Presentations by Streams

At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire experienced a dramatic increase in the forms and variations of personal, social, and religious knowledge. In an atmosphere of dramatically increased cultural transfer and social transformation, even such seemingly conservative and rigid formations as Orthodoxy became subject to change and had to (and often wanted to) respond to the challenge of modernity. In our papers we want to examine these changes at different levels: 1. at the level of educational institutions, how Orthodox academic education responded to the demands of secular knowledge; 2. at the level of the interaction between church and literature as social institutions, here it is a question of how social expectations directed equally at church and literature were accommodated and discussed, and 3. how, in interaction and mutual repulsion from the Orthodox tradition, non-Orthodox religious and social practices could be established in Russian culture.