The Ethical Values of <em>Narodnoe Pravoslavie</em>: Traditional Near-Death Experiences and Fedotov

Abstract

In 1935 the emigre scholar G. P. Fedotov published an analysis of the ethical values of popular Russian Orthodoxy, basing his conclusions on the genre of dukhovnye stikhi (lit. spiritual verses). These religious songs were performed before the Revolution by the blind itinerant singers known as the kaleki or kaliki perekhozhie [Fedotov 1935/1991].(2) For Fedotov the key features of folk Orthodoxy (narodnoe pravoslavie) were the emphasis on life as suffering, the profound sinfulness of man, the belief in the power of Christian love and the attachment to Mother Earth (Mat’ syra zemlia) and maternal values in general, with their supreme embodiment in the Mother of God. His view has proved highly influential outside Russia, largely through its distillation in the opening chapter of volume one of The Russian Religious Mind [Fedotov 1946]. Fedotov’s influence has perhaps been reinforced by the coincidences between his own concept of folk Orthodoxy and key aspects of Dostoevskii’s view of the people (narod), itself based to a considerable extent on the writer’s reading of the dukhovnye stikhi [Ivanits 2002; Wigzell 2002b:28-31].(3) In Russia where Fedotov’s work began to appear only in 1989, his views have had less impact, while, among folklorists, there is a new interest in and awareness of the complexities of folk ethics [Belova 2002]. In this essay I question the validity of Fedotov’s analysis for popular Orthodoxy as a whole by examinng another of the genres of religious folklore, the type of vision known as the obmiranie. So unfamiliar is the obmiranie, except to some folklorists and traditional Orthodox believers, that a definition would seem in order. The term obmirat’, self-evidently linked to umirat’ (to die), refers both to the state of falling into/being in a coma as well as to the narrative account of what is seen during a coma, that is, essentially a near-death experience. To this day among traditional believers (official Orthodox or Old Believers) in rural Russia as in other Orthodox Slavic countries, the near-death experience is generally believed to consist of a journey to the world beyond the grave.(4) Here the subject most commonly meets relatives, sees the torments of hell and learns the date of his or her own death. Obviously these narratives represent a continuation of early and medieval Christian tradition (Dante’s Divine Comedy is the supreme literary example.) Visits to the world beyond the grave were traditionally experienced not only during coma but also as dreams, or, when awake, as visions, but in Orthodox Slavic countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such visions are linked primarily with a coma or unusually prolonged and deep sleep. Indeed, it is traditionally assumed that anyone in this state will visit the afterlife, and in particular hell. During the vision, even when heaven is mentioned, the specific virtues of the blessed are not. Consequently, the ethical emphases of the obmiranie have to be judged largely from the sins mentioned, whether those of categories of sinners, or specific people known to the visionary, including his or her own moral failings. Within the Byzantino-Slavic Orthodox tradition considerable differences exist between accounts of visits to heaven and hell, allowing the visionary to select