Old believer historiography of the last 3rd part of the 20th century: purpose and method

The article discusses the approaches to the presentation and assessment of the reliability of historical material used by the monk Fedosey, a custodian of the archive of the taiga old believer's monastery, when compiling the hand-written collected sammelband. Along with his own historical writings, the code includes dogmatic and polemical treatises of the leaders of the Skete community of the 1920s and 1940s, letters from Siberian Old Believers, extracts of different years from the works of historians and encyclopedias, etc. The circumstances of the appeal of the monk Fedosey to the history of the Christian church were reconstructed on the basis of clerical documentation and interview materials from residents of the taiga hermitage. The need to revise the provisions of the dogma and test them with historical evidence and facts provoked the actions of local authorities in the 1970s - 1980s, aimed at breaking the ties of the taiga monastery with the rural district. The study found that the late Old Believer historiography preserves the eschatological vision of the historical process, actively uses ecclesiological vocabulary to evaluate historical information and sees its purpose in constructing confessional genealogy and proof of ideological continuity between different generations of adherents of “ancient piety”. At the same time, the characteristics of secular scientific ideas about the correct methods of historical research that it learns are the construction of a text based on an analytical-synthetic model, the desire to indicate the origin of the sources of information used and the criteria for checking the information contained. The author concludes that among the features of the Old Believer historiography of the period of modernity, it is necessary to attribute, firstly, the narrowing of the scale and geography of historical narration, and secondly, the equating of local Old Believers to the early Christian and ancient Russian writers. Reorientation to local events has a practical meaning, it helps the Old Believer communities to consider themselves as a part of the world history of the Christian church and create commemorative strategies that are adequate to contemporary realities.

Keywords

Authors

References