Toward Undiscovered Ends: Friends and Russia for 300 Years (review)

Book Reviews Toward Undiscovered Ends: Friends and Russia for 300 Years. By Anna Brinton. Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 62. 1951. 48 pages. 35 cents. ? NNA Brinton's new pamphlet deserves a warm welcome not only because it is the only historical survey known to this reviewer of Quaker contacts with Russia, but also because it will provide the encouragement of perspective for the numerous Quakers today who are dedicating themselves to wearing holes through both sides of Iron Curtains. After an introductory discussion of the essentially religious nature of Quaker concerns about Russia, the pamphlet gives an account of Friends' relations with Peter the Great in the seventeenth century and Alexander I in the nineteenth, during their visits to England. Among the most interesting sections of the pamphlet are those dealing with the Quaker agriculturalist Daniel Wheeler and his life in Russia during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, and those dealing with the visits of Stephen Grellet and William Allen to Russia in 1818-1819 and of Thomas Shillitoe in 1824. The unsuccessful efforts of British Friends to avert the Crimean War and their astonishingly successful efforts afterwards to persuade the Great Powers to insert a binding arbitration clause in the Treaty of Paris should be of particular interest to Friends who are following the present-day work of the international Quaker delegation among the members of the United Nations. Other sections of the pamphlet deal with Quaker contacts with the pacifist sects in Russia, particularly the Mennonites and the Dukhobors; with Friends' relief work in Russia in 1856 and 1891 as well as after the First World War; with recent Quaker publications about the tension between Russia and the West; and finally with the visit of the British Quaker delegation to Russia in June, 1951. The very achievements of this pioneering study serve to call attention to certain areas of Quaker history that are still in great need of further research. Anna Brinton's pamphlet indicates that practically nothing is known about Quaker influences in Russia from the death of Peter the Great (1725) to the end of the eighteenth century; and yet from Russian sources we know that the Orthodox Church in 1744 condemned twenty-two Russian nuns to exile in Siberia as "followers of the Quaker heresy," and that two survivors were still living there as late as 1784. Even more important is the need to study Quaker influences in Russia as they appeared to the Russians themselves, particularly during the reign of Alexander I. Quaker mysticism has generally been the fountainhead of energy and guidance for Quaker social concerns, but Tsar Alexander's period of greatest interest in Quakerism and mysticism coincides with his turn to social and political reaction. Why? 63 64Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Further light on that shadowy but crucial borderline between genuine mystical insights and psychological aberrations should come from research by Friends into the extraordinary career of Baroness Juliana Kriidener, a German from Russia's Baltic provinces, who was converted by a Moravian shoemaker, exercised tremendous influence over Alexander I in 1815 (claiming credit for giving him the idea of the Holy Alliance), and spent years preaching something close to the Inner Light and getting into hot water all over Europe for her social concerns. Equally deserving of study but even less well-known in the West is the controversial Polish mystic Andrezej Towianski, whose doctrines, weird as they may appear to sober-sided Quakers, gained followers in various countries of Europe and for several years held in their sway the two greatest poets of Poland, Mickiewicz and Slowacki. The Kriideners and Towianskis of Eastern Europe, as well as Alexander I himself and his pious, reactionary Minister of Education Prince Galitsyn (who also liked Quakers), may help us to understand why it has so rarely occurred to liberal Russians that religious mysticism might be associated with political and social progress. Pennsylvania State CollegeWilliam B. Edgerton A Friendly Mission: John Candhr's Letters from America 1853-1854 Edited by Gayle Thornborough. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society. 1951. 134 pages. $1.00. T N THE fall of 1853 a delegation of four Friends (John Candler, William Holmes, Josiah...