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Old Belief as Popular Religion: New Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert O. Crummey
Robert O. Crummey*
Affiliation:
College of Letters and Science, University of California, Davis
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Extract

In recent decades, the rediscovery of historical ethnography in western historiography has produced an extensive literature on "popular Christianity" in many European societies. Until recently, however, this historiographical current has exercised very limited influence on historical study in the former Soviet Union. In one sense, Russian historians had no need for such influence; the populist tradition in Russian historiography and its continuation in marxist-leninist attire meant that the study of popular attitudes and beliefs was hardly the novelty it was in other countries in recent decades.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 700 - 712
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

1. Excellent critical summaries of this literature include Davis, Natalie Zemon, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” in Ozment, Steven, ed., Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 321–42Google Scholar; Scribner, R. W., “Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 89–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Engen, John, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard van Dulman, “Volksfrömmigkeit und konfessionelles Christentum im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Schieder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 14-30.

2. There are a few remarkable exceptions to this statement, in particular the works of K. V. Chistov and A. I. Klibanov. See Chistov, K. V., Russkie narodnye sotsial'noutopicheskie legendy (Moscow: Nauka, 1967 Google Scholar); Klibanov, A. I., Narodnaia sotsial'naia utopiia v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977 Google Scholar).

3. Pascal, Pierre, The Religion of the Russian People (London and Oxford: Mowbrays, 1976 Google Scholar); Obolensky, Dmitri, “Popular Religion in Medieval Russia,” Russia and Orthodoxy, Volume II: The Religious World of Russian Culture, ed. Blane, Andrew (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 43–54 Google Scholar; Lewin, Moshe, “Popular Religion in Twentieth-Century Russia,” The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History oflnterwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 57–71 Google Scholar. Ivanits, Linda J. (Russian Folk Belief [Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1989]Google Scholar) summarizes the extensive Russian literature on “folk beliefs” and folklore. For a helpful and stimulating analysis of the hoary concept of dvoeverie (double faith), see Eve Levin, “Dvoeverie and Popular Religion,” forthcoming in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993).

4. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélèene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984Google Scholar).

5. Gurevich, Aron, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. Bak, J. H. and Hollingsworth, P. A. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988 Google Scholar); and the same author's Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

6. The extent to which Old Belief can be viewed as a coherent movement with wide popular support is still subject to debate. In his recent dissertation, Georg Michels stresses the fragmentary nature of Old Belief in the seventeenth century and argues that the movement as such emerged only in the early eighteenth century in response to the policies of Peter I. See his “Myths and Realities of the Russian Schism: The Church and Its Dissenters in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1991).

7. See, for example, Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694-1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).Google Scholar

8. In this essay I will not deal with the so-called “sectarians,” whose more rationalistic or “charismatic” approaches to Christian belief, worship and practice took them much farther from the mainstream of historic Eastern Orthodoxy than the Old Believers. The extremely varied groups which are customarily grouped under the broad label sektantstvo can legitimately be studied as examples of popular religious attitudes and practices in eighteenth and nineteenth century Russia. That, however, is material for another article.

9. The most useful introduction and survey of these issues is Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978 Google Scholar). For a stimulating recent discussion on approaches and methodologies for the study of popular culture, see the “AHR Forum,” American Historical Review 97 (1992): 1369-1430. For our purposes, the most helpful comments are those of Natalie Zemon Davis, “Toward Mixtures and Margins,” 1409-16.

10. Schmitt, Jean-Claude, “Réligion populaire et culture folklorique,” Annales: Economies, Sociétès, Civilisations 31 (1976): 941–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar reviewing Delaruelle, Etienne, La piété populaire au moyen âge (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1975)Google Scholar.

11. Muchembled, Robert, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750, trans. Cochrane, L. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 11 Google Scholar.

12. Daily oral reading was prescribed by the “rule” of the Vyg community. See Kuandykov, L. K., “Ideologiia obshchezhitel'stva u staroobriadtsev-bespopovtsev vygovskogo soglasiia v XVIII v.,” Istochniki po kul'ture i klassovoi bor'be feodal'nogo perioda (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1982), 94.Google Scholar

13. Manselli, Raoul, La réligion populaire au moyen âge: Problemes de methode et d'histoire (Montreal: Institut d'études mediévales Albert-le-Grand, 1975), 25–26 Google Scholar.

14. For a Russian example, see Amfiteatrov, A., Russkii pop XVII veka (Belgrade: Russkaia tipografiia, 1930 Google Scholar).

15. Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture.

16. Manselli, , La réligion populaire, 21–24 Google Scholar.

17. A variant of this argument underlies Keith Thomas's pathbreaking Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner's, 1971). See also van Dulmen, “Volksfrommigkeit,” 15-21.

18. In recent years, many scholars have made this point. See, for example, Manselli, , La religion populaire, 20–41 Google Scholar; Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Cochrane, L. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 37–40 Google Scholar.

