The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The article deals with the problem of the peasant population’s attitude to the religious teachings of Vasily Kirillovich Syutaev. The authors aim to identify and analyse the reasons for the marginal character of Christian movements in the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th century which based their spiritual and practical activities on the evangelical principles of communitarian nature. To address the problem posed in the article, the performative approach was used as well as the «speech acts» method introduced by J. Austin and the «scenarios» method proposed by R. Wortman. Within the framework of the selected approach, the authors treat the Holy Scripture interpretation proposed by Syutaev as a scenario of life «in the spirit» based on the conception of the first Christian communities’ activities. The main elements of this «scenario» are love, freedom, truth and good deeds. The main forms of the realisation of Syutaev’s «scenario» of «life in the «spirit» are preaching and the organisation of a communitarian-type brotherhood. The authors note that these «scenario» forms are performative in nature. The article points to a complex of subjective and objective factors that served as the grounds for the formation of Syutaev’s views. Among these factors are the personal qualities of the Tver province peasant, the influence of Baron M. M. Korf, the development of capitalist relations in the country and the assimilation of the Christian narrative. The paper notes that the spread of the life scenario «in the spirit» among the peasants was not successful. The reasons for this, as identified by the authors, included Syutaev’s social position, his criticism of the church and Orthodox rites and the inconsistency of his teachings and practices with the cultural code of the Russian peasant population in the second half of the 19th century.