Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russian and Ukraine

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

The 10 articles in this collection, written by some of the best scholars
in the field, challenge the idea of a strong division between popular
and elite culture. Often they suggest that what at first glance appear
to be expressions of faith rooted in ancient beliefs and practices in
fact stem from religious high culture. The editors call for a
reconsideration of the strict distinction between lowbrow and highbrow,
and dominant and disempowered, suggesting that the terms consumption and
production, and enunciation and articulation might be better
formulations. The approach makes for a refreshing new take not only on
religious customs but also on populist influences in historical
scholarship.

The focus is on majority religion in the territories of the Eastern
Slavs—Orthodoxy and Uniatism (Greek Catholicism). A number of articles
deal with peasant practices related to death and burial rites; others
with miracles, sexuality and gender, religious cults, icons, and popular
literature. Roman Holyk, Valerie A. Kivelson, and Eve Levin deal with
the medieval and early modern period; Paul Bushkovitch with the reign of
Peter I; Christine D. Worobec, Vera Shevzov, and Andriy Zayarnyuk with
the 19th century and late imperial Russia; and Natalie Kononenko with
post-Soviet Ukraine. The articles on icons by Sophia Senyk and John-Paul
Himka move from medieval to modern times.

A number of articles are concerned with demonstrating how the semiotics
of individual fantasy has been realigned with the intersubjective
semiotics that guided contemporaries. Accordingly, the “folklorized”
interpretations of individual fantasy, jostle with the official
religious concepts from which they originated. For example, Eve Levin
points out that the cult of St. Paraskeva represents not just a pagan
goddess with a new name, but “a recombination of elements and their
reinterpretation within a specifically Christian context.” However,
the powerful female image represented by the saint made churchmen
uncomfortable, leading some of them to condemn it as pagan. In turn,
later scholars who were favourably disposed toward paganism rejected the
Christian elements as unfortunate later admixtures. The original cult,
rooted in Christian tradition and filtered through popular culture,
became in this way entangled with the populist–purist polemics.