Old Believers in a Changing World: Polish Narratives of World War ll

Afterword

Afterword When I began to study the Old Believers in the early 1960s,Ihadnoinklingthatthedecadesofmylifeasaworkinghistorianwould coincide with the remarkable revival of scholarly study of the movement. Looking back, of course, I can see how fortunate I was to have received the advice and encouragement of such leaders in the rebirth of Old Believer studies as Malyshev and N. S. Demkova, to say nothing of the privilege of meeting I. N. Zavoloko, a living bridge between scholars and believers. Still less did I—or anyone else—foresee the radical changes in Russia in the late 1980s and 1990s that created entirely new conditions for both practicing Old Believers and for the scholars of their tradition. New political conditions offered the promise of active cooperation between academic scholars and active believers, and the possible emergence of a new generation of individuals who would fully participate in both worlds. One harbinger of the future was the international conference in Novosibirsk in September 1990. The organizers brought together scholars of Old Believer history and culture from around the world along with spokesmen of several branches of the moment. It is hard to capture the excitement and sense of limitless possibilities we all felt in that moment. In retrospect, there were also signs that we were nowhere near a utopian land of common interests and sharedagendas.Asthemeetingprogressed,scholarsdebatedwithscholarsand Old Believer leaders aimed their comments at one another. Since that time, scholars and believers have, for the most part, lived in their own spheres. And Afterword 191 this, I would suggest, is to be expected in any religious tradition; for scholars strive to analyze and explain the history, culture, and contemporary condition of religious communities, while believers’ primary concern is to express and live their faith as best they can. Since I live in only one of these two worlds, I will limit my reflections to the present state and future prospects of scholarship on Old Belief. As the chapters in this volume show, the community of scholars has been remarkably productive in recent decades. Meticulous searches in archives and discoveries in the field have led to an outpouring of work on previously neglected dimensions of the movement’s history and culture and shed new light on individuals and communities that were already well-known. By now the traditional polarities in the literature on Old Belief have largely disappeared. The best scholars have combined the ecclesiastical historians’ focus on the theological, liturgical, and canonical issues that have preoccupied the Old Believers themselves with serious analysis of the administrative and social conditions in which they lived and the political implications of their choices. At the same time, each historian must inevitably establish hierarchies of causes and, in the case of Old Belief, has to choose whether the movement’s adherents strove primarily to save their souls or to cry out against oppressive social and political conditions. In addition, scholars—especially the Novosibirsk school—have demonstrated that, in Russia at least, the imaginary line between elite and popular religious cultures barely exists. The extent to which educated Old Believers influenced their less sophisticated brothers and sisters and vice versa, however, remains a significant and interesting question. Finally, recent scholarly work has made us more aware than ever that Old Belief was and is an extremely complex and continually changing movement. Over the course of its history, its adherents have split into a bewildering variety of accords, tendencies, and groups as they have struggled to define true Orthodoxy and develop strategies to defend it in a rapidly changing world. Where do we scholars go from here? As we have seen, well-established modes of scholarly investigation and analysis are still serving us well. For examples one can point to the achievements of the Novosibirsk school discussed in chapter 12 and to E. M. Iukhimenko’s monumental two-volume work on the cultural history of the Vyg community.1 And, if Iukhimenko was able to add so much to our knowledge about this well-known and welldocumented center of Old Belief, how much more could we learn about the innumerablecentersandcurrentswithinthemovementaboutwhichweknow virtually nothing? It would be helpful to know a great deal more, for example, 192 O l d B e l i e v e r s i n a C h a n g i n g W o r l d about the varying fates of Old Believer leaders and their flocks in the Soviet period. We...