Holy Fathers, Secular Sons - (Niu Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) by Laurie Manchester (Paperback)

About the Book

"Holy Fathers, Secular Sons" is the first study of the Orthodox clergy's contribution to Russian society. Prior to the 1860s, clergymen's sons were not allowed to leave the castelike clergy in large numbers. When permission was granted, they responded by entering free professions and political movements in droves. Challenging the standard view of educated pre-revolutionary Russians as largely westernized, secular, and patricidal, Laurie Manchester demonstrates that the clergymen's sons did retain their fathers' values. This was true even of the minority who became atheists. Drawing on the clergy's commitment to moral activism, anti-aristocratism, and nationalism, clergymen's sons believed they could, and should, save Russia. The consequence was a cultural revolution that helped pave the way for the 1917 revolutions.
Using a massive array of previously untapped archival and published sources--including lively first-hand autobiographical writings of over two hundred clergymen's sons--Manchester constructs a composite biography of their childhoods, educations, and adult lives. In a highly original approach, she explores how they employed the image of the clerical family to structure their political, professional, and personal lives. Manchester's work provides a window into an extremely significant but little-known world of Russian educated culture while contributing to histories of lived religion, private life, and memory, as well as to debates over secularization, modernity, and revolution. "Holy Fathers, Secular Sons" powerfully challenges the assumptions that radical change cannot be inspired by tradition and that the modern age is inherently secular.

Book Synopsis

Holy Fathers, Secular Sons is the first study of the Orthodox clergy's contribution to Russian society. Prior to the 1860s, clergymen's sons were not allowed to leave the castelike clergy in large numbers. When permission was granted, they responded by entering free professions and political movements in droves. Challenging the standard view of educated pre-revolutionary Russians as largely westernized, secular, and patriarchal, Laurie Manchester demonstrates that the clergymen's sons did retain their fathers' values. This was true even of the minority who became atheists. Drawing on the clergy's commitment to moral activism, anti-aristocratism, and nationalism, clergymen's sons believed they could, and should, save Russia. The consequence was a cultural revolution that helped pave the way for the 1917 revolutions.

Using a massive array of previously untapped archival and published sources--including lively first-hand autobiographical writings of over two hundred clergymen's sons--Manchester constructs a composite biography of their childhoods, educations, and adult lives. In a highly original approach, she explores how they employed the image of the clerical family to structure their political, professional, and personal lives. Manchester's work provides a window into an extremely significant but little-known world of Russian educated culture while contributing to histories of lived religion, private life, and memory, as well as to debates over secularization, modernity, and revolution. Holy Fathers, Secular Sons powerfully challenges the assumptions that radical change cannot be inspired by tradition and that the modern age is inherently secular.

Review Quotes

Manchester has made a major contribution to the historiography not only of Russia, but of European modernity. Manchester's work supplements and corrects the works of earlier cultural historians, such as Reinhard Bendix and Liah Greenfeld, who have tried to discern religion's role in the rise of modernity.

The author's scholarly apparatus, her extensively documented sources material, and her cultural and sociological analysis offer a coherent and convincing picture of a previously unstudied social class... Her study of the popovichi's contribution to the Russian intelligentsia, Russia's revolutionary path, and national identity forges a crucial missing link in Russian culture's evolutionary chain.

This wide-ranging, original volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role that Russian Orthodoxy, through priests' offspring, played in that country's social and cultural history. It is a model of definitive, exhaustive archival research.

Well written, argued, and footnoted, and deserve[s] a place in the canon of primary studies of Russian history.

About the Author

Laurie Manchester is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. The author is the receipient of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, AAASS, and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2009 (the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences).