Heathen: Religion and Race in American History

Abstract

a liturgical and social process of preparation and purification called govienie, which involved fasting, limitations of secular activity, attending several days of church services, then confession and communion. Because the vast majority of Orthodox fulfilled this ritual before Easter, govienie took on a communal and seasonal character. Memoirs, letters, and literature of the nineteenth century are replete with descriptions of govienie. Written confessions demonstrate the extent to which Russians incorporated the words of the liturgy into their personal self-examinations. Kizenko’s focus on practice, and her gender analysis, support a rethinking of characterizations of elite culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that suggest confession was a compromised, theatrical procedure. Kizenko shows the degree to which elite men took it seriously and how it had become intertwined with civic virtue in their minds. Certainly, after heavy-handed efforts by Nicholas I to use confession against those arrested after the 1825 Decembrist uprising, such men increasingly distinguished between the sacraments of the Orthodox Church and the contents of the Gospel in their writings about govienie. However, Kizenko shows that for noble women in the nineteenth century, for whom it was less of a test of loyalty and who had few opportunities to publish their writings, sacramental confession played a key role in their reading and life narration. These women sought father-confessors who were their intellectual equals and corresponded extensively; moreover, these clerics clearly were not just directing their spiritual daughters but using the correspondence to explore ideas in private. The many devotional texts noble women authored to prepare their children for confession reveal the sacrament’s centrality to elite domestic culture. This book is a scholarly tour de force. In Kizenko’s able hands, confession proves to be an illuminating window into church–state relations, but also for viewing Russian Orthodoxy in relation to both western Christianity and other Orthodox societies, for exploring social and legal relationships in imperial Russia, and for glimpsing the devotional lives of its Orthodox inhabitants.