This paper was part of a roundtable discussion at the international symposium, “Russian Literature and Philosophy: Religion, Nationalism and Dissidence,” which took place at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, November 2022. The roundtable included Paul Contino, Gary Saul Morson, and the author of this paper, Caryl Emerson.
It is an honor for me to follow Gary Saul Morson, but I need to re-orient the roundtable first, since I am making two big shifts.
First, Saul focused on the 20th century: the ethical horrors of a materialist worldview linked to a violent revolutionary regime. This is the basic thesis of his book forthcoming from Harvard University Press this spring (2023), Wonder Confronts Certainty. Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. And I am moving backward, to the 19th century, when that nightmare was still largely a literary fantasy.
My second shift concerns the word “dissidence” in our title. What interests me is not political or ideological dissidence, which is tied up with power — it seems at times that the Russian word власть / vlast’ comes already fused with arbitrary cruelty. My interest is, rather, dissidence within a religious belief system, official Russian Orthodoxy. In the 19th century and earlier, this dissidence came in two forms. The first were the intra-Christian sectarians — Old Believers, and various gnostic or protestant sects. And then there was the more diffuse fact of Russian двоеверие / dvoeverie or “dual belief,” the blending of Russian Christian faith with nature worship — pantheism or panentheism.
Much scholarly and artistic attention has been paid to the first group, the Russian sectarians — Old Believers burning themselves alive rather than surrender to Peter the First, the Anti-Christ; the Flagellants and Self-Castrators mutilating themselves for the glory of God — in part because these groups are so colorful, extreme, persecuted, apocalyptic, and because they produce such exciting, racy plots full of sex-and-violence. Thanks to Saul Morson, we have a word for what these plots are not. They are not prosaic: meaning, they seek out the extraordinary, the violent, the maximalist, and they favor what is aggressive and exceptional over decent everyday inter-personal virtues. My focus will be not on the shocking or apocalyptic event but on the conciliatory, restrained (rather than “heroic”), and integrative. So: some thoughts about ethics, dissidence, and Russian 19th century literature.
Recall three of Saul Morson’s comments just now, because they set me up: for the Bolsheviks, Saul said, “to show compassion was to risk the accusation of covert religiosity. It therefore paid to be as cruel as possible. Cruelty, in short, became an atheist virtue.”
And then consider a sentence that the Dostoevsky scholar Michael Ossorgin applied to Christ’s response to the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, “When cruelty is the norm, love is an act of rebellion.”
That statement also applies to the best traditions of Orthodox Christian thought in 19th century Russian literature. Cruel and arbitrary power has been the rule of Russian regimes for at least 600 years. The current fusion, in Putin’s police state, of military aggression, abuse of human rights, and religious fervour is very similar to the fusion, under communism, of an inhuman political agenda with atheistic fervour. Against this background, Russian writers committed with some urgency to devising spiritually healthy alternatives to live by. Dual faith, dvoeverie, often provided the ground. The native paganisms that blended with Christianity were not maritime, but continental, tied to the soil, rivers, forests. They were less anthropomorphic than the Greek and Roman pantheon. For example, there was no single goddess of female beauty (only of grass, birch trees, ponds and swamps). She did not need a face. Beauty was not jealous, but fertile, cyclical, patient, a little sad — like the face of Mary on Russian icons. What is more, the Russian pagan believer was not fascinated by an aggressive god of war. Killing and being killed was an awful necessity in a region exposed to invasion on all sides, but there was no cult of the cruel military victor.
The cults were cyclical, like the seasons. Nature was “profane matter”— but also holy. We might say that dual faith had a spiritual road map in two directions: it balanced “praying up” (to a Heavenly Father or to a resurrected Christ) with “praying down” (to Mother Earth).
By praying up, mediated by the sign of the Cross, we can access the Divine Ideal. But in doing so, we always risk losing touch with earthly matter. By praying down, especially if helped by incantations and charms, we are promised a re-unification with the earth. In both options, bodily death becomes sacred. Burying a dead body means to reconsecrate it, to plant it in the womb of its original mother.
