Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia

3. Scripting the Gaze: Liturgy, Homilies, and the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Late Imperial Russia

3 Scripting the Gaze: Liturgy, Homilies, and the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in Late Imperial Russia Vera Shevzov 61 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during a sermon on the feast of Russia’s well-known miracle-working Kazan icon of the Mother of God, a Russian Orthodox priest beckoned his listeners to “gaze upon the image of the Queen, gaze with ardent and fervent prayer.”1 Recent studies in religion and visual culture have shown that such seemingly simple exhortations are anything but straightforward.2 Included among the numerous questions raised by such exhortations are those that concern the very act of religious seeing and the cultural dynamics that contribute to it. “Looking upon” an icon in Russian Orthodoxy was indeed a complex act. On the one hand, a believer’s apprehension of an icon was deeply personal: how one perceived a sacred image largely depended on who one was, the state of one’s mind, and where and when one came upon it. On the other hand, the act of the devotional gaze involved more than a single individual and a detached image. Icons and believers were also part of a broader faith community that provided a living environment in which icons were both produced and received. One of the most prominent aspects of that environment was the sacred community’s liturgical worship. As the historian Margaret Miles has argued for Western Christian medieval visual experience, “the individual viewer confronted the image as a member of an interpreting community, and the image itself was also part of the . . . liturgical presentation of an ordered cosmos of being, reality, and value.”3 In this sense, in modern Russia, too, the production and reception of an icon were not simply attributable to the iconographer and the individual believer, respectively, but involved broader religious, cultural, 62 Vera Shevzov and even political processes. Nowhere was this more evident in late imperial Russian Orthodoxy than in the veneration of its nationally recognized miracleworking icons, most of which were of Mary, the Mother of God.These icons not only enjoyed specially designated feasts on the Church’s liturgical calendar but also had special liturgical services composed in their honor. Orthodox liturgical worship consisted largely of chanted established rehearsals of foundational narratives and sacred stories that formed the basis of the community’s “lifeworld .”4 It also included, with increasing frequency from the eighteenth century on, homilies or paraliturgical talks in which a presiding bishop or priest would expound on a topic related to the sacred celebration. On the feast of a particular icon of Mary, ecclesial narratives and the Church’s visual culture were thereby integrated in a mutually transformative way. On the one hand, Old and New Testament narratives and apocryphal stories gained new meaning as they were woven together in honor of a particular image of Mary. On the other hand, liturgical texts and the homilies spoken on the feast framed the icon of Mary with stories that themselves became part of the phenomenon of that particular icon. This essay examines the “sacred rhetoric” of the liturgical and homiletic Figure 3.1. The Kazan icon of the Mother of God as depicted in a pamphlet that recounted the icon’s life. Skazanie o chudotvornoi ikone Bozhiei Materi, imenuemoi Kazanskoi, 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1888). Scripting the Gaze 63 culture associated with a particular icon of Mary, namely, the Kazan icon of the Mother of God, in order to understand better the broader narrative context in which the Orthodox believer viewed it and, in turn, the multidimensionality of religious viewing itself.5 While it might be impossible to determine the way and extent to which this rhetoric may have stirred the imagination of any given believer, that it was spoken and that it influenced the believer’s perception of the icon would be difficult to deny. I have chosen to focus on the Kazan icon for several reasons. First, it was the most widely publicly revered of Russia’s twenty-eight nationally recognized miracle-working icons of the Mother of God.6 The Church celebrated the icon on two days, 8 July and 22 October. The latter date was also a state holiday. Many businesses and government offices were closed, and liturgical services were conducted throughout the empire.7 That the Kazan icon was an extremely popular image among the laity, with a copy found in most homes and...