Saint of our time: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian people

Prot. Dedicated to Boris and Tamara Kitsenko, my beloved father and mother. The summer of 1988 was marked by two important events - the millennium of the Baptism of Rus' and the revival of the pre-revolutionary tradition of the scientific study of Orthodoxy. This tradition reached its highest point on the eve of the First World War. The government actively supported many scientific organizations at that time. The Imperial Archaeographic Society, the Imperial Philological Society, the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, four theological academies - all these organizations published both sources and research on Orthodox culture. In some areas, for example in the study of the history of Byzantium, the contribution of Russian science was so significant that knowledge of the Russian language was considered mandatory for foreign researchers. However, despite its well-deserved international reputation, pre-revolutionary studies of Orthodox culture remained very little developed in one area. This is the imperial period. Because of the close connection between the government and the Church, and to avoid double censorship (ecclesiastical as well as ordinary), scholars were not inclined to study the church culture of the era that was chronologically closest to them. Moreover, since in the last decades of the 19th - early 20th centuries. In Russian historical science, the “state” and “bourgeois-economic” schools dominated; the role of the Church in the history of Russia was reduced in the multi-volume works of Solovyov and Klyuchevsky to a purely economic function. An example of such neglect is the attitude of historians towards the saints of the imperial, or synodal, period. While the veneration of saints, central to Orthodox religiosity, extended to figures from 1700–1917, pre-revolutionary historians focused primarily on saints from the era of Kievan Rus and the Muscovite state. “Old Russian Lives of Saints as a Historical Source” by V. O. Klyuchevsky serves as an example of the limited capabilities of the factual approach. E. Golubinsky made an attempt to write the history of the canonization of saints in the Russian Orthodox Church, but his methodology was criticized by such Russian historians as N. Suvorov and the Bollandist Peters 1. It is paradoxical, but despite the fact that the synodal period turned out to be the least studied, especially with regard to hagiography, it was then that a huge amount of material was accumulated. Countless cheap publications, works about zealots of piety and ascetics of piety, diocesan magazines, and popular literature represent a gold mine for the historian. The same can be said about parish and synodal documents, many of which have been preserved in archives, some of which are stored in the same buildings where they were written (although it may also turn out that the most important archives of the Synod and its chief prosecutor will be inaccessible to researchers for a very long time - this depends on what the fate of the RGIA will be). The most severe declines in the study of Russian Orthodoxy in the 20th century. coincided with major historical events: the First World War, the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, then decades of Soviet rule. The sad picture of this development is illustrated by the appearance of the magazine “Byzantine Temporary”: the book, of unprecedented thickness in 1914, gradually dries out by 1917–1918. to an almost insignificant size, then revived in the 1920s, but remains very thin. It is hardly necessary to add that the era of militant atheism, when thousands of representatives of the clergy, monasticism and ordinary laymen joined the ranks of those who suffered for their faith, did not create favorable conditions for the study of Russian religiosity. Foreign scientists tried to continue the tradition. Here it is necessary to name the works of Fedotov, Zernov, Smolich, Kontsevich and Kartashev, representatives of the clergy Schmemann, Meyendorff, Pomazansky, Shavelsky, Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and Khrapovitsky - these are just the most famous names of historians of the Russian church. The traditions of Russian Theological Academies were continued by the publications of the Institute of St. Sergius in Paris, Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville (New York) and St. Vladimir Seminary in Crestwood (New York). Some of their works were published not only abroad, but also in Russia. But there was little the emigrants could do. For many years, most historians in Europe and the United States specializing in Russia followed their Soviet colleagues in their approaches and periodization, reducing the significance of Orthodoxy to a minimum. And only at the end of the 1970s a collection of articles was published in which key questions were raised about Russian Orthodoxy under the old regime 2. At the same time, specialists in Western Europe gave new life to the study