. Because of his wounds, he could not walk without a staff. The Paterikon records a characteristic episode:

“One of the brethren, seized by carnal passion, came to this venerable one and begged him for help, saying: ‘I vow to keep until death everything you command me.’ The blessed one said to him: ‘Never in all your life speak a single word to any woman.’ He promised with love to fulfil this.”

Moses struck the brother with his staff in the groin – “and at once his members grew numb, and from that time there was no more temptation for that brother.”

Moses died on July 26, 1043. The Church canonized him. His relics were venerated as wonder-working: the Venerable John the Long-Suffering, fighting carnal temptations, buried himself up to his shoulders opposite the relics of Moses and after praying was delivered from the “impure warfare.”

How Rozanov Read This

Until the 20th century, the Life of Moses was read in strictly orthodox terms: as an example of the Christian will’s victory over fleshly temptation. A radical reassessment came from the philosopher Vasily Rozanov.

In 1911 he published People of Moonlight: The Metaphysics of Christianity – an unusually frank treatise for its time on same-sex love, the psychology of celibacy, and a critique of Christian asceticism.

Rozanov was full of contradictions. A passionate champion of the family, Old Testament fecundity, and reproductive sex, he attacked Christian asceticism and monastic celibacy – while simultaneously defending the “naturalness” of same-sex love for a certain category of people.

To describe this category he borrowed the idea of a “third sex” from European sexologists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, calling such people “people of moonlight.” He was convinced that homosexuality had often been historically hidden behind the mask of religious celibacy.

The Initial Interpretation: The “Third Sex”

This is precisely how Rozanov initially read the Life of Moses. He saw in it no ascetic feat. Moses, in Rozanov’s reading, was not overcoming desire for a woman – he had no such desire to begin with.

Rozanov was struck by the logic of the act. Why would a young, strong, healthy male slave refuse freedom, wealth, high status, and intimacy with a woman – choosing instead starvation, torture, and castration? The answer: contact with the female body was physiologically and psychologically impossible for Moses.

“This entire story, in its pattern, coincides to a striking degree with what biologists report about attempts to couple a man-maiden with a woman. The insuperable revulsion is the same as that which actus sodomiticus [a homosexual act] provokes in us, the normal, ordinary people. And one cannot fail to point out, for the benefit of legislators, physicians, and parents, that attempts to ‘marry off’ […] these subjects of the ’third sex’ are exactly equivalent to criminal and horrifying attempts to sodomize them.”

Rozanov asserted: for Moses – a representative of the “third sex” – a heterosexual act was an impossibility that provoked the same revulsion a heterosexual man would feel if forced into homosexual contact.

In Moses’s story, Rozanov saw the key to the entire institution of monasticism:

“The story of Moses the Hungarian, naively and sincerely told, with his so clearly expressed physiological nature, lifts the veil over the whole matter. This ‘story’ ought to be engraved on copper and nailed to the gates of every monastery.”

Moses became proof of Rozanov’s central thesis: monastic celibacy was not a victory of the will over nature, but a refuge for people whose nature made marriage to a woman impossible. By stripping Moses’s act of its halo of martyrdom, Rozanov shifted his tragedy into the domain of biological predetermination and social cruelty.

Rozanov Revises His Position

In the same edition – in the section “Corrections and Additions by an Anonymous Correspondent” – Rozanov published criticism from an anonymous correspondent and, in a move rare for him, fully agreed with it.

The anonymous correspondent addressed Rozanov directly: “Are you certain of your interpretation? Is it not too much – to disbelieve his own direct testimony, ‘I can, but I will not,’ and to maintain instead that he ‘cannot’?” Moses’s resistance was an ordinary masculine reaction to female aggression, not a manifestation of homosexuality. A real man does not tolerate a woman seizing the initiative; the more insistently she demands, the more unyielding his resistance – not because he is incapable of intimacy, but because his masculine pride has been wounded. The correspondent cited psychopathology: an obsessive idea can paralyze any natural drive – hunger, thirst, sexual desire – for months, years, and even an entire lifetime.

The correspondent also noted: had that woman treated Moses differently – calmly and without coercion – the outcome might have been different. But when a person is grabbed, ordered, bribed, beaten – “what, tell me, was left for him to do, other than what he did?” He drew a parallel with Joseph: he too tore himself away from Potiphar’s wife – in indignation, not from lack of desire; when he acted on his own initiative, he had children. The correspondent appealed even to Rozanov’s personal experience: if Rozanov himself were “seized on the street by some woman who, now offering money, now beating him over the head with an umbrella, began demanding” his favors, he too “would have cursed and spat, preferring to end up at the police station on the woman’s complaint rather than in her boudoir.”

Rozanov responded with a detailed note:

“I am in deep agreement with the entire explanation regarding the venerable Moses the Hungarian. First of all, let us honor his suffering […] I myself found it unpleasant to write this, and I am glad to withdraw from any reproach or suspicion of abnormality in the Venerable One.”

Having abandoned his diagnosis of Moses himself, Rozanov redirected criticism to the author of the hagiography. A case of natural masculine resistance “before a brazen woman” had been turned by the pious writer into “a kind of Uranistic confession of enmity toward womanliness, toward femaleness, toward femininity” – Rozanov called this “positively unbearable, heretical, and historically deeply harmful.”

Rozanov’s final judgment carried a new contradiction: “And Moses was truly beautiful. […] The righteous are righteous – whether they ‘do’ something, it is good, and if they ‘do not,’ it is also good. And in general things are ‘good’ with them and around them, and this is the essence of righteousness.” For a philosopher who considered “the beautiful” inseparable from “the righteous,” this was the highest praise – but it moves Moses from the category of a “clinical case” into the category of a “saint,” undermining his own original theory.

