Models of Personal Conversion in Russian cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries (Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe) PDF
Preview Models of Personal Conversion in Russian cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries (Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe)
INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 12 12 INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 12 This volume offers a view of modern Russian intellectual culture as shaped by the dynamic of conversions. The individual contributions examine a rich variety of personal conversions occurring in a culture in MODELS OF PERSONAL which the written word enjoyed a privileged status and, historically, N O was closely linked to the sacred. However, the essays presented go SI beyond the original meaning of conversion as a change of religious ERRY CONVERSION IN beliefs. They address shifts in style, aesthetic outlooks, and mindsets, VO N political and ideological transfigurations as well as religious conver- T OS sions in the true sense of the term. CHI RUSSIAN CULTURAL Whether at the level of culture, society or biography, the study of AL L A conversions opens the way to profound reflections about questions of NR identity, cultural ruptures, and continuity. The awareness of former OU HISTORY OF THE 19TH ST conversions and the possible ‘convertibility’ of one’s own ideological, RL EU spiritual or social stance has been among the central traits of Russian PC intellectual culture during the last two centuries. OF N AND 20TH CENTURIES A LS SI ES DU OR MN I S) D E ( R E D N H E Z N A TI S RI H C JENS HERLTH is Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of & H Fribourg (Switzerland). LT Jens Herlth & R E CHRISTIAN ZEHNDER is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Slavic H Christian Zehnder (eds) Languages and Literatures at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). S N E J ISBN 978-3-0343-1596-8 PETER LANG www.peterlang.com INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 12 12 INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 12 This volume offers a view of modern Russian intellectual culture as shaped by the dynamic of conversions. The individual contributions examine a rich variety of personal conversions occurring in a culture in MODELS OF PERSONAL which the written word enjoyed a privileged status and, historically, N O was closely linked to the sacred. However, the essays presented go SI beyond the original meaning of conversion as a change of religious ERRY CONVERSION IN beliefs. They address shifts in style, aesthetic outlooks, and mindsets, VO N political and ideological transfigurations as well as religious conver- T OS sions in the true sense of the term. CHI RUSSIAN CULTURAL Whether at the level of culture, society or biography, the study of AL L A conversions opens the way to profound reflections about questions of NR identity, cultural ruptures, and continuity. The awareness of former OU HISTORY OF THE 19TH ST conversions and the possible ‘convertibility’ of one’s own ideological, RL EU spiritual or social stance has been among the central traits of Russian PC intellectual culture during the last two centuries. OF N AND 20TH CENTURIES A LS SI ES DU OR MN I S) D E ( R E D N H E Z N A TI S RI H C JENS HERLTH is Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of & H Fribourg (Switzerland). LT Jens Herlth & R E CHRISTIAN ZEHNDER is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Slavic H Christian Zehnder (eds) Languages and Literatures at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). S N E J PETER LANG MODELS OF PERSONAL CONVERSION IN RUSSIAN CULTURAL HISTORY INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Vol. 12 Edited by Christian Giordano, Nicolas Hayoz & Jens Herlth PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien JENS HERLTH & CHRISTIAN ZEHNDER (EDS) MODELS OF PERSONAL CONVERSION IN RUSSIAN CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES PETER LANG Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945452 Cover Illustration: “The Contemplator” (1876) by Ivan Kramskoy ISSN 1661-1349 pb. ISSN 2235-7025 eBook ISBN 978-3-0343-1596-8 pb. ISBN 978-3-0351-0778-4 eBook This publication has been peer reviewed. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2015 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Contents Jens Herlth and Christian Zehnder On Russian Conversions: Introduction ..........................................................7 Tomáš Glanc Slavic Conversions ...........................................................................................21 Alexey Vdovin Between Schlegel and Baader: Stepan Shevyrev’s Conversion to Orthodox Literary Science in the European Cultural Context ..............................................................................................51 Jens Herlth “An upheaval was so necessary”: Authorial Conversion and the Literary Public in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) ..........................................................................71 Anatoly Korchinsky and Oxana Zamolodsky The Terrorist “Tigrych” versus the Monarchist Lev Tikhomirov: Why did Tikhomirov “Stop Being a Revolutionary”? .................................95 Irina Sirotkina Conversion to Dionysianism: Tadeusz Zieliński and Heptachor ............105 Regula M. Zwahlen Sergei Bulgakov: The Potentiality of Conversion ......................................123 Oleg Kling Valerii Briusov’s Shift from Symbolism to Proletarian Culture ...............141 Bela Tsipuria Cultural Conversion: From Modernism to Socialist Realism (Boris Pasternak and Titsian Tabidze) ........................................................151 6 Contents Christian Zehnder Conversion as Attitude in Pasternak ...........................................................167 Josephine von Zitzewitz Leonid Borodin’s Rasstavanie: Orthodoxy and the Moscow Intelligentsia in the 1970s .............................................................................191 Milutin Janjić The Place of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar # 37 in the Witnessing of the Orthodox Christian Conception of “Anthropos” in Soviet Society ..................................................................211 Miriam Finkelstein Our House Russia? Conversions from and to Judaism in Oleg Iur’ev’s Novel Poluostrov Zhidiatin ....................................................237 Ekaterina Orlova “To Be Means to Communicate …” Tat’iana Bek’s Poetry: A Dialogue Between the Poet and God ......................................................253 Contributors ...................................................................................................265 Jens Herlth and Christian Zehnder On Russian Conversions: Introduction The notion of “conversion” connotes, first of all, a turn from one belief to another, though not necessarily religious in nature; one can also speak of philosophical, ideological, or political conversions. The characteristic fea- ture of a conversion in any of its forms is a fundamental change in value perspective – what was once “good”, or at least “usual” now becomes “bad” or “evil”. The Polish philosopher Józef Tischner (1998: 31–34) describes conversion as a limit-situation that calls for a leap out of old habits into something completely new, and therefore leaves no room for compromise. As the vast literature on conversion shows, such turns, despite their existential depth and radicalism, often follow, at least in part, certain behav- ioural and rhetorical models that have been transmitted by a long tradition of conversion narratives. One could think here of Saul’s transformation into Paul following his illumination on the road to Damascus, according to the Acts of the Apostles; Saint Augustine’s protracted journey from Mani- chaeism to Christian faith via Platonism, as related in the Confessions; or Blaise Pascal’s nightly encounter with the “fire” of faith, recorded in the so called Mémorial, a piece of parchment that he would carry on his person for the rest of his life. Obviously there is a strong link between conversional dynamics and the dynamics of the (written) word. In the present volume, we do not limit the discussion of conversion to the sphere of religious art or changes of, or returns to, a religious belief. This would be all the more inadequate as in Orthodox Christianity con- versions (in Russian: obrashchenie)1 tend to be seen as leading out of the Church, threatening the only real conversion in the life of an Orthodox believer, namely Baptism, the complete “turning” of a person to Christ (see Medzhibovskaya, 2008: x–xi). As Alexander Schmemann (1976: 20) pointed out in his study Of Water and the Spirit, conversion, from an 1 In the Russian language, different words are used to describe the conversion from one religion or confession to another. Apart from the abovementioned obrashchenie (turn), this can be perekhod (transition) or also priniatie (acceptance – of a new faith). 8 Jens Herlth and Christian Zehnder Orthodox standpoint, “is not an event in the realm and on the level of ideas, as so many people think today. It is not the choice of an ‘ideology,’ not even an answer to ‘problems’.” However, as William James argued in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1901/1902): the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a gener- al psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. (James, 2002: 139) There would be, for example, no obstacles to calling Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (The Thirtieth Love of Marina, 1983), about the turn of a dissident woman from her libertine life to a prudish, almost ascetical communism, a novel about a conversion. It is often not so much the questions of “where from?” and “where to?” but rather the rad- icalism of the reorientation as such that makes us speak of a conversion. This leads us to what seems to be the heart of the conversion discourse in, and about, Russia, namely the generally accepted assertion of Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii that (modern) Russian history is marked by sudden turnarounds, ruptures and caesuras of all kinds. According to Lotman and Uspenskii (1985), polar extremes would stand in relation to one another as irreconcilable opposites and appear to exclude any ‘third way’. If we follow this idea of the “binary” structure of Russian cultural consciousness, con- version indeed appears to be something specifically ‘Russian’. But is this more than a truism? Is there really a specifically Russian affinity for conversion? An affinity that would be based on the precarious structure of Russia’s historical and cultural self-consciousness, that could be explained by the specific mistrust in physical life and physical order that marks Russian religious thought? Following the theologian Ivan Il lich,2 Charles Taylor (2007: 743) argues, “that there has been a long-standing tendency in the West to slide towards an identification of Christian faith and civilizational order.” Max Scheler (1963: 111) was astounded by the fact that the Russian “fine and subtle autumnal religiosity” (“feine und subtile herbstliche Religiosität”) could merge with one of the “greatest tyr- annies” in the history of mankind, the Tsarist empire. Maybe, despite or because of the unity between state and Church that has reigned in Russia for the last few hundred years (with a few exceptions), it is more difficult from a Russian context to disregard the dramatic gap that divides, as Taylor 2 See Illich (2005).
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