From the History of the Introduction of Edinoverie in Russia: A New Source about the Unification of the Starodub Old Believers with the Official Church

The article is devoted to an episode connected with the implementation of a church-state project aimed at the gradual elimination of the Old Belief by means of creation of the so-called Edinoverie. The article introduces a new document about the conversion of Russian Old Believers to Edinoverie in the first half of the 19th century. The article describes events in the Old Believers' settlement Dobrianka (Chernigov Gubernia). The document is stored in the depository of the Laboratory for Studies in Archaeography (Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia). It adds and specifies the known information, particularly, corrects data from the memoirs of Timofey Verkhovsky, a missioner who attempted to convert Starodubie settlements to Edinoverie. Verkhovsky claimed that Do-brianka Old Believers converted to Edinovrie massively and voluntary, but the document ubder study draws a new picture of those events. The document contains information about seven inhabitants of Dobrianka who refused to convert to Edinoverie. They were sentenced to hard labor and exile to different distant parts of the Russian Empire. The document is a copy of a letter written by relatives to one of these seven people, Simeon Ivanovich Shchekotikhin, who served his sentence in the Omsk prison. The copy was written in a six-page folio (the quarto size). The paper does not contain any watermarks, but can be dated to the 1850s-60s. The text was written with black ink, semi-uncial script, by one scribe. The letter was found by the expedition of the Laboratory for Studies in Archaeography of the Ural State University in a Siberian village, where Shchekotikhin used to live after the term of his hard labor expired. The author of the article found that there were two sentenced persons from Dobrianka (Shchekotkhin and Voronin) in Omsk, and Fyodor Dostoevsky was in the same prison at the same time. One of these Old Believers (or both of them) became the prototype of the character of the Old Believer old man in Dostoevsky's novel The House of the Dead. The letter informs about places of imprisonment of five more sentenced Old Believers. One of them, the author of the article assumes, was exiled to the Aland Islands. The letter is one of the sources on the everyday life history which can be used for the reconstruction of the holistic picture of the epoch. It is also very interesting because few letters written by ordinary people were preserved till today. The full text of the letter with all grammatical peculiarities is published as an appendix to the article.

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