"Holy Russia": A Study in the History of an Idea

Abstract

NOT with the mind can be understood.... One can only believe in Russia, wrote Tiutchev. The poet tried to answer one of the vital questions his contemporaries were asking: What is Russia? Tiutchev's solution, certainly, did not satisfy everybody; the question was asked, time and again, and is still being asked, and there has been no dearth of answers. Yet the poet saw the true nature of the question and so offered faith rather than reason, for what was sought was not the reality but the myth. Those who would accept his solution, however, still had to decide which of a number of possible Russias, which answer to the original question, they would believe in. It is with one possible answer that I intend to deal in this study, one component of the Russian idea, expressed in the commonplace, Russia. That this strange epithet is a common symbol for would be difficult to deny. But if the use of commonplaces is a problem for the social psychologist, the history of a symbol and its content, many stranded though it may be, is the province of the historian. The article by Alexander V. Soloviev, (Study of the Development of a Social-Religious Idea),1 published in 1927, drew my attention to this history. Soloviev was the first, to my knowledge, to attempt a historical survey of the epithet. In a later study, published in 1954,2 the Russian scholar explores the question of the possible derivation of Russia from early medieval concepts. Soloviev is quite correct when he points out the significance of the epithet. Holy, after all, evokes the image of the Holy Land, the land where Christ lived and on which He set His foot; Palestine is holy as a sum total of all the holy places within it.' is the only other land