How Karlinsky Read This

The historian Simon Karlinsky placed the story of the Hungarian brothers within a broader, hidden homoerotic tradition in Russian culture. He noted the influence of the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and observed that the Life is pervaded by hostility toward women and toward sexuality in general – a feature typical of medieval monastic texts.

Karlinsky regarded Rozanov’s method as speculative, but his conclusions as important. The story of Moses matters not as proof of innate physiology, but as an example of a violent clash between an individual and the social and gender role imposed on him.

Moses – a slave deprived of agency – reclaims it through a total refusal to participate in the reproductive system. Karlinsky wrote that the castration was an act of revenge by the owner for “his preference for male partners and the accompanying lack of interest in conventional marriage.” Moses appears as a person whose resistance to the heteronormative order was so uncompromising that it ended in physical mutilation.

Levin’s Interpretation

Eve Levin offers a methodological counterweight to overly modern interpretations. Orthodox theology read Moses’s refusal solely as the highest expression of willpower and grace. What mattered was not what a person’s “nature” might have been, but what he did.

Within the framework of medieval religious thought, Moses is above all an exemplar of ascetic achievement, regardless of his possible inclinations.

Levin acknowledges the social function of monasticism. The monastery provided a legitimate refuge for people who, for psychological, physiological, or social reasons, could not or did not wish to enter the system of heterosexual marriage. The fate of Moses, who found peace in the monastery after his castration, illustrates how this niche operated.

How Mayhew Reads This

An analysis of the Life within the framework of modern gender studies was proposed by the historian Nick Mayhew in his article “Eunuchs and Ascetic Masculinity in Kievan Rus.” He reads the Paterikon as a text in which new forms of gender are constructed.

According to Mayhew, in the story of Moses the classical Christian scheme of imitatio Christi – the imitation of Christ – undergoes a radical transformation. Ideal masculinity is defined here not by authority, marriage, and procreation, but by emasculation and a state in which sexual desire has been entirely eliminated.

Mayhew draws attention to a detail that contradicts Rozanov’s idea of innate predetermination. In conversations with the widow, Moses repeatedly emphasizes that he is physiologically capable of having sex with her but refuses out of the fear of God. For the hagiographer this is crucial: if a person does not desire sin by nature, the refusal cannot count as the highest virtue. The text deliberately stresses that the capacity was present and the refusal was conscious.

In this interpretation, castration becomes a paradoxical act of liberation. The mutilation transfers Moses to the borderline position of a eunuch, removes the tension between flesh and spirit, and makes him the embodiment of a bodiless masculinity. Mayhew writes:

“The castration of Moses the Hungarian subordinates the imitatio Christi schema to ‘castrate’ masculinity in the Paterikon – constructing a form of masculinity defined by the absence of sexual desire. […] Since the castration is effectively caused by Moses’ negation of the flesh, manifest in his consistent refusal to fornicate with the Polish princess, he effectively performs an ultimate act of ‘crucifixion’ upon himself without incurring the guilt of self-castration.”

After his return to the Kyiv Cave Monastery, Moses, according to the Paterikon, acquires the ability to transmit celibacy to others. A monk beset by carnal passion comes for help – Moses touches him with his staff, and the man forever loses all sensation in the genital area.

Mayhew sees here a ritual transmission of “castrate masculinity”: the secular model of manhood based on procreation is subjected to a symbolic castration. Fatherhood in the Paterikon becomes the glorification of impotence: Moses is described as the “father” of his flock, but this patriarchal structure contradicts the patriarchal structure of the secular world.

Can Moses Be Considered a Queer Figure?

The question requires methodological precision. From the standpoint of historical sexology – the work of Michel Foucault and David Halperin – the answer is negative. Identities such as “homosexual” or “queer person” formed within medical, legal, and social discourses no earlier than the late 19th century. In Kyivan Rus’, sexual practices and social roles existed, but not sexual identities in the modern psychological sense. To call an 11th-century monk a “queer person” is to project modern categories onto the distant past.

In a broader sense, however, the Life of Moses does lend itself to a queer reading.

First, Moses radically refuses the system in which a person is expected to marry and have children. By rejecting the widow’s offer, he rejects not only sexual intercourse but integration into the system of inheritance, the exchange of capital, and the continuation of the line. In a society where dynastic and marital ties were the basic mechanism of survival, this was a violation of the social norm.

Second, his story breaks down the rigid division into male and female. After castration, Moses exits the “man/woman” framework and occupies the position of a eunuch. As Mayhew shows, this does not render him sexless; rather, it creates an alternative masculinity grounded not in phallic dominance but in imperviousness to passion.

Third, the Life demonstrates alternative kinship. Having severed blood ties and refused marriage, Moses finds a new family in the homosocial space of the Kyiv Cave Monastery, where spiritual bonds – between teacher and disciple, between brothers in Christ – are valued above biological ones.

The conclusion: it is impossible to reconstruct Moses’s actual psychosexual profile from a hagiographic text. His refusal may have been driven by religious conviction, as the Paterikon asserts. But for the history of ideas what matters more is how this plot functioned within culture. For centuries, the figure of Moses the Hungarian served as a screen onto which society projected its conceptions of corporeality, sex, and sexuality – from the medieval horror of carnal sin to Rozanov’s theory of the “third sex” and the idea that gender manifests through roles and behavior.

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