Solzhenitsyn and American Culture

The great University of Notre Dame Press just sent me advance page proofs of a book set for release in October: D.P. Deavel and J.H. Wilson, eds., Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: the Russian Soul in the West (UNDP, October 2020), 400pp.

The entire second part, consisting of four chapters, explicitly looks at the relationship between Solzhenitsyn and Russian Orthodoxy. About this collection the publisher further tells us this:

For many Americans of both right and left political persuasions, the Russian bear is more of a bugbear. On the right, the country is still mentally represented by Soviet domination. For those on the left, it is a harbor for reactionary values and neo-imperial visions. The reality, however, is that, despite Russia’s political failures, its rich history of culture, religion, and philosophical reflection―even during the darkest days of the Gulag―have been a deposit of wisdom for American artists, religious thinkers, and political philosophers probing what it means to be human in America.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands out as the key figure in this conversation, as both a Russian literary giant and an exile from Russia living in America for two decades. This anthology reconsiders Solzhenitsyn’s work from a variety of perspectives―his faith, his politics, and the influences and context of his literature―to provide a prophetic vision for our current national confusion over universal ideals. In Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson have collected essays from the foremost scholars and thinkers of comparative studies who have been tracking what Americans have borrowed and learned from Solzhenitsyn as well as his fellow Russians. The book offers a consideration of what we have in common―the truth, goodness, and beauty America has drawn from Russian culture and from masters such as Solzhenitsyn―and will suggest to readers what we can still learn and what we must preserve. The book will interest fans of Solzhenitsyn and scholars across the disciplines, and it can be used in courses on Solzhenitsyn or Russian literature more broadly.

Contributors: David P. Deavel, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Nathan Neilson, Eugene Vodolazkin, David Walsh, Matthew Lee Miller, Ralph C. Wood, Gary Saul Morson, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., Micah Mattix, Joseph Pearce, James F. Pontuso, Daniel J. Mahoney, William Jason Wallace, Lee Trepanier, Peter Leithart, Dale Peterson, Julianna Leachman, Walter G. Moss, and Jacob Howland..

Bombs Away!

It has, for two decades now, often been remarked upon that the Russian Orthodox Church has gone hand-in-hand with the military adventures of Putin--whether in Syria, the invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or other parts of the former Soviet Union. (In this it repeats in different fashion the role it played in another context--that of the "great patriotic war" of 1941-45.) But that relationship has not been systematically studied in English in the way it is in this forthcoming book: Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy by Dmitry Adamsky (Stanford UP, 2019), 376pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

A nuclear priesthood has arisen in Russia. From portable churches to the consecration of weapons systems, the Russian Orthodox Church has been integrated into every facet of the armed forces to become a vital part of Russian national security, politics, and identity. This extraordinary intertwining of church and military is nowhere more visible than in the nuclear weapons community, where the priesthood has penetrated all levels of command and the Church has positioned itself as a guardian of the state's nuclear potential. Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy considers how, since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Church has worked its way into the nuclear forces, the most significant wing of one of the world's most powerful military organizations.

Dmitry Adamsky describes how the Orthodox faith has merged with Russian national identity as the Church continues to expand its influence on foreign and domestic politics. The Church both legitimizes and influences Moscow's assertive national security strategy in the twenty-first century. This book sheds light on the role of faith in modern militaries and highlights the implications of this phenomenon for international security. Ultimately, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy interrogates the implications of the confluence of religion and security for other members of the nuclear club, beyond Russia.

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature

Northern Illinois University Press continues to be in the front lines of scholarship about Russian history, including Russian Christian and literary history. Just last month it published a fascinating new study by John Givens: The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (2018), 329pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky’s characters “sinning their way to Jesus.” In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky’s novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute.

The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ.

This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

The Mythology of the Third Rome

I yield nothing to nobody in my respect for Russian Orthodox Christian traditions--the staggering architectural beauty of her churches, the philosophers of her so-called Silver Age, the long-suffering influence of Trinity-Sergius Lavra and her other monastic centres, and many of her liturgical and musical celebrations, inter alia. But neither respect nor affection are increased by conniving at nonsense used to advance a nationalist and neo-imperialistic agenda. Thus one can only dissent from, if not openly disdain, the notion of Russia as a "Third Rome," a notion that has a long history but has come in for fresh criticism in a new book released just this month from a Norwegian scholar: Jardar Østbø, The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth Ibidem Press, 2016), 270pp.

Ibidem Press is a Hanoverian publisher whose North American works in English are made available by Columbia University Press in New York. From them we learn the following about this book:

Drawing on theories of political myth and concepts of nationalism, Jardar Østbø analyzes the content and ideological function of the myth of Russia as a Third Rome. Through case studies of four prominent nationalist intellectuals, Østbø shows how this messianic myth was used to reinvent Russia and its allegedly rightful place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though it exists in many radically different versions, the Third Rome myth in general embodies particularism and rabid anti-Westernism. At best, it portrays Russia as an essentially isolationist country. At worst, it casts the country as superior to all other nations, divinely elected to rule the world.

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars

The Jesuits' history is certainly a colorful one, and their encounters with the Christian East in the early period cannot be unequivocally accounted good, as I noted recently with regards to what happened in Ethiopia. Jesuit activities in Russia are perhaps even more controverted, and a book forthcoming later this year will shed further light on this period that did so much to rouse and maintain Russian Orthodox suspicions of Roman Catholic activities and orders:

Nikolaos A. Chrissidis, An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), 384pp.

About this book we are told:

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes.

In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy’s impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices.

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.

Russian and Greek Identities

I've met the author of this book several times at conferences, where his lectures are always both fascinating and entertaining. Much of his earlier research and presentations were indeed precisely on questions of Greek religious and political identity, and the complexities of both that he unearthed were very interesting indeed. Now we have a book-length treatment of relations between two major European Orthodox powers: Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821-1844 (Oxford, 2015), 304pp.

About this book we are told:

The birth of the Greek nation in 1830 was a pivotal event in modern European history and in the history of nation-building in general. As the first internationally recognized state to appear on the map of Europe since the French Revolution, independent Greece provided a model for other national movements to emulate. Throughout the process of nation formation in Greece, the Russian Empire played a critical part. Drawing upon a mass of previously fallow archival material, most notably from Russian embassies and consulates, this volume explores the role of Russia and the potent interaction of religion and politics in the making of modern Greek identity. It deals particularly with the role of Eastern Orthodoxy in the transformation of the collective identity of the Greeks from the Ottoman Orthodox millet into the new Hellenic-Christian imagined community. Lucien J. Frary provides the first comprehensive examination of Russian reactions to the establishment of the autocephalous Greek Church, the earliest of its kind in the Orthodox Balkans, and elucidates Russia's anger and disappointment during the Greek Constitutional Revolution of 1843, the leaders of which were Russophiles. Employing Russian newspapers and "thick journals" of the era, Frary probes responses within Russian reading circles to the reforms and revolutions taking place in the Greek kingdom. More broadly, the volume explores the making of Russian foreign policy during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) and provides a distinctively transnational perspective on the formation of modern identity.