19. On a theoretical plane, new directions emphasize the complexity of the relationship between the scholar as educated outsider and the cultural phenomena he she seeks to understand. For example, Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical works stress the continual mutual interaction of social formations and mental structures which begin as the internalization of external reality, but quickly take on a life of their own and shape that reality ( Chartier, , Cultural History, 44–45 Google Scholar). Reflexive ethnography attacks the presumed objectivity of the educated observer and stresses the extreme difficulty— indeed impossibility—of escaping from one's own worldview into that of the culture under study. See Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 Google Scholar), especially “On Ethnographic Authority,” 21-54.

20. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. John, and Tedeschi, Anne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 Google Scholar); Pokrovskii, N. N., “Ispoved’ altaiskogo krest'ianina,” Pamiatniki kul'tury. Novye otkrytiia (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), 49–57 Google Scholar. These authors’ commitment to let the men they studied “speak for themselves” closely parallels the guiding spirit and expository strategies of the “new ethnographers. ”

21. See Michels, “Myths and Realities” and his “The Solovki Uprising: Religion and Revolt in Northern Russia,” Russian Review 51 (1992): 1-15.

22. Michels ( “Myths and Realities,” chapters 4 and 5) stresses the role of itinerant monks and nuns, officially tonsured or self-designated, and renagade priests in spreading resistance to the Nikonian reforms. See also Crummey, Old Believers, 31-38. In an unpublished essay, I emphasize that the first Old Believer “cultural system,” the tapestry of interwoven polemical and devotional texts, was the creation of a conservative “intelligentsia” within the clergy ( “The Origins of the Old Believers’ Cultural Systems: The Works of Avraamii,” forthcoming in Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte).

23. Roy R. Robson uses this term in his dissertation, “Old Believers in a Modern World: Symbol, Ritual, and Community, 1905-14” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1992).

24. I. V. Pozdeeva frames her studies of early Russian book culture with this presupposition. See, for example, her “Drevnerusskoe nasledie v istorii traditsionnoi knizhnoi kul'tury staroobriadchestva (pervyi period),” Istoriia SSSR (1988), no. 1: 84-99. This questionable presupposition does not detract from the value of the more concrete findings of Pozdeeva's group of ethnographers and literary scholars.

25. See Amosov, A. A., Budaragin, V. P., Morozov, V. V. and Pikhoia, R. G., “O nekotorykh problemakh polevoi arkheografii (v poriadke obsuzhdeniia),” Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl1 dorevoliutsionnogo Urala (Sverdlovsk: Izd-vo Ural'skogo Gos. universiteta, 1983), 5–19.Google Scholar

26. See Crummey, Old Believers; Druzhinin, V. G., Raskol na Donu v kontse XVII veka (St. Petersburg: Tip. I. N. Skorokhodova, 1889 Google Scholar); Sokolov, N., Raskol v Saratovskom krae (Saratov, 1888 Google Scholar); Pokrovskii, N. N., Antifeodal'nyi protest uralo-sibirskikh krest'ian-staroobriadtsev v XVIII v. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1974 Google Scholar); Pikhoia, R. G., Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl’ trudiashchikhsia Urala (konets XVII-XVIII w.) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural'skoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1987)Google Scholar; A. T. Shashkov, “Izuchenie uralo-sibirskogo staroobriadchestva vtoroi poloviny XVII-nachala XVIII v. v otechestvennoi istoriografii ” ; and Baidin, V. I., “Ural'skoe staroobriadchestvo kontsa XVIII-serediny XIX v. v dorevoliutsionnoi i sovetskoi istoriografii,” Istoriografiia obshchestvennoi mysli dorevoliutsionnogo Urala (Sverdlovsk: Izd-vo Ural'skogo Gos. universiteta, 1988), 31–50 Google Scholar. The local history of Old Belief is the subject of an extensive literature, particularly in regional and ecclesiastical periodicals. We badly need new studies of the major centers of Old Belief, especially the communities in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

27. Manfred Hildermeier's articles, “Alter Glaube und neue Welt: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Raskol im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbüher für Geschichte Osteuropas 38 (1990): 372-98, 504-25 and “Alter Glaube und Mobilität: Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung und sozialen Struktur des Raskol im früindustriellen RuBland (1760-1860),” ibid. 39 (1991): 321-38 do much to fill this gap.

28. On the “book culture” of the Old Believers, see the work of I. V. Pozdeeva and her collaborators, for example, “Drevnerusskoe nasledie.” G. V. Esipov published paraphrases of a number of inquisitorial records from the reign of Peter, I in Raskol'nich'i dela XVIII st. 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tip. N. Tiblena, 1861, 1863)Google Scholar. For a par ticularly interesting case from a later period, see Pokrovskii, “Ispoved'. ”

29. Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion',” 323.

30. On the Old Believers’ sacred history, see Crummey, R., “Istoricheskaia skhema vygoretskikh bol'shakov,” Traditsionnaia dukhoxmaia i material'naia kul'tura russkikh staroobriadcheskikh poselenii v stranakh Evropy, Azii i Ameriki (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1992), 90-96.Google Scholar

31. Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 90–92 Google Scholar.

