Steinberg M.D., Coleman H.J. (ed.) Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia

Indiana University Press, 2007. — 434 p. — (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies).Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our understanding of the place of religion in modern Russian history. Topics examined include miraculous icons and healing, pilgrim narratives, confessions, women and Orthodox domesticity, marriage and divorce, conversion and tolerance, Jewish folk beliefs, mysticism in Russian art, and philosophical aspects of Orthodox religious thought. Sacred Stories demonstrates that belief, spirituality, and the sacred were powerful and complex cultural expressions central to Russian political, social, economic, and cultural life.Contributors are Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heather J. Coleman, Gregory L. Freeze, Nadieszda Kizenko, Alexei A. Kurbanovsky, Roy R. Robson, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Gabriella Safran, Vera Shevzov, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mark Steinberg, Paul Valliere, William G. Wagner, Paul W. Werth, and Christine D. Worobec.Introduction: Rethinking Religion in Modern Russian Culture
Miraculous Healings
Transforming Solovki: Pilgrim Narratives, Modernization,and Late Imperial Monastic Life
Scripting the Gaze: Liturgy, Homilies, and the Kazan Icon ofthe Mother of God in Late Imperial Russia
Written Confessions and the Construction of Sacred Narrative
“Orthodox Domesticity”: Creating a Social Role for Women
Profane Narratives about a Holy Sacrament: Marriage andDivorce in Late Imperial Russia
Arbiters of the Free Conscience: State, Religion, and theProblem of Confessional Transfer after 1905
Tales of Violence against Religious Dissidents in the Orthodox Village
Prayer and the Politics of Place: Molokan Church Building, Tsarist Law,and the Quest for a Public Sphere in Late Imperial Russia
Divining the Secular in the Yiddish Popular Press
Revolutionary Rabbis: Hasidic Legend and the Hero of Words
“A Path of Thorns”: The Spiritual Wounds and Wandering of Worker-Poets
A New Spirituality: The Confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy inRussian Religious Thought
Malevich’s Mystic Signs: From Iconoclasm to New Theology
The Theology of Culture in Late Imperial Russia
Further Reading