Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The article introduces for scientific use one of the copies of a polemic writing by a Siberian peasant writer Grigoriy Arefyevich Strakhov from the collection of the Institute of History, SB RAS. The copy has been acquired in one of the Old Believers’ settlements as a result of archaographical fieldwork. Using G.A.Strakhov’s writing as an example the author considers eschatological issues that remained invariably topical in the Old-Believer literature and perfectly characterized specifics of historiosophy and ideology of the people at the grassroots level of Belokrinitsky Agreement - one of the last Old Believer agreements. Moreover, addressing the range of eschatological problems (which is a separate research problem) allows to deepen our understanding of both Old-Believers’ internal and interfaith polemics, as well as the late Old Believers’ political essays written in the latter half of the XIX century. In the article the author used traditional (general and specific) methods of historical research as the most appropriate for studying the narrative sources: analysis and synthesis, typologization and classification; causal analysis. In this particular case it is of utmost importance to study the historical context and circumstances in which the source was created. Like any other writer G.Strakhov had, perforce, to take into consideration the situation that had developed in the Belokrinitsky agreement by the time of creation of his work. On the one hand, by the late XIX century the Austrians had increased their influence in the Old Believers’ world, while a stand-off between the leaders of other agreements had also taken a serious turn, involantarily stimulating the literary activities and cultural exchange. On the other hand, civil and ecclesiastical authorities increased their pressure on the Belokrinitsky Old-Believers sharpening their long-standing oppositional sentiments. This was indirectly confirmed by the very fact of addressing the issue of end times.