Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2018 number

The article objective is to review the polemics of the priestless Old Believers about khomonia in the late XIX - early XX centuries in the context of legalization of the Old Believer schism and cultural modernization. The paper tries to define the place of a liturgical edition prepared by L.A. Grebnev, an Old Believer leader. Researchers examining these polemics have considered only its individual cases. In contrast, the present article characterizes these debates as a holistic phenomenon and analyzes factors of the polemics intensification at the centuries turn. The paper is built around Grebnev’s liturgical version, a scholarly description of which has already been published. This article first analyzes Grebnev’s work in the context of priestless polemics about church singing. These debates also touch upon wider problems of identity and adapting tradition in accordance with calls of a changing epoch. The study is sustained along the lines of intellectual history, has a multidisciplinary character: the methods of the historical discipline are combined with those from musicology. An analysis of Grebnev’s work allows us to uncover the author’s intent and characterize the way of editing liturgical texts. His plan was compared with the ideas sounded in the priestless polemics. An analysis of modern liturgical performances by Fedoseevtsy and Pomortsy in Vyatka allows us to make some remarks about the development of priestless liturgical chanting and evaluate the alternatives to the debates about khomonia. The author concludes that the legalization of the Old Believer schism enabled the polemics about chanting. The entry of the Old Believers into public space posed the problem of how they should integrate themselves into the modernizing society while maintaining their authentic character, including their unique chant tradition. According to the educational practice of this time, Grebnev founded a school for teaching the hook-note chanting. In order to make the liturgical language more comprehensible, he sought to remove anachronisms, including khomonia during his editorial work. Thus, he went directly from oral debates to preparing a version of liturgical texts. However, his work along with the polemics themselves were interrupted by the Bolshevik power, which had raised another problem of the Old Believers’ survival.