Authors

Discussion

In my paper I would like to analyse Tolstoy's short story "Father Sergius" (1904/1911) in the context of religious practices in the late Russian empire. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries are marked by various forms of God-seeking (bogoiskatel’stvo). Although this term is primarily associated with the "Religious-Philosophical Society" and fin de siècle culture, the tradition of the search for God and faith is much broader and touches very different strata of Russian society. In my paper I would like to focus on the religious practices of the military nobility and the conversions of noble officers to monks (using the example of the Life of the Monk Theodore of Sanaksarsk and the biography of Ignatius Bryanchaninov). I assume that these texts were familiar to Tolstoy to a greater or lesser extent and served - along with the hagiography of Jacob the Faster from the Great Menaion Reader - as a starting point for the story "Father Sergius". By placing his story between traditional patristics and contemporary hagiographies of officer-monks, Tolstoy is able to discuss the different forms of the search for faith and to propagate a view of authentic faith characteristic for Tolstoyanism.