Russian wanderers. Images of orthodox divine service on the roads

The article is devoted to the study of the diverse manifestations of the phenomenon of religious wandering in Russian culture, especially the 19th century, with the study of their external aesthetic image, way of life, Orthodox foundations and principles, characteristic language, methods of organization and institutionalization. The author considers the concept of “wanderer” as one of the fundamental concepts in world and especially Russian culture, emphasizing its polysemantic and heterogeneous nature, and also pointing out its special value as a visible embodiment of the Orthodox understanding of God, man and the world, permeated with the spirit of hesychasm. At the same time, the author confines himself to considering in his article mainly folk religious forms of Russian wandering, which were widely developed and spread in the 19th century. It was at this time that the theme of wandering becomes one of the main ones in Russian and European literature. So, the author dwells in detail on the image of a wanderer in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Teenager”, on the work of N. Leskov “The Enchanted Wanderer”, on the works of I. Shmelev. Particular attention is paid in the article to Russian painting of the mid-second half of the 19th century, in which the figure of the wanderer is one of the central ones, which all leading artists turned to in their paintings. The central place in the study (in the 2nd part of the article) is devoted to the consideration of the richest material of the book “Wandering Rus’ for Christ’s sake” by S.V. Maksimov, in which the features of life, image, language of the most diverse forms of Russian religious wandering are collected and preserved for us in detail. The author also refers to the composition “Frank stories of a wanderer to his spiritual father” to show the influence of hesychasm on the formation of the idea of wandering, in its highest and most perfect religious form, as a fundamental Orthodox value worthy of being presented and recognized as a separate form of holiness.