Addressing the problem of Chekhov as a religious artist, Denis Zhernokleyev looks beyond Chekhov’s own ambivalent statements on this topic towards the culture of Eastern Christianity itself, exploring Chekhov’s creative engagement with the stories, symbols, and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that were an ineradicable part of his upbringing and inheritance.

Stravinsky’s spiritual trajectory is an essential part of his complex artistic makeup and his work cannot be understood without taking it into account. While this may initially seem paradoxical given Stravinsky’s standing as an arch-modernist, his relationship with religion, while it varied in kind over the course of his life, was extremely strong and closely interwoven with other aspects of his character, in particular his connection with the culture of his native Russia. Not that this should be unexpected. As Peter Gay has pointed out, ‘The psychological turn of a modernist towards a lost emotional home should surprise only those who equate modernism with atheism. … It does not follow, then, that Stravinsky abandoned originality while he searched, as he put it, for order.’1

Start with the map. What we call ‘Russia’ is a geographically vast territory: one set of borders looks to an unambiguously Western world, the world of (often militant) Latin Christianity; another towards the self-contained cultural world of China. South-westwards lie the Balkans and what was once the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, as Dimitri Obolensky called the cluster of states and peoples sharing a broadly Greek Christian heritage; south-eastwards, the tribal cultures and Turkic languages of Central Asia. Russian identity has been moulded in response to – sometimes violent reaction to – all these environments, and its complexities reflect the way in which these diverse contacts and conflicts have impressed themselves on Russia’s sense of itself and its destiny.