But the organic world is also full of dangerous appetites and seductions. Thus no space is neutral: it is either protected (by a pagan spirit or a patron saint) — or it is unprotected. If it’s unprotected, any sort of demon can take it over. These dark spirits, collectively referred to as the “unclean force,” are more mischievous than evil. They can be bribed with gifts. Their power lies in their multitude and smallness; they can crawl into any hole or orifice and hide away there. Writers made good use of these petty devils, sometimes keeping them tiny, sometimes bloating them up to human size as in Ivan Karamazov’s nightmare. But Russian demons were rarely as monumental as Dante’s Lucifer or as grand as Milton’s Satan. Dual-faith plots are less melodramatic, more prosaic. So, in our everyday weakness and quest for love, do we pray up or down?
In my final minutes, let me mention several examples from three very different prose-writers from the second half of the nineteenth century — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Leskov. All three understood love, and prayer, in the spirit of dual faith. Each used Russia’s hybrid religious tradition to create rebels, even heretics, for love.
But love is a tricky word. Overall, these writers had little interest in the bourgeois love plot of the standard European novel, so obsessed with disobedient eros and so hungry for happy marriages at the end. The greatest Russian writers parodied that plot, rather than imitating it. (Another insight we owe to Saul Morson.) Instead, they took on the far more complex virtues of caritas (charity) and agape (the love of God for humanity), investing them with the irresistible appeal of eros.
Now, agape-love can sometimes seem unbeautiful, or barren, or devoid of families. But these writers redefined fertility and family, and expanded kinship categories. The goal was a love plot without sexual possessiveness, and independent of official institutions. It’s no surprise that the official Orthodox Church, subordinated to the Tsarist imperial State, was an uneasy ally and at times even an enemy. Dostoevsky was arrested by the State, Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Church. Established authority, with its hierarchy and wealth, was seen by these writers as an inevitable temptation to judgment and violence. In contrast, weakness and wandering were vulnerable. For that reason, they were morally invincible. Love is unpower.
To begin with Dostoevsky. No question about it, that in his journalism he was a Great-Russian imperialist. But in his novels he championed a very different ideal, a compassionate panentheism, which angered conservative Orthodox critics. There is a great deal of praying-down in Dostoevsky. The one non-negotiable demand that Sonya makes of the murderer Raskolnikov is to confess his sin downward, to ask the earth’s forgiveness by kissing the dirty public square. The novel pays little attention to the upward turn, to the sinner’s pleas for divine guidance. Christian faith is active in Crime and Punishment, but more as Scripture (the Raising of Lazarus) than as prayer. The Brothers Karamazov is also full of symbolic bows and downward prayer. Zosima is balanced between the higher ideal of an all-forgiving Jesus and an equally sacred principle, rooted in nature and revealed to him at the time of his brother Markel’s death. However, it is the Christian envelope that proves transfigurative. Paul Contino — our next speaker in this roundtable — remarked in his recent study, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism. Finding Christ Among the Karamazovs, that although “some have critiqued the elder’s Orthodox practice as thin [read: bordering on pagan—CE], Zosima’s recollections are implicitly rooted in the incarnation, with its sacralization of time, space, and story, and the church as Christ’s body.”[1] Zosima’s trademark is to bow down to sinners, to the earth, eventually to be buried in that earth, and even to rot publicly in it. This is no scandal, Alyosha gradually comes to see. Rather, it is sacramental.
Next is Leo Tolstoy. Arguably, his worldview was “dual faith” throughout his life. He prayed down to nature, fertility, physical strength, peasant labor, and then (after his spiritual crisis in the late 1870s) he attempted—with only partial success—to pray up to a disembodied spiritual ideal that had gotten rid of the “animal principle” altogether. Tolstoy was intolerant of civilization’s social rituals and he revered everything that was ecological, manual, and agricultural.
As a Christian thinker, Tolstoy was part radical Protestant and part rebellious Gnostic. He noisily rejected “the Trinity, the sacraments, original sin, redemption, salvation, Final Judgment, and all other ‘supernatural ways of caring for men’.”[2] But when we take all that away, can we even speak of “praying up” in a Christian cosmos? To some extent we can, I think, if we apply to Tolstoy the same incarnational vision that Paul Contino confers on Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima.
