Ways of Russian Theology

39. On Lopukhin see chapter IV, note 110; on Karneev see chapter IV, nate 132; for Koshelev see above, note 12; for Turgenev see below, note 50; on Labzin see chapter IV, note 119.

40. See chapter IV, note 117.

41. He was assisted by A. Vakhrushev. The history was published in 1799-1802. [Author's note] . The Russian work is entitled Istoriia ordena sv. loanna lerusaIimskogo (St. Petersburg, 1799-1801).

42. On the French archbishop and mystic Fenelon see chapter IV, note 112.

43. Johann Konrad Pfenninger (1747-1792), a friend and collaborator of Lavater was a Protestant minister in Zurich known for his apologetical and exegetical writings.

44. Johann Ludwig Ewald (1748-1822) was a German pastor and professor, known for his espousal of supernaturalism, a late l8th century movement in England and Germany which grew as a reaction to deism and rationalism.

45. M.A. Dmitriev in his memoirs about Labzin. [Author's note] .

46. See chapter IV, note 103.

47. Innokentii Smirnov (1784-1819) was an outspoken opponent of the mystical movement represented by Labzin. He had taught at the Trinity Seminary in Moscow, at the St. Petersburg Academy, and served on the chief administration of the schools in the Ministry of Education. Innokentii was also the ecclesiastical censor until he allowed a book critical of Golitsyn to be printed, for which he was “exiled” to a bishopric in Siberia. An important ecclesiastical writer, his Outline of Church History [Nachertanie tserkovnoi istorii] served as a standard textbook until the 1860's.

48. Feofil (d. 1862) was a catechist in the Second Military Academy in St. Petersburg and a leading member of Labzin's lodge “The Dying Sphinx” until 1818, when he was sent to Odessa to teach in the Lycee Richelieu and head the Odessa branch of the Russian Bible Society. After 1824 he was sent to a monastery in Rostov and forced to pursue his calling. Iov, a teacher of religion in the Maritime Academy, had been a theoretical degree mason since 1809 and was a member of Mme. Tatarinova's circle. He joined Labzin's lodge in 1818 but died of a mental disorder that same year.

49. Mikhail Matveevich Kheraskov (1733-1807) was a Russian poet, dramatist, and curator of Moscow University. He became a mason while an administrator of the college in St. Petersburg in 1771, and it was his decision while at Moscow University in 1779 to lease Novikov the press. His best-known poems are Rossiada (1779) and Vladimir Reborn (1785), about the introduction of Christianity in Russia. “How Glorious is our Lord in Zion” ["Kol' slaven nash gospod' vo Sione"] became the hymn of the imperial family and was regularly sung at coronations, weddings and funerals.

50. A prominent government official and Decembrist, Nikolai Ivanovich Turgenev (1789-1871) went abroad in 1824, a year before the Decembrist revolt, and lived in London and Paris for the rest of his life. In Paris in 1847 he published a work containing a history of this period from the Decembrist point of view, La Russie et les Russes.

51. The Aleksandr Nevskii Seminary, the seminary of St. Petersburg, was founded in 1725. With the ecclesiastical school reform of 1798 it was upgraded to the status of an academy.

52. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish scientist and engineer who in the 1740's began to have frequent visions and on the basis of them formulated a new philosophical system of Christianity. Swedenborg denied the traditional doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and on the whole his teaching approximated neoPlatonism in the context of l6th and l7th century Protestant mysticism. His works, among them the Biblical commentary Arcana celestia (1749-1756) and the doctrinal work Vera christiana religio (1771) were widely read in his own time and greatly influenced later romantics and psychics. Although Swedenborg never formed a community himself, his followers organized the New Jerusalem Church in 1787, and it almost immediately became known in Russia.

53. P.D. Lodi heard his Lvov lectures and pointed him out to Speranskii. [Author's note] . On P.D. Lodi see below, note 61.

54. A longtime government official and director of the St. Petersburg library, Modest Andreevich Korf (1800-1872) served under Speranskii for five years in Emperor Nicholas I's private chancellery. His Zhizn' grafa Speranskago was published in St. Petersburg in 1861.

55. A Transylvanian by birth, Fedor (Freidrich-Leopold) Gauenshil'd (d. 1830) came to Russia in 1811 and was a well-known pedagogue and director of the Alexandrian Lycee in St. Petersburg. He left Russia in 1822, and in Dresden published a three volume translation of Karamzin's History. His comments are contained in the article “Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii” in Russkaia StarinaMay, 1902, pp. 251-262.

56. Gustav Andreevich Rosenkampf (1762-1832) was an eminent jurist who worked on and headed Alexander's Commission on Laws. He also published several works on Russian legal history, including the first studies of the Kormchaia kniga.

57. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) occupied an important place in the German Enlightenment and in German literature as a critic and dramatist. He also subscribed to controversial religious views, believing in a future rational religion which was to succeed Judaism and Christianity. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was the successor of Immanuel Kant as the leader of German idealist philosophy and applied Kant's philosophy to religion, producing a doctrine akin to deism and illuminism and based on the principles of morality and duty.

58. The opinion of Pozdeev expressed in a letter to Count A.K. Razumovskii. [Author's note]. Pozdeev (1742-1820) was one of the original founders of freemasonry in Russia and one of the first to advance to Rosicrucianism. Count Razumovskii was Minister of Education at the time.

59. Count Sergei Uvarov (1786-1855) had served in the Russian embassies in Venice and Paris, and later became president of the Academy of Sciences (1818) and Minister of Education (1833). He is best remebered as the formulator of the slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” — the so-called “official nationality” of Nicholas I's reign.

60. Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev (1785-1846) was a well-traveled nobleman who in 1810 was named head of the Department of Foreign Confessions and a member of the State Council. He had studied at the University of Gottingen, and contributed greatly to Russian historical scholarship by collecting materials on Russian history from foreign archives.

61. Petr Dmitrievich Lodi (1764-1829) was a professor at universities in Lvov and Cracow before coming to St. Petersburg in 1803 to teach philosophy. Mikhail Andreevich Balugianskii (1769-1847), born in Hungary and educated in Austria, was a professor of law and history who came to Russia in 1804 and later became the first rector of St. Petersburg University. Ivan Semenovich Orlai (1771-1829) came to St. Petersburg as a student at the Medical Institute, and worked there for many years before being named head of the Bezborodsko Lycee in Nezhin in 1821 and in 1826 the head of the Lycee Richelieu in Odessa. He published several medical treatises in addition to Latin poems and a history of Carpatho-Russia.

62. Pezarovius (1776-1847) had studied at the University of Jena before coming to Russia to work on the Commission on Laws and in the College of Justice. He founded the journal Russian Invalid in 1813 to raise money to help the victims of the recent war, and by 1821 turned over more than a million rubles to the government committee founded in 1814.

63. On Platon see chapter IV, note 48.

64. Cf. the statute of the Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquities, opened in 1804. [Author's note]

65. One of the first professors of Moscow University, founded in 1755, Ioann Matias (Johann-Matthias) Shaden was a German who, after graduating from the University of Tiibingen came to Moscow in 1756. He taught various subjects there until his death in 1797, and was one of the most popular and influential professors among the students.

66. A highly influential churchman and theologian during the reign of Nicholas I, Innokentii Borisov (1800-1857) was well-known for his oratorical skills. He graduated from the Kiev Academy and was a professor and inspector of the St. Petersburg Academy until 1830, when he returned to Kiev as rector. In 1836 he was consecrated bishop of Chigirin and served the sees of Vologda and Khar'kov before being named archbishop of Kherson and the Crimea in 1848. Innokentii left several unpublished works, including Poslednie dni zemloi zhizni lisusa Khrista and the collection of dogmatic essays Pamiatnik very. He also translated Filaret's catechism into Polish and was the founder in 1837 of the joumal Voskresnoe chtenie. See below pp. 233-235.

67. Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800-1875) was a conservative Russian historian who taught at Moscow University, edited the journals Moskovskii vestnik and Moskvitianin, and worked in the Ministry of Education. His chief works are Issledovaniia, zamechaniia i lektsii o russkoi istorii (7 volumes, Moscow, 1846-1857) and important research on the chronicle of Nestor and other ancient chronicles.

