Вера и личность в меняющемся обществе: Автобиографика и православие в России конца XVII – начала XX века ed. by Лори Манчестер и Д. А. Сдвижкова (review)

This book is an outcome of a larger research project at the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Moscow, which focused on religious autobiography. The edited volume comprises fifteen chapters penned by Russian and foreign scholars, covering the entire scope of Russian religious autobiography, at least from a historian's point of view. All the chapters very concisely relate to the volume's topic, making the book a prime introduction to the subject for the Russian-language audience. The value of such an introduction is only enhanced by the fact that different academic cultures – English, German, and Russian – fuse to create a comprehensive picture that incorporates the perspectives from both the inside and the outside.

As Denis Sdvizhkov and Laurie Manchester remind readers in the introduction to the volume, the first manifestation of the modern self in Russian culture is usually attributed to Archpriest Avvakum's autobiography written after 1670. However, the notions of a "modern self" or "spiritual autobiography" are not easily translatable to the Russian context since they are intricately linked to Protestant conceptions of individuality and religious discipline. In the nineteenth century, the Slavophiles claimed that one of the main virtues of Orthodox Christianity was its "impersonality" and rejection of "individuality" as a value. Not surprisingly, the development of a modern religious self within the Russian Orthodox tradition has not received as much scholarly attention as it deserves. It is this lacuna that the book under review seeks to fill by providing an extensive overview of the development of religious individuality in imperial Russia through autobiographical texts – including diaries, letters, sermons, and so forth. The volume's authors focus not only on the clerical estate but also on the nobility, merchants, and peasants.

Arranged in chronological order and divided into three uneven parts, fifteen chapters follow the introductory essay written by the editors, which outlines a peculiar trajectory of autobiography as a genre in post-Petrine Russia. Seven chapters form part 1, "From the Early Modern Period to the Nineteenth Century." The very short first chapter by Tatiana Sochiva reconstructs the formation of individual subjectivity in early modern Russian literature on the example of one of Archpriest Avvakum's texts. She criticizes the widespread assumption that in his writings, Avvakum had sacralized his self, pointing out that this would have contradicted his Christian beliefs. Rather, Avvakum perceived reality around him in biblical terms, seeing everywhere the signs of the apocalypse.

The following chapter by Sdvizhkov traces the parallel process of the rise of new religiosity and the new subjectivity in pre-Reform Russia. Unlike in the West, where the religious self was by and large a product of reformation theology emphasizing individual piety, in Russia, "it emerged because of a crisis in religious consciousness, through religious dissent, the establishment of a secular world and the need to situate oneself within it" (P. 31). Spiritual autobiography helped draw the boundaries between immanent and transcendent, worldly and sacral, and secular and religious. According to Sdvizhkov, the new genre envisioned four main narrative strategies: hagiography (lives of saints), life as confession, life as book, and, in the nineteenth century, life as journey. The budding literary genre was further stimulated by the availability of earlier Western European spiritual autobiographies, which were widely read in Russia. By the early twentieth century, autobiographical writing already involved all parts of society.

The next three chapters by Gary Marker, Olga Tsapina, and Aleksandr Feofanov, each focus on eighteenth-century religious egodocuments, which originated in different layers of society – respectively, among the monks, white clergy, and nobility. The autobiographical texts cited by these authors reveal hesitant attempts to frame a sense of self within the normative religious discourse, while at the same time accentuating one's individuality. This is especially apparent in Marker's chapter on monastic literature, a literature consisting primarily of texts tightly regulated by the established canon, leaving little room for individuality. Monks could use some discretion only in the foreword and afterword to a religious text or by adding insertions and visual marks. For most of the available sources the monastic religious...