OLD BELIEVERS AND POWER: JUSTIFYING THE AUTOCRACY IN THE VYG RHETORICAL CULTURE
O.D. Zhuravel1,2
1Institute of History SB RAS, 8, Nikolaev Str., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russian Federation
2Novosibirsk State University, 1, Pirogova Str., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russian Federation
Keywords: Old Believers, Vyg, Andrey Denisov, Andrey Borisov, autocracy, spiritual leader, rhetorical strategies, baroque, Enlightement
Abstract
The paper discusses two cases related to the loyalty of the Old Believers from the Vyg enclave to the Tsar’s regime. The first one was reflected in rhetoric panegyric texts and other writings of the 1720s created by AndreyDenisov, an ideological leader of the Old Believer “second generation”. The second one was elaborated in the works by his follower Andrey Borisov (about the 1780s). This article presents new interpretive approaches aimed to understand the Vyg enclave members’ viewpoint which gradually led to their adoption of the prayer ritual for the Russian emperor. Such position was not dominant among the Old Believers and became a cause of acute inter-confessional disputes and conflicts. Based on the analysis of handwritten texts that expressed the idea of justifying the Tsar’s autocracy, this paper studies the Vyg’s ideologues’ argumentation determined by the type of rhetorical book culture that was formed in Vyg at the early XVIII century. The author shows that Andrei Borisov, an Old Believer’s writer of the Enlightenment age, developed a particularly sophisticated argumentation. He substantiated the Old Believers’ right to call the tsar “pious” and “right-believing” relying on linguistic, philosophical, rhetorical arguments and the authority of Andrey Denisov, the famous predecessor. The loyal position of the Vyg enclave leaders conflicted with the central thesis of the eschatological doctrine which determined the Old Believer movement’s entire logic, but at the same time re-habilitated the New Testament’s postulate, according to which there was no authority except for God. The paper analyzes new manuscript sources including rhetoric and polemical writings created by Andrey Denisov and Andrey Borisov. These unique materials make it possible to suggest that idealizing the Tsar’s autocracy was not just the result of the forced compromise, but conditioned by the Old Believers’ utopian ideas about the state. Such belief was successively connected with the Russian concept of the Third Rome and the messianism, which were paradoxically combined in the Old Believer consciousness with the discourses on “last times”.
|
