Father Sergius Bulgakov and Yulia Nikolaevna Reitlinger: History of a Spiritual Romance

Abstract

This article examines the personal and creative relationship between the theologian, philosopher, and priest Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov and the artist and icon painter Yulia Reitlinger (Sister Ioanna, after taking the veil). Beginning with their first acquaintance in Crimea in 1918 and until the death of Father Sergius in Paris in 1944, Reitlinger was spiritually close to Bulgakov; she was his spiritual daughter, and he considered her work one of the greatest achievements of modern religious art. This article uses material from the personal diaries of Bulgakov and Reitlinger, their correspondence, and testimonies from their contemporaries. Along with her mother Maria (Skobtsova), Reitlinger was one of the most prominent participants in the spiritual life of Russian emigration in Europe (especially in Paris, Prague) in the early twentieth century. This article also touches on some aspects of Bulgakov’s philosophy of gender, reflected in his works of the 1910s and 1920s, when Bulgakov overcomes Plato’s androgynism and asserts the male and female as primordial principles.