Studies of Russian folklore have usually emphasized the supposedly pre-Christian survivals believed to be the authentic Slavic base of Russian folk culture. It is only recently that this way of studying Russian folklore has begun to change: Leonid Heretz’s Russia on the Eve of Modernity is an informative example of just what can be done when Russian folklore is examined as a product of its time (in this case, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries) rather than as a source for survivals of early Slavic culture.
Heretz rightly insists that much of Russian folk culture can only be understood from a Russian Orthodox perspective. Heretz describes in his first chapter what he calls “the traditional worldview,” which is the worldview derived from the Orthodox Church. There has been considerable effort to imagine the Russian peasantry as only marginally Christian, but, as Heretz shows, the Russian peasantry was in fact thoroughly Christian. As he notes, “[t]he researcher who categorizes various popular religious notions or practices as pagan/semi-pagan ascribes to them a significance which contradicts the meaning given them by their carriers” (21). Peasant Orthodoxy, as would be expected, differed in many ways from the religion taught by the Church--one important aspect of this difference was the use of apocryphal writings by the peasantry. Although most of the apocryphal texts were proscribed by the Church, they were nonetheless eagerly read and retold orally by the peasants.
The next two chapters in Heretz’s book describe the important schismatic group in Russian Orthodoxy, the Old Believers (chapter 2), and the most important of the sectarian groups in pre-revolutionary Russia (chapter 3). One of the themes that Heretz focuses on in his book is the relationship between traditional culture and modernization. In the Russian context modernization was often seen by the peasantry as betrayal of the values of the Church and Russia, even to the point where modernization could be imagined in apocalyptic terms. One group that made an especially strong association between modernization and the Apocalypse was the Old Believers, who rejected not only the seventeenth-century reforms of the Church but also modern culture. The sectarian groups that Heretz surveys in his third chapter shared this apocalyptic worldview with the Old Believers.
Chapters 4 through 8 of Heretz’s book focus on specific topics: chapter 4 examines folk eschatology; chapter 5, the impact of the assassination of Alexander II on the traditional worldview, as well as folk Tsarism; chapter 6 takes up “The year of famine and cholera” and the demonization of the nobility in traditional culture; chapter 7 looks at the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Russian folk culture; and chapter 8 looks at the impact of the 1905 revolution. Each chapter also examines more detailed aspects of these topics in relationship to peasant religion and political ideas.
Heretz makes exemplary use of the many collections of Russian folklore done in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in his book. Though many of these collections were themselves done with a mythologizing slant, they still provided an enormous amount of accurately reported texts for Heretz to work from. It is a merit of the book that Heretz quotes extensively from these collections, as they are little known and have been rarely translated.
Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars presents something new: an analysis and description of Russian folklore that emphasizes Orthodox religious belief as the core of traditional folk culture. Heretz’s book should be read not only by specialists in Russian folklore, but also by scholars in other areas of folklore studies, such as medieval Scandinavian, medieval and modern Celtic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugrian, where reconstructions of pre-Christian belief and culture through the use of sources gathered in post-conversion times have often been the norm. Although there are some rough edges to Heretz’s writing at times, Russia on the Eve of Modernity nonetheless is a strong--and to my mind correct--statement about how Russian folklore should be studied.
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[Review length: 659 words • Review posted on December 10, 2008]