Studies of Old believers as a methadiscipline for Russian culture creativity

Abstract

The Old Belief, which acts as a true keeper of Russianness and tradition, now is the object of interests of separate researchers — historians, ethnographers, religious scholars — limited by the methods of their own disciplines. In fact, the Russian Orthodox Old Belief has always been distinguished by the highest parsimony in relation to everyday culture, social roles and structures, Russian literature, behavioral models — everything that constitutes the traditional mentality. Displaced to the periphery of modernized empire, the Old Believers proved able to organize stable and self-reproducing communities and subsequently actively participate in development of the Russian economy, science, technology and culture. Later, upon emigration from the USSR to other countries, the Old Believers managed to organize enclaves, which are financially prosperous, economically self-sufficient and respectfully preserving their cultural heritage to this day. Our task is to create an integrative culturological metadiscipline: methodologically rigorous, interpretively tolerant, factually rich, dialogue-oriented. We believe to provide a fundamental review publication, summarizing all attempts to research and understand the Old Believers (culturologists, religious scholars, historians, ethnologists and ethnographers, political scientists, economists, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, philosophers, ideologists, publicists, writers). Our work tasks: 1) involvement of the scientific community in an interdisciplinary dialogue; 2) development of a comparative methodology for the study of ancient Orthodoxy; 3) introduction of Old Believers as a semiotically rich object available for research in different levels of humanitarian knowledge. Our goal is to identify those aspects of the Russian traditional mentality that made it possible for Old Believers to implement an original model of Russian modernization — flexible, attentive to the innovations of science and technology, responsive to world social shifts, but carefully preserving and reproducing the heritage of ancestors, a living connection with traditional culture, history, language. Independence, self-sufficiency, comradeship, family values — preserved and constantly displayed by Old Believers — these features are relevant in our time and instrumental in search of Russia for its place in an open multi-polar world. The search for these principles is a duty of modern Russian Humanities scholar and a scientific super task of our own. The establishment of a new topical metadiscipline of Old Believers’ studies, the launch of a humanitarian research dialogue, development and refinement of a new and flexible methodology, acquaintance of researchers of the Old Belief and traditional culture with facts and assessments from other fields of knowledge — these are the marks of scientific significance of our project.