Russian nationalism and the orthodox revival

Abstract

It is common practice to date both Russian neo-nationalism and the Russian religious revival back to the late 1960s, when the first Russian nationalist and Orthodox Christian tracts began to appear in samizdat, sometimes jointly and at other times quite separately.· Samizdat is a good yardstick of the genuineness of a trend of thought, being free from institutionalised censorship and thus more accurate than the official" press in mirroring developments in society. Nevertheless, the printed press should not be ignored, especially those authors who are subjected to frequent party-line attacks, those who find it difficult to print their works, and those whose works are immediately bought out by their readers yet rarely see second and third printings. Here we primarily have in mind the rural writers (derevenshchikl), whose publications go back to the '60s. At first their works were marked above all by patriotic anguish for their motherland ~ Russia and its people. In their writing, the national element appeared long before a conscious discovery of the Christian "soul" of the nation as the kernel of its spiritual health. This di~covery, or at least its revelation, has been. very cautious and gddual, at first appearing almost exclusively in a cultural and . aesthetic form. In representative art, more 'and more landscapes appeared with onion-domed churches in either the background or the foreground, at first without crosses, more recently with crosses. Films with similar landscapes gradually evolved to include genuine religious themes with national-nostalgic overtones. The symbiosis of the national and the religious (together with severe national self-criticism) \ was particularly striking in Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev, in which