For a long time, historians have been thinking over the question of why the “silence of Muscovy” persisted after modernity—an age of self-expression—began in the eighteenth century. The authors of this collection decided to find an answer to this question. Their goal was to research the role of faith in the establishment of personal selfhood under imperial Russia.
The collection was named after the issue at hand, which, in turn, marked it as an innovative work in this field of research. Relying on the studies of Protestant autobiographies of the Modern Age, research in history has long ago refuted the traditional opposition between modernity and religiousness. Due to meager source base, searching for religious autobiographical individualism in texts written during the Russian Synodal Era has been difficult for a long time, though this did not prevent the emergence of several detailed, comprehensive works by such authors as Laurie Manchester or Nadieszda Kizenko. The authors of articles in this collection undertook two tasks based on the suggestion that “the autobiographical vacuum as such does not allow a conclusion that the clergy did not write texts on themselves” (61). The first was to outline the complex of genres which focused on self-presentation; and the second was to show how to read them as ego-texts (62).
The articles in this collection are chronologically divided into three large sections: “From the beginning of the Modern Age to the 19th Century,” “From the Great Reforms to Revolution,” and “An excursion: after 1917.”
Archpriest Avvakum (1620–1682), author of his own Life, is considered to be the founder of the Russian autobiography genre. This is why the editors saw fit to open the collection with a piece analyzing another book by him, The Work of Interpretations and Moralizing. Tatiana Sochiva demonstrated that the text stood out in “being replete…with autobiographical details—concerning both the interpretations themselves and Avvakum's commentaries on them” (21–22), which was beyond the scope of the genre etiquette of Old Russian literature.
The first section focuses on the problem of searching for texts from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, which can help answer the question of whether this period marked the rise of selfhood, given that “autobiography in Russia became widespread from the second half of the 19th century onwards under the influence of social change, increasing literacy rates, the ongoing development of the press, and the emergence of autobiographical projects” (30). The authors managed to demonstrate, quite persuasively, that texts which were not originally intended for self-expression did contain some elements of self-reflection. Denis Sdvizhkov, Gary Marker, and Olga Tsapina provided an extensive range of indirect sources from the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries (forewords and afterwords, correspondence, visual signs in texts, clergy-related lawsuits) that help establish a connection between the new religiousness and the formation of self-awareness of a new identity. Aleksandr Feofanov analyzed the autobiographic texts by Prince Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgorukov (1764–1823), Galina Ulyanova focused on those written by merchants from 1770s to 1860s, while Nadieszda Kizenko studied the genre of a written confession among early nineteenth century nobility.
The authors’ attempts to “find a key” to unlock the “encrypted” sources of the extrabiographical genre can be seen as a successful methodological experiment. The search for sporadic displays of selfhood and autobiographical meanings in “indirect” sources is a novel strategy for researching this period. Unfortunately, it will not lead to global conclusions, as it only operates on the level of hypotheses. Furthermore, the notion that during the reign of Peter the Great monks “demonstrated a considerably better grasp and wider variety of the language of emotions than secular authors” (87) is questionable, informed as it is by the frequency of their use of the terms “love” and “passion.”
The second section covers several interpretations of unique sources from the nineteenth century: obituaries of parish priests (Laurie Manchester), church chronicles (Elena Ageeva), priests’ diaries (Marta Łukaszewicz and Heather Coleman), religious autobiographies by peasants of late imperial Russia (Julia Herzberg), and ego-texts by noblemen who turned monks (Gleb Zapalsky). The diaries of the clergy, which in the nineteenth century became a caste of its own, not only provide a glimpse into the inner world of their authors, but outline the many intricacies of the interrelations inside this structure, such as social inequality in monasteries, or hierarchization of the relationships between parish priests and archbishops. One might agree with Heather Coleman's opinion that the rareness of priests’ diaries make it hard to fully outline the specific features of this genre (266).
The collection begins with an analysis of the works of Avvakum, a disgraced seventeenth century archpriest. It ends with two articles on self-reflection of those living in the conditions of the forced secularization of the twentieth century. The first of them is Archbishop Varfolomey, a persecuted leader of underground monastic communities in the 1920s and 1930s (Aleksey Beglov); the second one is Emelyan Yaroslavsky, the “soul” of the USSR's anti-religious campaign (Sandra Dahlke). These antagonistic characters are unified by a burning faith: in the transcendental, for the bishop, and in the possibility of building a heaven on earth, for the revolutionary. It is quite obvious that the latter case expands the meaning of “faith” as a category, which is postulated at the beginning of the collection (“cultivating an ‘inner human’ instead of an amorphous faith in something” [5]). However, it is the display of modernity in the secular mind of the revolutionary (“religious allegories brought up by Yaroslavsky, comparing himself to Christ,—all of these are typical for a Modern Age secular rethinking of religious values” [18]) that allows us to evaluate the legacy of the Synodal Era.
To summarize, it can be said that the authors in this collection managed to do more than show the inner evolution of the creators of autobiographical texts. They also traced the changes that faith underwent as a “focus of the formation of the modern identity,” as well as how varied religious autobiography can be.
The review was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.
