The Russian Folk Religious Imagination

The “folk” and intellectual views of folk material play a
profound role in Russian cultural history. The German
Romantics argued that the folk conveyed the true essence
of a nation’s identity, a stance adopted in nineteenth century
Russia. Beginning in the late 1930s, the Soviets held up the folk
as heroes who conveyed the ideals of the socialist state. Both
of these conceptions persist until the present day and present
an attitude that differs signifi cantly from most contemporary
civil societies, where the folk are typically viewed as poor,
backward people that need to be enlightened. Throughout
19th- and 20th-centuries, folk culture and “high” culture have
come together in Russia in a way unknown in most European
societies. Thus, it can be argued that in order to understand
Russia, one must study the conception of the “folk” and their
belief systems. Russian religion is no exception in this regard;
to study Russian religious belief without a consideration of the
folk conceptions is to overlook one of the most important
sources for Russian religious ideas.
Russian Orthodoxy has been the source of a great deal of
speculation about the extent of dvoeverie (dual faith). Soviet
scholars argued that the Russian Orthodox religion had a strong
pre-Christian base, which allowed the Soviet government to
assert that religious folk tradition was actually not “religious”
at all and thereby should be preserved despite the atheist
policies of the state. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars
have undertaken the study of folk religion in earnest, but there
is as yet no comprehensive study of the interrelations between
various folk genres in relation to religious belief. Typically
folklorists study either oral literature (e.g., legends and songs),
or folk ritual and iconography. This separation of genres inhibits
a full understanding of the complexity of the complete religious
belief system. Our multimedia web-based critical edition, the
Russian Folk Religious Imagination (RFRI), will feature an
innovative cross-disciplinary approach combining the study of
legends on saints and biblical fi gures, songs and religious rituals,
and folk iconography into a single, comprehensive research
project that will be published in a new digital framework
designed to integrate text and multimedia into a coherent
whole (http://www.rch.uky.edu/RFRI/). We are using the AXE
annotation tool (created by Doug Reside at the Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities: http://www.mith2.
umd.edu/) for encoding commentary on audio, video, images
and textual materials (for an example of video annotation, see
here: http://www.rch.uky.edu/RFRI/AXE-example.html). This
far-reaching project will be of use to specialists in a wide range
of disciplines including historians, folklorists, anthropologists,
linguists, and scholars of literature and of religion, as well as
to amateur historians and to the general public. Our poster
presentation will showcase the achievements of the project
thus far and provide demonstrations of the variety of material
and techniques we are using in the development of this
project.
Despite the Soviet government’s tolerance of scholarly
fi eldwork gathering folk religious traditions, there is a paucity of
in-depth research and publication in this area, due to the offi cial
policy of atheism in the Soviet Union. Folklorists collecting
data on this topic often could not publish their fi ndings, and
the material has languished in archives and private collections.
Even when published editions did exist, they quickly went out
of print, so that specialists elsewhere were also unable to do
extensive research on Russian folk religion. Our edition will
provide unprecedented access for scholars and students of
folklore and of Russia to materials they could not previously
obtain without extensive archival work. Scholars will be able to
read currently inaccessible texts, access audio and video fi les
of song and legend texts and rituals, and consult still images
of folk iconography and rituals. Users will be able to search,
compare, and study in full context the entire range of text,
image, audio and video materials in a way that would not be
possible in a print edition. This approach not only provides a
greater breadth of materials (typically only available in Russian
archives) for both scholars and students, but also brings to the
fore the advantages of using digital resources in the humanities.
In addition, the RFRI project will serve as broad an audience as
possible by providing Russian originals and English translations
of both the original texts and the scholarly commentary and
textual analyses. The project resulting from this expertise will
signifi cantly increase the knowledge of and scholarly interest
in Russian folk belief and religion. A digital multimedia critical
edition, as we have conceived it, will not only make use of the
latest in digital technology, but will also feature a combination
of technologies that is truly cutting-edge. Our methods
and design will be a model for other scholars to follow in
developing fully integrated multimedia research projects using
open-source software and internationally accepted standards.