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Introduction: Rethinking Religion in Modern Russian Culture Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman These essays reflect the dramatic growth of new research and interpretation on the long neglected history of religious life in late imperial Russia.1 An elusive object of study, religion is understood here less as the story of institutions or fixed beliefs than as a vital terrain of social imagination and practice where everyday (and extraordinary) experience, ideas, beliefs, and emotions come together as people make sense of their lives. As in so much religious experience and expression, at the center here are stories and images, representations through which meaning gels (and disintegrates, and is reshaped). No less important,these cultural stories bridge the gap between the inner self and social existence. This work views the religious as fully and deeply entangled with the world. Belief, spirituality, and the sacred are seen not as separate, clearly bounded spheres—religion as the terrain of “things set apart and forbidden”2 — nor as mere reflections of social and political life but, rather, as powerful and complex cultural expressions of transcendent meanings, passions, and beliefs entwined inescapably with the whole of life, in Russia and beyond. Necessarily, therefore, these sacred stories are also stories about power and resistance, community and individuality, the public sphere and private life, class and gender, and, pervading all this, modernity. Indeed, the relationships between religion and the landscape of the modern—modern forms of political power, modern social relationships and identities, modern conditions of change and crisis, and modern ideas—imbue these stories with their particular tone and urgency. Religion and the Russian Fin de Siècle Modern Russia, especially in the final decades of the old regime, was awash in sacred stories. As will be seen in the chapters that follow, the landscape of rapid industrialization, social transformation, and political revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also a landscape of intellectual journeys of spiritual discovery, mass religious pilgrimage, nonconformist religious movements, battles over freedom of conscience, literary and artistic 1 2 Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman mysticism, and the emergence of a vital new tradition of religious philosophy. In the pages of the increasingly free and widely circulating press, Russians told one another of religious healing, of lives transformed by the words of charismatic preachers like the priest Father Ioann of Kronstadt or the dissident lay preacher “Brother” Ivan Koloskov, or of conversion to new creeds. Writers, poets, artists, and philosophers increasingly described the world in mythic and mystical terms, exalted spiritual imagination and elemental feeling, spoke of the divinity of all things or of mystical “correspondences,” resituated ethics on the ground of religion, turned away from both church dogma and scientific materialism and determinism toward a new spiritual faith, and often described apocalyptic visions of a coming catastrophe out of which, perhaps, great redemption would come. The imperial Russian state and its church also entered the fray, telling stories of a national religious mission and of an eternal spiritual bond between ruler and ruled. Sacred stories were to be found in unexpected places, too—in the pages of the secularist Yiddish press, in the work of avant-garde, even “Futurist,” artists like Kazimir Malevich, in the verse of selfconsciously proletarian poets, and even among revolutionaries articulating their own sacredly inflected story of imminent revolutionary change. Modernization and the modern were entwined through all these stories. Modern life unsettled social, political, and intellectual hierarchies and knowledges. Quite tangibly urbanization, modern rail transport, and the rapid expansion of popular literacy and the press worked together with other new social and economic realities to cause many people to experience their faith in novel ways and to send others in search of new, more appropriate forms of spirituality and transcendent meaning for a modern age. Just as the encounter with modernity made people more self-conscious as individuals, it also heightened self-awareness about religious belief, the presumed boundaries of the sacred and the secular, and the place of religion in their country and the world. Orthodoxy, the established religion of the empire, found itself in a paradoxical position. Russia’s last two tsars, Alexander III (reigned 1881–1894) and Nicholas II (reigned 1894–1917) championed an “Orthodox” conception of the monarchy and the empire. Both personally devout, father and son sought to “resacralize” the monarchy by revitalizing the role of Orthodoxy in imperial ceremony and by sponsoring festive commemorations of great religious events in the nation’s past and...

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