Secular/ReligiousRift in Mid-to-Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture
This paper argues against the generally accepted picture of Russian
culture in the eighteenth century as exclusively secular and
rationalist. It suggests that a new cultural synthesis emerged during
the fifty-year period from the mid 1740s through roughly the late
1790s, a rapprochement between ecclesiastical and secular culture.
The argument here rests upon and elaborates the work of Viktor
&Zhachek;ivov on the development of the Russian literary
language. While the Petrine period witnessed a sharp linguistic
differentiation between secular and religious languages, which was
graphically illustrated in the creation of the new civic
script,
by mid-century the developing literary language had
been re-defined as the Slaveno-Rossijskij jazyk,
which
as the label suggests, subsumes both Church Slavonic and vernacular
elements. &Zhachek;ivov traces the process by which this language was
defined—in essence, the creation of a discourse of
synthesis—and provides a powerful framework from which to
examine the changing cultural status of religion. The new
Slaveno-Rossijskij synthesis
was to be, in
&Zhachek;ivov's formulation, the single language for a single
unified culture
(edinyj jazyk edinoj kul&soft;tury). The
rapprochement between the religious and vernacular traditions may also
be demonstrated in a whole series of literary, sociological and
institutional phenomena. However, it seems more appropriate to
describe this phenomenon as a unique discourse rather than simply a
period or movement, insofar as discourse occupies a mediating position
between cultural ideology and the embodiment of its conceptions (to
whatever degree) in concrete actions, political, social and
institutional formations. This approach seems particularly pertinent
to the phenomenon under discussion, insofar as the discourse in
question was embodied in—and in some sense equivalent
to—the very vehicle of communication itself—the new
literary language. The paper will trace some of the contours of this
discourse in both the secular and religious literary traditions, which
(it will be argued) manifested significant parallels, crossovers, and
commonalities. Secular writers wrote in various duxovnye
&zhachek;anry,
while the new generation of Russian (rather
than Ukrainian) enlightened churchmen
who came into
authority under Elizabeth and Catherine revived the Petrine tradition
of giving sermons, which were acknowledged the neo-classical genre
system, written in the new synthetic language (rather than in
Slavonic), and often published by secular presses. An understanding of
the discourse of synthesis has important consequences for how we
understand such central and disputed notions as a Russian
Enlightenment, the role of the church in imperial Russia, and the
context in which modern Russian literature came into being.