Consider Tolstoy’s tiny story from 1859, “Three Deaths.” The first death is that of a noblewoman fleeing Russia for a cure in Europe. She is in consumption, in denial, wealthy, and trapped in profane matter. She cannot pray up or down, and thus she meets a miserable end. The second death is that of a coachman, at a waystation where the noblewoman’s carriage makes a stop. When the young driver Sergei asks the dying Fyodor to give him his boots, Fyodor agrees—but on condition that Sergei erect a cross over his grave. Eventually Sergei remembers his promise and one morning goes into the forest to find the right tree. This is the third death, and the best. It is not pain-free. The universe is alive, and feels. The tree knows it is dying as the axe cuts into it; it shudders, and its roots tremble with fear. But the final note is one of jubilation, as more sunlight fills the forest over the fallen tree, which will rise again as a cross. This scene shows us dual faith at its most radiant: Christian self-emptying depicted not from a cramped and fearful personal point of view, but as part of a larger cosmos, from the perspective of nature itself.
Finally, for the darker sides of dual faith, we end Nikolai Leskov. In his youth Leskov had worked as a business agent for his uncle and travelled extensively throughout the Russian Empire. He was an eyewitness to all social classes—nobles, merchants, peasants, bureaucrats, the clergy, sectarian Old Believers. He refused to commit to any reigning political ideology. All people were potential carriers of good and evil. Leskov was a chronicler of Russian institutions where cruelty was the unmarked norm. And he could shock his readers with actual—even if accidental—acts of reconciliation and love.
One such shocking act unfolds in Leskov’s 1885 tale Пугало / Pugalo, The Scarecrow or “The Spook.” The narrator is a young upper-class boy, brought up on Holy Scripture but fascinated by folk belief: wood demons, water-mill spirits, swamp sprites. He assumes that the local recluse, a peasant named Selivan who lives in a ruined wayside inn, is in league with the unclean force. Every misdoing or mishap in the village is attributed to him. Selivan must be a shapeshifter, people say—when he commits a crime, he cannot be caught — because he turns into a rooster, a rat, or a wagon-wheel. In the final episode, a blizzard forces a wealthy relative to take emergency refuge in Selivan’s inn. The travellers are so certain that they will perish violently in this unprotected place that, come dawn, they rush out, forgetting their moneybox. Everyone assumes that Selivan stole it — until he turns up breathless at the police station, with the box. Selivan refuses the reward, which is owed him by law and which the grateful travellers press him to accept. “There’s no need,” he says. “I don’t need what isn’t mine.”[3] The moral here: only pagan logic insists on contracts and laws. But Selivan is a Christian праведник / pravednik, a Righteous Person, who does good absolutely regardless of how he is treated by others. Selivan is relieved that the villagers no longer fear him. But he seeks neither retribution nor justice for past injuries.
Leskov, in this late story, achieves the non-judgmental moral texture that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in their novels, developed with the help of far more elaborate philosophical structures. Selivan’s love is an act of rebellion against cruel political norms, which in Russia — then as now — have all too often been sanctioned by a compromised, hierarchical Church. But the prayerful orientation of Selivan is neither up nor down. It is across, face-to-face; it is a forgiving response to an immediate other in the present. Like Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima and his disciple Alyosha, and also like Tolstoy’s tree that becomes a Christian cross, Leskov’s pravednik Selivan is a luminous example of Russian Orthodox personalism.
[The comments for this roundtable were adapted from “Love as an act of rebellion: Orthodoxy and Literary Culture,” an essay that appeared in Christian History, no. 146 (2023).]
[1] Paul J. Contino, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism. Finding Christ among the Karamazovs (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), p. 50.
[2] Caryl Emerson, ch. 11, “Tolstoy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, eds. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 184-204, quote on p. 184.
[3] “The Spook,” in Nikolai Leskov, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 2014), quotes on p. 491 and pp. 492-93.