32. Fortunately, Russian scholars are devoting a great deal of attention to this question. See, for example, R. G. Pikhoia, “Knizhno-rukopisnaia traditsiia Urala XVIIInachala XX v. (k postanovke problemy),” Istochnikipo kul'ture i klassovoi bor'befeodal'nogo perioda, 101-14; E. I. Dergacheva-Skop and V. N. Alekseev, “Staroobriadcheskie biblioteki v Sibiri (problemy rekonstruktsii),” Traditsionnaia dukhovnaia i material'naia kul'tura, 125-30; A. G. Mosin, “Istochniki po istorii knizhnoi kul'tury zhitelei Viatskoi gubernii (1840-1850),” Kul'tura i byt dorevoliutsionnogo Urala (Sverdlovsk: Izd-vo Ural'skogo Gos. universiteta, 1989), 103-21.

33. For twentieth century examples, see Pokrovskii's, N. N. description of his anonymous informants in Puteshestvie za redkimi knigami (Moscow: Kniga, 1984), 16–22 Google Scholar; E. B. Smilianskaia's discussion of the role of K. I. Dontsov in the Old Believer village of Kunicha in Moldova in “Belokrinitskie prikhody v Moldove (knizhnost’ i kul'tura s. Kunicha),” Traditsionnaia dukhovnaia i material'naia kul'tura, 179-85; and essays on two remarkable contemporaries, E. A. Ageeva, “Sovremennyi staroobriadcheskii pisatel’ A. K. Kilin,” and N. D. Zol'nikova, “Sovremennyi pisatel'-staroobriadets s Eniseia,” Ibid., 277-88.

34. See, for example, the essays of Nikitina, S. E. and Chernysheva, M. B. in Russkie pis'mennye i ustnye traditsii i dukhovnaia kul'tura (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1982 Google Scholar). The literature on the dukhovnye stikhi is extensive and includes a number of editions of texts.

35. Although centered on other issues, Robson's “Old Believers in a Modern World” provides much helpful material on this question.

36. See Juha Pentikäinen, “Oral Repertoire and World View: An Anthropological Study of Marina Takalo's Life History,” FF Communications 93, no. 219 (1978). Pentikainen's work and the testimony of his informants must be treated cautiously for at least two reasons. First, it is unclear to what extent Marina Takalo and the other informants can legitimately be considered Old Believers. Second, since Pentikainen works with informants of various Ugro-Finnic ethnic groups, it is unclear whether one would find such extraordinary mixtures of Old Believer scruple and folk syncretism among Great Russians.

37. This theme is central to Robson's “Old Believers in a Modern World. ”

38. See, for example, Ponyrko, N. V., “Uchebniki ritoriki na Vygu,” Trudy Otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 36 (1981): 154–62Google Scholar.

39. “Zhil'ber Romm u vygovskikh raskol'nikov,” Kraeved Karelii (Petrozavodsk, 1990), 148-59.

40. A. A. Amosov, V. P. Budaragin, V. V. Morozov and R. G. Pikhoia make this point in “O nekotorykh problemakh polevoi arkheografii,” 14.

41. Cherniavsky, Michael, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25 (1966), 1–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 23 and n. 99; Klibanov, , Narodnaia sotsial'naia utopiia, 201–19Google Scholar.

42. Such was the conclusion of P. I. Mel'nikov, based on his studies of the Nizhnii Novgorod region. See his Otchet o sovremennom sostoianii raskola v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, 1854), 288.

43. Crummey, Old Believers, 101.

44. Freeze, Gregory L., “The Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850,” Studia Slavica Finlandensia 7 (1990): 101–36Google Scholar and “The Wages of Sin: The Decline of Public Penance in Imperial Russia,” forthcoming in Seeking God.

45. The best discussion of this movement within Russian Orthodoxy in the midseventeenth century remains Pascal, Pierre, Avvakum et les débuts du raskol (Paris: Libraire Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1938 Google Scholar; reprinted, Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1963), 148-89. See also Heller, Wolfgang, Die Moskauer “Eiferer für die Frommigkeit” zwischen Stoat und Kirche (1642-1652) (Wiesbaden: O. Harrasowitz, 1988 Google Scholar). Peter Burke points to the parallel between the program of the “Zealots of Piety” and the activities of Protestant and Roman Catholic contemporaries elsewhere in mid-seventeenth century Europe ( Burke, , Popular Culture, 214–15Google Scholar).

46. Avvakum, Archpriest, The Life Written by Himself, trans. Brostrom, Kenneth N. (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979 Google Scholar). The most useful Russian editions are Zhitie Protopopa Awakuma im samim napisannoe i drugie ego sochineniia (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960) and Robinson, A. N., ed., Zhitie Awakuma i drugie ego sochineniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1991).Google Scholar

47. See, for example, Crummey, Robert O., “The Spirituality of the Vyg Fathers,” Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Hosking, Geoffrey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 23–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pia Pera, “Theoretical and Practical Aspects of the Debate on Marriage among the Priestless Old Believers from the End of the Seventeenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1986).

48. See, for example, Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–124 Google Scholar; and Victor Turner, W., The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969 Google Scholar.