Rockis Stella. Popular Religion in Russia: double belief and the making of an academic myth

London and New York: Routledge, 2007. — 234 p.This book dispels the widely held view that paganism survived in Russia alongside 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 perception 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 dvoeveriewould 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 dvoeverieto 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 Rockis 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.Christian idol-worshippers and 'pagan survivals'
Heretics, doubters and 'wrong-believing'
A history of historians
How Russian is 'double-belief'?