Authors

Ruth Coates¹;  ¹ University of Bristol, UK

Discussion

Iulia de Beausobre was an aristocratic Russian emigrée who became a powerful communicator of Russian Orthodox spirituality to the west, specifically to England. She exemplifies a form of charismatic lay leadership that manifests variously as spiritual direction, public engagement, life writing, and storytelling, all of which flow from her personal experience of spiritual survival in the Soviet prison system.
This paper will focus on the interface between cultural mediation and spiritual leadership. De Beausobre lived out her life in England in obedience to her perceived vocation as witness and interpreter. This vocation consisted of at least three strands: the articulation of her personal religious experience in captivity and her practice of silent prayer; the determination to honour explicit appeals by persons in captivity with her to tell the west about the suffering of the Russian people and of their spiritual heritage; and her desire to translate the oral accounts, gathered in and around the camp, of the life and significance of St Serafim of Sarov (d. 1833). De Beausobre shows an acute awareness of the problem of translating her native spiritual heritage into a language, both literal and figurative, that the English can understand. My paper will analyse her statements on this problem in parallel with a consideration of her heterogeneous written legacy as itself representing a diverse set of translation strategies with a common spiritual purpose.