Towards Post-Soviet Pre-Modernism: on recent approaches to early Rus(s)ian hagiography

Abstract

The appearance of Paul Hollingsworth’s book of translations, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Hollingsworth 1992), provides the pretext for this survey. Tales of saints, or of candidates for sainthood, constitute a substantial proportion of the extant native literature of pre-Mongol Rus, comparable in volume only with the chronicles. This in itself has ensured that the study of hagiography has had a prominent place in the study of early Rus literature and culture, and hence in the wider field of byzantinorussica. In recent years native saints have benefited additionally from changes in the cultural and political climate: the advent of glasnost (from 1985), one of whose main themes was the recovery of the past; the millennium of the Conversion of the Rus, whose celebration in 1988 became a test and a manifestation of glasnost; and eventually, at the end of 1991, the collapse of the USSR and the sharpening of competition between national mythologies (competition for the same cultural space) both within and between the newly independent East Slav states of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The surge of ‘native’ interest has been matched, only in part fortuitously, by an increase in western publications.