 68. Filaret Gumilevskii, archbishop of Chernigov from 1859 to 1866, was an important Russian hierarch, historian and theologian. Born in 1804, he studied at the Tambov Seminary and at the academy in Moscow, where he became a monk and successively served as professor, inspector, and finally rector. In 1841 he was named to the see of Riazan' and was transferred to Khar'kov in 1848 before becoming archbishop of Chernigov. As a bishop he was known as a competent administrator and patron of education, especially for women; as a teacher he was considered both intelligent and innovative, and as a writer he was respected for his dogmatic treatise Pravoslavnoe dogmaticheskoe bogoslovie (1864), his five volume Istoriia russkoi tserkvi (1847, first published in 1859) and Obzor russkoi dukhovnoi literatury (third edition, St. Petersburg, 1884). Filaret is also important as a collector of historical materials in the dioceses he served. The basic work on him is I. Listovskii, Filaret, arkiepiskop chernigovskii (Chernigov, 1895). See below, pp. 253-254.

69. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was an English politician, neo-Platoruc philosopher, and the author of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who visited Russia in 1773 at Catherine II's invitation, was a leading French philosophe and editor of the Encyclopedie. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) also worked on the Encyclopedie and was an outstanding French scientist. His main works are Opuscules mathematiques (1761-1780) and Melanges de literature, d'histoire, et de philosophie (1753). On Rousseau see chapter IV, note 118.

70. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), poet, satirist, and essayist, was the most prominent literary figure in England in his time and the leader of English neo-Classicism. Among his works are translations of Homer, The Rape of the Lock (1712), The Dunciad (1728), An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An Essay on Man (1733-1734), which was especially popular in Russia.

71. Nachertanie pravil o obrazovanii dukhovnykh uchilishch. [Author's note].

72. The law on that reform was published on March 10, 1806. Of course the notion of academic regions had akeady appeared in the draft proposal by Evgenii. [Author's note] .

73. That is, the internal and external administration. [Author's note].

74. Feofilakt Rusanov (1765-1821) was a graduate of the Aleksandr Nevskii Seminary and taught poetics and rhetoric there besides serving as a catechist in several institutions in St. Petersburg. In 1799 he was made bishop of Kaluga, in 1806 he became a member of the Synod, and in 1809 he was elevated to archbishop of Riazan'. Feofilakt was an active supporter of education in the spirit of the Enlightenment and worked most energetically on the committee to reform ecclesiastical education, but his opposition to Fessler in 1810 won him a reputation as an obscurantist as well as the animosity of Golitsyn and Speranskii. He soon lost his influential position in the Church and in society and was forced to return to his diocese. In 1817 he was transferred to Georgia as exarch and then metropolitan (1819). Feofilakt was an expert in modern languages and produced many translations from French; German, English and Latin.

75. Filaret Drozdov, later metropolitan of Moscow. See note 7.

76. The Moscow Theological Academy was now located at the Holy Trinity Monastery. [Author's note] .

77. Archpriest Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii (1787-1863) was an esteemed professor philologist and Hebraist and a controversial Biblical scholar and translator. A graduate of the St. Petersburg Academy, in 1814 he was named to the chair of Hebrew there. and that same year joined the Russian Bible Society, for which he translated the Psalms and the Gospel of Matthew and edited translations of the Old and New Testaments. He gained prominence in society as a priest at the tsar's court, a member of the ecclesiastical censor's committee, and since 1819 a professor of theology at the University of St. Petersburg. From 1821 to 1839 he worked on the journal Khristianskoe chtenie, and in 1826 he was appointed a tutor to the tsarevich Alexander (the future Alexander II). He was dismissed from this post in 1835 after a controversy over some books he wrote for his lessons, including Khristianskoi uchenie v kratkoi sisteme and Nachertanie tserkovnoi istorii (Filaret's comments on these works and Pavskii's defenseare published in Chteniia v Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh, 1870).Then in 1841 another controversy erupted over some Old Testament translations he had done wt,lle a professor at the academy, which his students had lithographed from their notes and distributed without official permission (see below, pp. 249-25 Z). With the accession of Alexander II in 1855 Pavskii was again at the court chapel, and in 1858 he was elected to the Academy of Sciences for his linguistic work. Pavskii's chief work is Filologicheskiia nabliudeniia nad sostavom russkago iazyka [Philological Observations on the Composition of the Russian Language, 1841-1842] which, unlike his Biblical research and translations, was well-received on all sides. His Bibleiskiia drevnosti dlia razumeniia sv. Pisaniia was published only in 1884. Pavskii also compiled a Hebrew grammar. See N.I. Barsov, “Protoierei Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii, Biograficheskii ocherk po novym materialam,” in Russkaia Starina, 1880.

78. Irodion Vetrinskii was a professor of history and philosophy for many years at the St. Petersburg Academy, and later directed the gymnasium at Mogilev.

79. The last years of the l8th century witnessed an outburst of missionary zeal in England, when several societies, such as the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Religious Tract Society, were formed. The British and Foreign Bible Society, opened in London in 1804, was the largest, most ambitious, and most successful of these groups. Its purpose was the wider distribution, free of charge and “without note or comment,” of the Bible, and from its very beginning it was interdenominational. An immediate success in the British Isles, it quickly grew in foreign affiliates and by 1816 had branches in over a hundred cities throughout the world. In 1805 two Scottish missionaries associated with the British Bible Society, John Paterson (1776-1855) and Ebenezer Henderson (1784-1858) set out for India, but unable to obtain passage from the British East India Company they instead devoted themselves to founding Bible societies in Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden and Norway. Paterson then came to Russia in 1812, and was joined by Henderson in 1816. Both worked closely with the Russian Bible Soeiety, and in 1822, after severing his relationship with the parent organization, Paterson became an actual director in the Russian society. Paterson and Henderson were forced to leave Russia after the Bible Society's closing in 1826.

80. Metropolitan Stanistaw was an old instrument of Catherine II in her religious policies in the annexation of Poland. He was named bishop of Mogilev in 1774, and in 1782 was promoted to archbishop and chief pastor of all Roman Catholics in the Russian empire. Elevated to metropolitan in 1789, he lost some influence to the Jesuits during Paul's reign, but rose again under Alexander and it was on his orders that the Jesuits were expelled from St. Petersburg in 1815. He died in 1826.

81. This term was given birth during Catherine II's journey down the Dnieper River in 1790. Her favorite Grigorii Potemkin, the governor of the southern provinces, was careful to see that everything and everyone Catherine would see from her riverboat would be immaculate and in good order. The Saxon diplomat Helbig suggested satirically that Potemkin had facades constructed and transported along the route, and coined the term “Potemkin village” [Potemkinsche dorfer] to describe them. The term gained regular use in the German vernacular language.

82. Sofiia Sergeevna Meshcherskaia (1775-1848) was one of the earliest and most devoted members of the Russian Bible Society, and in the 1830's she was head of the St. Petersburg Women's Prison Committee. All told she helped translate and publish over 90 titles, and all copies were distributed free or for a nominal charge. Alexander I also contributed funds for this enterprise.

83. These were the so-called Meyer brochures, named after the bookseller who served as correspondent for the British Bible Society in St. Petersburg. [Author's note].

84. Metropolitan Mikhail (1762-1820) had studied at the Trinity Seminary in Moscow, and also attended Moscow University, where he joined Novikov's translation and publishing enterprise and the Friendly Learned Society. He became a priest in Moscow and was well-known for mystically oriented sermons. In 1796 he was named a court priest and in 1802 became bishop of Starai Rus'. Transferred to Chernigov in 1803, he joined the Holy Synod in 1813 and two years before his death became metropolitan of St. Petersburg. Many sermons of his have been published.

85. The Lancaster system used older students to teach younger ones. On these schools see Judith Cohen Zacek, “The Lancastrian School Movement in Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review, XLV (July, 1967), pp. 343-367.

86. John Venning (1776-1858) in his youth worked for a Russian trading firm in London. In 1793 he moved to St. Petersburg and became a well-todo merchant there. His interest in prisons came from his brother Walter, one of the founders of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline in London. After the Russian Prison Society was set up Venning traveled to visit prisons and insane asylums in Sweden, Germany, France and England, and had personal contact with Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I.

87. Nikolai Nikolaevich Bantysh-Kamenskii (1737-1814) was important for his life-long labor of organizing the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the valuable collections of materials he produced for historians. Bantysh-Kamen- skii had studied at the Kiev and Moscow Academies and also wrote on moral philosophy. He served as vice-president of the Bible Society.

