LANGUAGE, CANONIZATION and Holy FOOLISHNESS

LANGUAGE, CANONIZATION AND holy FOOLIShNESS PER-ARNE BODIN LANGUAGE, CANONIZATION AND holy FOOLIShNESS STUDIES IN POSTSOVIET RUSSIAN CULTURE AND ThE ORThODOX TRADITION STOCKhOLM 2009 © Per-Arne Bodin och Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 2009 ISSN 0585-3575 ISBN 978-91-86071-30-1 Tryck: DotGain AB, Malmö 2009 Omslag och grafisk form: Omforma/Magnus Åkerlund Distributör: eddy.se ab, Visby Contents Acknowledgement 7 1 Formulation of the Problem, Method 9 2 The Influence of the Russian Orthodox Tradition 25 3 The Discourse on Church Slavonic in Contemporary Russia 43 4 On Canonical and Non-Canonical Icons and hymns 87 5 How to Remember a Fallen Soldier 135 6 Stalin as Saint. On Empire and Canonization 155 7 Jurodstvo in the Church and in Russian Culture Today 191 8 Postmodernist Saint. Ksenija’s Life 231 9 The Russian Court. Orthodox Church and Art. On the Exhibition “Ostorožno, Religija!” 255 10 Contemporary Russian Poetry and the Orthodox Tradition 281 11 Conclusions 311 Index 317 Acknowledgement The present study of the Orthodox discourse in post-Soviet Russian culture is part of a project financed by the Swedish Research Council, to which I am indebted for the economic support that made it possible. I would also like to warmly thank Maria Engström, another participant in the project, for our interesting discussions of the topic and for all her worthwhile comments on my text. A special word of thanks to Susanna Witt and Tora Lane, who worked in my area of the project as well as Elena Namli. They have all assisted me with constructive criticism, excellent advice and insightful opinions. This study would never have been completed without them. Many thanks also to those who have translated or edited various parts of the manuscript: Felix Corley, Julie hansen, Susan Long, and especially to Charles Rougle who has translated some of the texts and assisted in editing all of them. Their contributions went beyond language to include valuable comments on content and structure. Finally, I want to thank hans Andersson, Moa holmlund and Larisa Korobenko for the considerable effort they dedicated to improving the note apparatus, the text and the bibliography. The translations and the publication has been financed by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, history and Anti- quities, for which I would like to express my deep gratitude. I have had the opportunity to work with a very interesting, sometimes touching, sometimes frightening, and sometimes absurd body of materials. It has been a privilege to be able to sit down and examine these materials in an effort to acquire and convey a better understanding of the heterogeneous and complex processes taking place in the post-Soviet Russian world of today. Per-Arne Bodin 1 Formulation of the Problem, Method What happens when the Russian Orthodox tradition meets post-Soviet Russia? This is the general question I will attempt to answer in the following study, which is more in the tradition of the history of ideas and culture than the social sciences. I am particularly interested in examining the intersections between Orthodoxy and secular culture and will only by way of exception examine questions concerning the Church’s practical and legal relationship to society and politics, an issue that has been given considerable attention, as we can notice in the recent research reviewed at the end of this chapter. One chapter, however, will dwell on this issue as a background to the further study. I intend to study “the Orthodox component” in post-Soviet Russian culture, both in its own right and as a constituent of memory, a conserva- tive or imperialist political attitude and postmodernism. Consideration will also be given to the question of whether a number of these functions might be concurrently present as interacting or counteracting elements. My thesis here is that the relationship is reciprocal: the postmodern element, for example, is reinterpreted in culture in Orthodox religious categories, and Orthodoxy takes on features of postmodernism. The issues that will be addressed are the following: the debate over the use of Church Slavonic as the liturgical language. This is a question that is not strictly religious but concerns Russian culture and its distinctive nature in general; it is also part of a broader debate on language and identity in post-Soviet Russia. Another question involves the nature of the new canonizations that have taken place in the Orthodox Church. I will concentrate here on those promoted by various extremist orthodox groups in recent years. A special sub-study focuses on the attempts to canonize the soldier Evgenij Rodionov, another on the efforts to make Stalin a saint. I conducted an earlier study, already published, on the new martyrs, that is, the Orthodox Christians who were canonized because they had been tortured and died for their faith in the Soviet era.1 A third issue is jurodstvo, or holy foolishness, as a particular and re- curring theme in the Orthodox