Гуманитарный вектор (Jun 2021)
Clerical-Protective Direction in the Russian Historiography of the Old Believers of the 1850s: the Structure of Historical Research
Abstract
Understanding the historiography of the old believers depends on the level of development of the history of historical science, the development of its categorical apparatus. The lack of clarity of the research structure leads to uncertainty in terminology, in the description of scientific achievements and dead ends. The key historical works (historiographical facts) that defined the face of the science of their time are arbitrarily deleted from the literature, and the directions and stages of historiography are “erased”. The purpose of this work is to study the internal form and structure of clerical-protective historical research of old believers in the Russian literature of the 1850s: value, spatial, source ‒ study, vector relations of the author to the object of research; a set of concepts that reveal the “mechanism” of explaining old believers; ways to gain knowledge about the split mediated by this structure. The analysis showed that the clerical ideological position expressed in the works of historians of this direction focused on the defense of the “new rite”. It led to a narrowing of the subject of research, limiting it to “opinions” and facts of the statement of schism, which produced the purpose of research ‒ the “exposure” of schismatics and the moral-scholastic method of achieving it and pushed us to use a set of accusatory concepts in explaining the phenomenon under study. It became a barrier to the knowledge of anti-Church protest by the middle of the 19th century. The fact of the practical failure of the clerical doctrine, which was a consequence of its cognitive limitations, was also realized by the bearers of the accusatory tradition themselves. The question of the reasons for the emergence and development of the old believers has become relevant again. A new answer to this question in the late 1850s ‒ early 1860s was given by the historian Afanasiy Prokopyevich Shchapov (1831–1876), who radically changed the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study.
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