Leonidas C. Pittos and Jonathan Daly, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60607
The study of religion in late Imperial Russian culture is
currently enjoying a surge of scholarly attention. While previously to a large
part overlooked, current research has focused on the relation between the
revolutionary fervor and popular religiosity of the masses during the final
decades of the Russian Old Regime. Many scholars have also focused on the
religious roots of the flowering of intellectual and cultural creativity on the
subject of religion during this period. This Russian Religious Renaissance was
a revival of religion, mysticism, spirituality and myth which in turn was part of
the challenge to positivist rationalism throughout the European world.
My paper explores the development of a distinct Russian Orthodox culture, a
resurgence of Russian Orthodox spirituality from the emancipation of the serfs
in 1861 to the October Revolution in 1917 and an inseparable part of this
Russian Religious Renaissance. This spiritual revival incorporated believers
from all levels of educated and peasant society, transcending the contemporary
social order by encompassing priests and bishops, members of the
intelligentsia, peasants and nobles, and women, all from different social and
cultural milieu. This distinctly Orthodox religious culture developed and
flourished in parallel to the official state dominated Church, yet in many ways
remained immune to the impotency that afflicted Church officialdom, and proved
to be “a shot in the arm” for Russian Orthodoxy. This Orthodox religious
culture continued to flourish even after the Revolution both in the Russian
Diaspora and within the clandestine resistance movements opposed to the
Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes.
This paper explores the images and symbols of this Orthodox religious culture
in the context of their time, and the powerful impact these images and symbols
had on the attitudes, behavior, values, and expectations of many Orthodox
Christian believers.