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  • Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia
  • Tatyana Bakhmetyeva
Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia. By Laurie Manchester. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2008. Pp. xiv, 288. $43.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80380-7.)

Since Marc Raeff's groundbreaking study of the origins of the Russian intelligentsia, scholars of Russian history have viewed this social group as composed primarily of nobility augmented by an influx of razhnochintsy(people of various ranks) in the second half of the nineteenth century. This composition, in turn, created the perception of the character of Russian intelligentsia as mostly secular, largely influenced by Western ideas, and preoccupied with trying to understand Russia through its relationship to the West (which they saw either negatively or positively). Laurie Manchester's study suggests, however, that there is still much to discover about both the composition and the character of the Russian intelligentsia. Manchester convincingly argues that to the already known elements that formed Russian intelligentsia, we should add another important constituent group: popovichior children of Russian Orthodox clergy who left their estate and entered a variety of secular professions. Identification of this additional element, in turn, complicates our view of the intelligentsia as Westernized and secular. Manchester's collective portrait of popovichireveals a stratum of Russian intelligentsia whose primary sense of identity came from their religious background and was deeply rooted in native Russian culture. The popovichi, in fact, did not abandon this sense of identity even after they left their estate and entered secular professions. Even though many of them—albeit not all—lost their faith, they nevertheless preserved—and brought with them—the values of the clerical estate and its deeply messianic character when they joined the ranks of the intelligentsia. [End Page 865]

While messianism described other members of the Russian intelligentsia as well, popovichiviewed themselves as alone destined to save Russia and alone possessing the knowledge of how this was to be accomplished. This belief in their mission and certainty in their ability to accomplish it stemmed from the popovichi's perception that they were a part of the common people ( narod), unlike the noble Westernized intelligentsia whom they saw standing in opposition to the people and therefore incapable of understanding their needs and values. Manchester traces the formation of this perception through the popovichi's personal narratives in which they remember—or, rather, construct—their childhood and youth as spent in close proximity to the peasantry, learning from them and about them. The chapter on the popovichi's early years is, perhaps, the most interesting in the book as it reveals the purposeful character of their construction of self. That is, it reveals the process by which they selected those elements of their background that justified their view of themselves as uniquely qualified to transform Russia. As Manchester rightfully observes, popovichihere acted as self-reliant modern agents while selecting values that were largely traditional, thus challenging in the process the binary opposition of traditional and modern.

But Manchester's study of popovichiexpands not only our understanding of the composition and character of the Russian intelligentsia. In the process, it also breaks the stereotypical image of Russian parish clergy as overwhelmingly uneducated, isolated, uncultured, and corrupt. Instead, Manchester introduces parish priests, fathers of future intelligentsia members, as intellectually alive, deeply engaged in their local communities, and devoted to their families, faith, and country. Even more important, by pointing out that the sons of Russian Orthodox priests had a prominent place within the intelligentsia, Russia's most influential social and political group of the nineteenth century, Manchester's study suggests that cultural and social influence of Russian Orthodoxy extended into areas previously overlooked by scholars.

Manchester uses a massive array of primary sources, most of them previously unstudied. Among these sources, the most interesting are undoubtedly the personal narratives of popovichithemselves. Recognizing the highly constructed nature of these sources, Manchester applies a very complex and original methodology, informed by recent theories, to decipher the process of the construction of self that the authors of these narratives have employed in a very modern way...

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