of Christianity in general. More than ten years passed before their approaches penetrated into Russian studies. This book, which appeared in 2000, became one of the first signs of the English-language revival. Since then, the study of Orthodoxy in Russia has been influenced by approaches borrowed from cultural history, anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics and theology 4 . Finally, after 1988, the intersection of religion and politics in Russia and Ukraine contributed to the emergence of an extensive polemical literature, on the one hand, and a significant readership, on the other. Access to archives currently seems quite simple. Pre-revolutionary works are being republished. There are more opportunities for joint projects (conferences, books, grants), including at the level of seminaries and theological academies 5 . To take advantage of these opportunities, and also to avoid the risk of reinventing the wheel, Russian scientists must know foreign languages ​​6 . Overall, this is the best time for historians to study Orthodoxy in pre-revolutionary Russia, and we look forward with pleasure to Russian scholars contributing to this fruitful and multifaceted enterprise. Suvorov N. Notes on the canonization of saints // Journal of the Ministry of Public Education. T. 348 (1903). pp. 263–308; Peeters P. La Canonisation des Saints dans l’Eglise Russe //Analecta Bollandiana. No. 33 (1914). P. 380–420. Russian Orthodoxy Under the Old Regime / Ed. by Robert L., Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis, 1978. Collections on the imperial period: Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia / Ed. by Stephen K. Batalden. DeKalb, 1993; Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine / Ed. by Geoffrey Hosking. Basingstoke, 1991. Here are some of the important contemporary studies in English that have appeared since the publication of this book in 2000: Chulos Chris J. Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917. De Kalb, 2003; Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars / Ed. by Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene. University Park, PA, 2003; Shevzov Vera. Russian Orthodoxy On the Eve of Revolution. New York, 2004. On monasteries, see Scott Canworthy's work on the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and William Wagner's book on the Nizhny Novgorod women's Monastery of the Exaltation of the Cross. For a review of modern literature, see: Engelstein Laura. Holy Russia in Modern Times: An Essay on Orthodoxy and Cultural Change // Past and Present. No. 173 (November 2001). P. 129–156; as well as her thoughts on the incorporation of religion into cultural history in the article: Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modem Russia, Across the 1991 Divide // Kritika. 2:2~(Spring 2001). P. 363–393. (Russian translation: Culture is everywhere: on the latest interpretations of Russian history of the 19th–20th centuries // New Russian book: Critical review. No. 3/4 (2001). pp. 107–121.) A recent study of the appearance of Fr. John in “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, see: Golstein V. What Does a Saint do amidst MASSOLIT Revelers? Mikhail Bulgakov, Father John of Kronstadt, and Julien Benda’s La trahison des clercs // Russian Review. Vol. 63. No. 4. October 2004. Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville has organized a number of conferences with the participation of Russian scholars. Several publications were published based on the conference materials, in particular: Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, 1782–1867: Perspectives on the Man, His Works, and His Times / Ed. by Vladimir Tsurikov. The Variable Press, 2003. Fedorov V. A. Russian Orthodox Church and State. Synodal period 1700–1917. M., 2003. This work is devoted to the institutional history of the church. The works of A. Polunov, S. Firsov and M. Shkarovsky reflect other, methodologically more subtle and modern approaches to the problems of church history in pre-revolutionary and Soviet times. On the contrary, “The Priest in the Spiritual Life of the Russian Village” by A. N. Rozov (St. Petersburg, 2003), although based on local archives, could have learned a lot from Gregory Freeze’s seminal work on the Russian parish clergy (Freeze Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton, 1983). See also: Manchester Laurie. The Secularization of the Search for Salvation: The Self-Fashioning of Orthodox Clergymen’s Sons in Late Imperial Russia // Slavic Review. Vol. 57 (1998). P. 50–76. Other fundamental works on the history of the clergy should be mentioned: Hedda Jennifer. Good Shepherds: The St. Petersburg Pastorate and the Emergence of Social Activism in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1855–1917. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1998; Pisiotis Argyrios. Orthodoxy Versus Autocracy: The Orthodox Church and Clerical Political Dissent in Late Imperial Russia, 1905–1914. Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2000.