Rethinking 'Historical Mysticism' in the Age of Russian Realism

The events of the 1850s and the early 1860s, including the Emancipation of the serfs (1861) and the Millennium celebration of Russia (1862), became a turning point in the cultural relationship between educated society and the narod. Following a wave of disturbances in the Russian countryside at that time, some Russian intellectuals came to perceive the narod as a protagonist in the political, social and cultural life of the Empire. These disturbances also revealed the narod’s tendency to interpret historical developments through a certain mythological framework. This dissertation argues that the public attention to the narod in the aftermath of these events raised educated society’s awareness of the political attitudes and historical thinking of the narod expressed though its mythology. I discuss how historians, writers and journalists such as Sergei Solovyov, Daniil Mordovtsev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail Pogodin, and Lev Tolstoy reimagined and redefined the narod through its penchant for mysticism. For these thinkers, understanding the narod, its beliefs and ideals, and how it conceptualized history became a prerequisite for shaping the image of the national and ideological nucleus of the Russian Empire. Chapter I of this dissertation examines how, under which historical circumstances, and why the interest in popular mythology among educated society emerged in the two reform decades (the 1850s-1860s); what it revealed about the political views of the narod, and how politics shaped it; which specific aspects of it were frequently utilized and discussed in the print media and to what end; and how a new debate with the concept of the narod and folk mysticism as its center of gravity evolved in Russia. Chapter II discusses Lev Tolstoy’s approach to folk mysticism in his novel War and Peace. I argue that the novelist makes a commune of peasants, whose actions and choices are driven by profound mythological beliefs, an agent of a single collective will. Chapter III demonstrates how in his A History of a Town, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin problematizes mythological beliefs that inform collective behaviour of the narod, considering them to be a stumbling block for the narod’s own historical development and that of the country. Chapter IV discusses how the mythological framework of the narrative of The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky absorbs a popular eschatological vision and becomes instrumental for the writer to express his social critique of modernity. This study demonstrates how in their literary works, the three authors show the existence of the narod not on the cultural periphery of the Russian Empire, but within the socio-political landscape, linking the narod’s moral image to its sacred beliefs and ideals. At the same time I argue that each of them utilizes popular mythology as an allegorical language to communicate his social and political ideas.Ph.D