This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper In the year 2000, during the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, more than one thousand victims of Soviet repressions—people persecuted and murdered by the Soviet regime—were glorified and named the New Russian Martyrs. By presenting the origin and background of the phenomenon, authors demonstrate that the New Martyrdom is a kind of invented tradition. They focus on analysis of the tension that occurs when history becomes religion by highlighting some problematic issues with regard to the New Martyrdom and showing how the Russian Orthodox Church is addressing them. The analysis sheds new light on the political use of religion for the creation of narrative about the past in contemporary Russia.
The Russian writer Nikolaj Leskov is widely renowned as a portrayer of the everyday life of the Orthodox clergy; his literary works depict God’s righteous servants as well as the greedy, selfish priests. Notwithstanding being a significant part of his work and effective way to express his views, Leskov’s activity as a book reviewer is not as well-known. Leskov wrote numerous book reviews, mostly on novels featuring clergymen and the ordinary aspects of clerical life, where he analyses the artistic merit and ideological perspective expressed in a work; literary-aesthetic values were, however, at the centre of his critical evaluation and interest. This paper examines Leskov’s book reviews by focusing on their content, structure linguistic style, and the evaluation framework employed by the author for book critical assessment. The aim of the present investigation is to shed some light on Leskov’s critical strategies and compare his critical arguments as a reviewer with the way he describes clergymen in his own works.
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