88. Aleksandr Skarlamovich Sturdza (1791-1854) was one of the leaders of a conservative, Orthodox reaction to the western mystical and intellectual influences in Russian society. A Moldavian by birth, he had a long and active diplomatic career, undertaking numerous foreign missions for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and also worked in Golitsyn's Ministry of Education. A prolific writer on religious and political themes, Sturdza's two most famous works are Considerations sur Ia doctrine et l'esprit de 1'eglise orthodoxe (Stuttgart, 1816), written while Sturdza was in Paris, and Memoire sur l'etat actuel de l'Allemagne (1818). The latter, composed on imperial commission while the author was on a diplomatic mission to Germany, condemned liberalism in education and advocated strict government control of instruction and discipline in the schools.

89. As secretary of the Russian Bible Society Vasilii Mikhailovich Popov (1771- 1842) was closely involved with all its affairs. He was also head of the Department of Public Education in Golitsyn's combined ministry. One of Mme. Tatarinova's most fanatical followers, after 1824 he joined her colony outside of Moscow, and when it was dispersed he was sent to the Zilantov Monastery near Kazan.

90. Ekaterina Filippovna Tatarinova (nee Buxhoden, 1783-1856) was the daughter of a German officer in Russian service. She married a Russian colonel, Ivan Tatarinov, and accompanied him on the Russian army's march into Europe after Napoleon. In 1813, however, she returned to St. Petersburg, separated from her husband and bereaved by the death of her infant son, and lived in the Mikhailovskii palace, where her mother was a nurse for the Tsarevna Mariia. Mme. Tatarinova then devoted herself to charitable work among the poor and a spiritual quest that took her away from her native Lutheran Church and into close relations with the Khlysty and Skoptsy before converting to Orthodoxy in 1817. It was soon apparent that she had her own peculiar interpretation of the Orthodox faith, for she proclaimed herself a prophetess and a clairvoyant and held meetings in her apartments where she led her followers through Scripture readings, hymns, impromptu prophesying and often frenzied dances aimed at spiritual exaltation. Among her disciples were many prominent members of government and society, including Golitsyn and the tsar himself and until 1822 Mme. Tatarinova received a rather large government pension. That year Alexander ordered the closing of all secret societies, but Mme. Tatarinova continued her meetings, protected by her high-placed patrons. After Golitsyn's fall in 1824 however, she was arrested and banished to the Moscow region. There she formed a colony around herself which lasted until 1835, when she was again arrested and incarcerated in a convent. In 1847, aged and enfeebled, she was released and allowed to live in Moscow, where she ended her days in quiet.

91. For the Dukhobors, see chapter IV, note 140; for the Molokans, chapter IV, note 141 ; on the Skoptsy see chapter IV, note 139.

92. Cf. the Dukhonostsy, a Bible sect founded by Kotel'nikov on the Don. [Author's note]. The Dukhonostsy, or “spirit bearers” represent a spill-over of mystical ideas from the aristocratic freemasons to lower classes of society. Evlampy Kotel'nikov, the Don Cossack chieftain, was heavily influenced by I.V. Lopukhin, and through him Jung-Stilling and other western mystics available in Russian translation. His followers were especially attracted to apocalypticism and the idea of the “inner church.” Arrested in 1817, Kotel'nikov was brought to St. Petersburg for interrogation in 1824 and gained sympathizers at court. In 1825, however, he was sent to the Schlusselberg prison and the next year to Solovki, where he went insane and died.

93. An admiral in the Russian navy who retired in the early years of Alexander I's reign in protest over the young tsar's liberal tendencies, Aleksandr Semenovich Shishkov (1754-1841) gained notice in intellectual circles in 1803 with the publication of Rassozhdenie o starom i novom slove rossiiskago iazyka. This work, a literary attack on Karamzin's prose style, marked the first exposition of the linguistic views Shishkov propagated for the rest of his life: that the Russian language was one dialect of one great Slavic language which he identified with Church Slavonic; and the Russian literary language should therefore be purged of foreign words, replacing them with words derived from Church Slavonic. At the same time Shishkov was a famous conservative and patriot, and a patriotic pamphlet he published in 1811 so impressed Alexander that Shishkov was named Secretary of State. Two years later he was named president of the Academy of Sciences, a position he held until his death. Although Shishkov was rather indifferent to the actual teachings of the Orthodox Church, he was a staunch defender of Orthodoxy for his conservative political reasons and was thus indisposed to Golitsyn and especially hostile to the Russian Bible Society for its translation of the Scriptures into contemporary Russian. In 1824 he succeeded Golitsyn as Minister of Education, and his tenure here was marked by strict censorship and control over the universities.