Popular Religion in Russia: 'Double Belief' and the Making of an Academic Myth

249 Pages·2007·2.6 MB·English

by  Stella Rock

Popular Religion in Russia
This book dispels the widely held view that paganism survived in Russia along-
side Orthodox Christianity, demonstrating that ‘double belief’, dvoeverie, is in
fact an academic myth. Scholars, citing the medieval origins of the term, have
often portrayed Russian Christianity as uniquely muddied by paganism, with
‘double-believing’ Christians consciously or unconsciously preserving pagan
traditions even into the twentieth century. It shows how the concept of dvoeverie
arose with nineteenth-century scholars obsessed with the Russian ‘folk’ and was
perpetuated as a propaganda tool in the Soviet period, colouring our percep-
tion of both popular faith in Russia and medieval Russian culture for over a
century. It surveys the wide variety of uses of the term from the eleventh to
the seventeenth century, and contrasts them to its use in modern historiography,
concluding that our modern interpretation of dvoeverie would not have been
recognized by medieval clerics, and that ‘double belief’ is a modern academic
construct. Furthermore, it offers a brief foray into medieval Orthodoxy via the
mind of the believer, through the language and literature of the period. If
clerics didn’t use the word dvoeverie to identify acts as unorthodox, which
words did they use, and what can these words tell us about popular faith? Was
the populace of Rus really more resistant to Christianization than its European
counterparts? What was it about popular culture that alarmed the clergy of
medieval Rus, and were their concerns so very different from those of Western
European clergymen, or the clergy of other neophyte peoples?
Stella Rock is Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Sussex.
Her publications on Russian Orthodoxy span the medieval and post-Soviet
periods, and her research interests focus on popular faith (in the broadest sense)
and the relationship between religious and national identity.
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Routledge Studies in the History of Russia and
Eastern Europe
Modernizing Muscovy
Reform and social change in seventeenth-century Russia
Edited by Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe
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The Washington Conference, 1921–1922, and ‘Uninvited Russia’
Paul Dukes
Tiny Revolutions in Russia
Twentieth-century Soviet and Russian history in anecdotes
Bruce Adams
The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800 –1917
Alex Marshall
Soviet Eastern Policy and Turkey, 1920 –1991
Soviet foreign policy, Turkey and communism
Bülent Gökay
The History of Siberia
Igor V. Naumov (edited by David N. Collins)
Russian Military Intelligence in the War with Japan, 1904 – 05
Secret operations on land and at sea
Evgeny Sergeev
Cossacks and the Russian Empire, 1598 –1725
Manipulation, rebellion and expansion into Siberia
Christoph Witzenrath
The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II
Relics, remains and the Romanovs
Wendy Slater
Popular Religion in Russia
‘Double belief’ and the making of an academic myth
Stella Rock
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Popular Religion in Russia
‘Double belief’ and the making
of an academic myth
Stella Rock
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First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2007 Stella Rock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Popular religion in Russia : double belief and the making of an
academic myth / Stella Rock.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in the history of Russia and eastern
Europe series; 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0- 415 - 31771- 9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Russia—
Religion. I. Rock, Stella.
BL980.R8P67 2007
200.947—dc22
2007007861
ISBN 0-203-59228-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 10: 0 - 415 -31771-1 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0 - 203- 59228-X (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978-0- 415 - 31771-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0 -203 - 59228 -1 (ebk)
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In memory of Thomas
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Contents
List of abbreviations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
1 Christian idol-worshippers and ‘pagan survivals’ 16
2 Heretics, doubters and ‘wrong-believing’ 46
3 A history of historians 87
4 How Russian is ‘double-belief’? 118
Conclusion 158
Notes 161
Bibliography 199
Index 227
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List of abbreviations
BLDR Biblioteka literatury Drevnei Rusi
CUP Cambridge University Press
GBL Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka (formerly Lenin Library)
GIM Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii muzei
HLEUL Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature
HUS Harvard Ukrainian Studies
KJV King James Version
MERSH Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OUP Oxford University Press
PLDR Pamiatniki literatury Drevnei Rusi
PSRL Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei
RAN Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk
RFV Russkii filologicheskii vestnik
RGADA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov
RIB Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka
TODRL Trudy otdela Drevnerusskoi literatury
TsGALI Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva
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Acknowledgements
It is thanks to a three-year studentship from the British Academy that my DPhil
thesis, which forms the basis of this book, was written. I was also supported
by travel grants from the British Academy and the University of Sussex, and
a scholarship to attend the Medieval Slavic Summer Institute at the Hilandar
Research Library, Ohio State University, which proved invaluable. I am deeply
grateful to all the staff there – in particular to Mary Allen Johnson (‘Pasha’)
– for constant support and encouragement.
I should like to express my thanks to those specialists who have helped in
general or in specific matters during the research for and writing of this book,
in particular Robin Milner-Gulland, Eve Levin, Simon Franklin, William Ryan,
Bernadette Filotas and Peter Burke, who all read and commented on the book
manuscript in its entirety or in part. Eve Levin’s help in reshaping a dry thesis
into a book deserves a special mention – she is a truly generous scholar – as
does the erudition and encouragement of Daniel Collins, which saved me from
despair when tackling many a convoluted text.
Vladimir Bersenev, Iuri Lesman and Irina Levinskaia were unstinting in their
support, and I am also grateful to Maria Korogodina, Aleksei V. Chernetsov,
Gregory Freeze, Dmitrii Bulanin, Daniel Kaiser, Ia. N. Shchapov, Oleg
Panchenko, Anatolii A. Turilov, Francis J. Thomson, Muriel Heppell, Beryl
Williams and the late Fr Sergei Hackel. Jonathan Mitchell and Jeffrey Pratt
offered useful insights from the field of anthropology. My editor at Routledge,
Peter Sowden, deserves special thanks for his unfailing patience and kindness
while awaiting the final manuscript. Thanks are also due to the resourceful staff
of Interlibrary Requests at the University of Sussex; Kit Condill and the wonder-
ful Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
David Howells at the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford; Denis Reidy at the
British Library and the librarians at the St Petersburg Spiritual Academy. I
also found the help of the staff at the archives of the State Historical Museum
(especially Elena Serebriakova) and the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library archive
in St Petersburg invaluable. My thanks to the staff at the Institute of Russian
Language, Moscow; to Liudmila Kozlova of the DAR Language School, St
Petersburg; to the Association for Women in Slavic Studies mentoring service
and Christine Worobec in particular, and to the various correspondents of
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