A ‘Thirst for Torment’ vs Suffering ‘for Righteousness’: The Polemics of Old Believer Sacrifice at the Turn of the Era

This article describes Old Believer polemics about sacrifice via self-immolation and other forms of ‘self-inflicted death’ between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The main object of condemnation by the Russian state and church authorities was the Old Believer system of sacralising one’s own sufferings (the creation and distribution of related narratives, appeals to popular religiosity, and the veneration of new martyrs). The author examines Old Believer writings and decrees, admonitions, and texts created by the authorities as parts of one discursive field and concludes that rational methods for combating Old Believer martyrs were consolidated in the Petrine era at the conceptual level in order to preserve the taxable population. Feofan (Prokopovich) offered the most original explanation for the widespread Old Believer veneration of new martyrs by interpreting it as bliss at being ‘persecuted for righteousness’ (1722): this interpretation was the basis for his admonition On the Invalidity of Unauthorised Suffering. The active disciplinary intervention of the authorities in the sacrificial discourse and the misinterpretation of self-sacrifice that spread among the Old Believers led their leaders to speak of piety as an indispensable condition for salvation. The desire of various participants in the discourse to speak on this topic generated, if not to a specific “language”, then a whole set of experiences embodied in genetically different rhetoric.