ISBN10: 0199736138, ISBN13: 9780199736133, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. In the 1830s and 1840s, increasing numbers of Russians renounced the modernized, secularized, Westernized Russia created by Peter the Great in an effort to revive alternative lifestyles based on Orthodox spirituality and values. This effort found expression in a revival of monasticism that began in the era of Nicholas I and would last for the duration of the imperial period, brought to an end only by the cataclysm of revolution and repression of the new Bolshevikregime. Suppressed by the communists, Russian monasticism experienced another revival in the post-World War II era and again in the post-Soviet period, demonstrating that the impulse to renounce thecontemporary world for the cloister is a central pattern of Russian religiosity. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of these monastic revivals, presenting a fundamentally new picture of religion in modern Russia. Scott Kenworthy's approach is that of a contextualized microhistory: an in-depth study of one monastic complex, framed within research on monasticism more broadly. The case study here is Russia's largest and most famous monastery, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Sergiev Posad,near Moscow. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church is again experiencing a revival, and monasticism is playing a central role in this resurgence. In the search to recoverthe ...
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ISBN10: 0199736138, ISBN13: 9780199736133, [publisher: OUP USA 2011-07-07, New York |Oxford] Hardcover Language: ENG
[London, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 2011]