Church after the fall of the Soviet Union as well as earlier in Russian history. A sub-study has been made of Kse- nija of Petersburg, the peculiar and well-loved holy fool of that city. The last issue to be examined is the significance of the Orthodox tradition in the most recent Russian art and poetry. A special study is dedicated to the debates around the exhibition “Caution! Religion”, the equivalent to the discussion of the Mohamed caricatures in the West. I have restricted my last chapter before my conclusions to poetry given that a general comparison seems to indicate that it is here and not in prose that the most interesting encounters occur between contemporary literature and the Orthodox tradition. There is also a practical consideration taken into account: it involves a smaller quantity of text, and it is easier to do a close reading of poetry than prose. Although the political role of the Church as an organization will be considered only in an introductory overview, I will investigate the interaction between contemporary political reality and the liturgical, hagiographic and iconographic creations of the Orthodox Church and parachurch groups. This focus on sacred texts and images rather than on Church documents of a more general nature is more or less unique. These texts and images will also be compared with their secular counterparts in an in-depth examination of the material not found in previous research to any significant extent. My investigation is informed by the comprehensive view of Russian cultural history advocated by the Russian semioticians, in particular Boris Uspenskij and Jurij Lotman, who work with fundamental oppositional pairs like east–west, old–new, Christian–profane.2 Another semiotic concept, also taken from Jurij Lotman is semiosphere.3 This concept makes it possible for a culture to be studied in 1 Per-Arne Bodin, Eternity and Time: Studies in Russian Literature and the Orthodox Tradition, Stockholm University, Stockholm, 2007, pp. 231–250. 2 As in the most well-known of these Russian semiotic studies: Jurij M. Lotman, Boris A. Uspenskij, “Rol´ dual´nych modelej v dinamike russkoj kul´tury (do konca 18 veka)”, Trudy po russkoj i slavjanskoj filologii, no. 28, 1977, pp. 3–36. 3 yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, (Translated 0 a broader context that extends beyond individual questions and instead views them in relation to other elements. Lotman and Russian semiotics in general, especially in its later phase, focus on how ideas interfunction synchronically in society and diachronically in history. One oppositional pair relevant to the semiosphere is centre–periphery. Some of the texts and images to be analysed were produced by marginal groups in Russian society today, but I also want to show how and in what way these marginal groups communicate with the centre and how they interact and reinforce one another in the current Russian debate on ideas. My thesis is that the centre and periphery in this debate on ideas in Russia are essentially axiologically equal. Discourse is yet another essential concept that has been used bro- adly in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades. In the present context it will be used in Michel Foucault’s sense4 to refer to utterances of an emotional, descriptive or evaluative nature regardless of the medium or whether the producer is a fictitious or real person or group. Discourse and the relationship between discourses involve power relations between groups. As for concrete use, I base my work on a number of concepts that are found in different discourses but differ partially in content depending on the historical period or differences in power relations. Also in Foucault’s spirit, although the producers of utterances will often be mentioned and considered, I will be more interested in investigating discourses, the relations between them and the mechanisms of their construction rather than in individual actors. It is not subjectivity that I want to explore but rather ideas in these flows and mergings. The smallest units of discourses, what Foucault calls “discursive structures”, are words, images, expressions, terms and genres found in a “discourse formation”, that is, a collection of discourses that are defined here as the Orthodox discourse. however, I will not use discourse in any narrower linguistic sense. The concepts “episteme”, that is the body of knowledge circulating at a particular time, and “silence” will also be of some importance in my study. Consideration is given to what can possibly be said in this by Ann Shukman), Tauris, London, 1990. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 120–122. 11 macrodiscourse defined as Orthodox as well as what cannot be expressed in this discourse and may have to be ignored in silence.5 I am convinced that this study can answer important questions about the construction and functioning of the Russian world of ideas in the first few decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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