Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2016 number

The aim of this article is to introduce into scientific circulation one of the unknown polemic writings dated from the turn of the 1890s. The work is written as an epistle, a style common among the Old Believers, and belongs to the Tomsk peasant writer G.A. Strakhov. Today, the only known copy of “ Appeal” is stored in the Scientific Library of the Tomsk State University. The author of the article used methods of historicism, hermeneutics and causal analysis. It seems logical that the polemic writings constitute a significant portion not only of the general Old Believers’ literary legacy, but of the Belokrinitskie Old Believers (“Austrians”) as well, because ideologists of the new community had to uphold their position from the first steps towards institutionalization taken in 1846-1847. In the case at hand, the aggravation of polemics between the Old Believers Chasovennyye and “Austrians” was caused by several factors connected particularly with the common past of Beglopopovtsy agreements whose routes of migrations had often overlapped within the Ural and Siberian Region. Inner contradictions took place both in the Chasovennyye and Belokrinitskie communities. In “The Appeal to the Old Believers Chasovennyye” these contradictions can be traced in regard to such issues as the rites of reception, adoption of common position towards the official Orthodox (“Nikonianskaya”) church and to always such a politically acute issue as the time of Antichrist’s advent. At the same time, re-establishment of its own Belokrinitskiy episcopate and the refusal to accept Orthodox clerics converting to Old Believers faith, according to a previous decision of the Tyumen convocation in 1840, resulted in the final organizational and ideological divergence between the two Old Believer communities. Analysis of sources used by G.A. Strakhov in his “Appeal” shows that the Belokrinitskiy apologist quite extensively used not only the literature that was authoritative for all Old Believers, but the synodal and civil publications as well. At the same time, ideological conceptions of the opponents, in G.A.Strakhov’s opinion, are directly affected by the radical Old Believers groups.