Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars (New Studies in European History)

Russia On The Eve Of Modernity Is A Pioneering Exploration Of A World That Has Been Largely Destroyed By Revolutionary Upheavals And Obscured In Historical Memory By Scholarly Focus On Elites. Drawing On Traditional Religious Texts, Ethnographic Materials, And Contemporary Accounts, This Book Brings To Light The Ideas And Perceptions Of The Ordinary Russian People Of The Towns And Countryside Who Continued To Live In A Pre-modern, Non-western Culture That Showed Great Resilience To The Very End Of The Romanov Empire. Leonid Heretz Offers An Overview Of Traditional Russian Understandings Of The World And Its Workings, And Shows Popular Responses To Events From The Assassination Of Alexander Ii To The First World War. This History Of Ordinary Russians Illuminates Key Themes Ranging From Peasant Monarchism To Apocalyptic Responses To Intrusions From The Modern World And Will Appeal To Scholars Of Russian History And The History Of Religion In Modern Europe.--book Jacket. Introduction -- The Traditional Worldview -- The Old Believers : Modernization As Apocalypse -- The Sectarians : Dualism And Secret History -- Folk Eschatology -- The Assassination Of Alexander Ii (1881) And Folk Tsarism -- The Year Of Famine And Cholera (1891-1892) : The Demonization Of The Nobility -- The Japanese War : Peasant Russia And The Wider World -- 1905 : Revolution Or Reaction? -- The Great War And The Crisis Of The Traditional Culture. Leonid Heretz. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 239-256) And Index.

The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the Second World War. As it develops, the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition.