Everyday Religiosity as the ‘Elsewhere’ of Socialist Reality: Spoken Narratives of the Orthodox Old Believers in Latgale
Everyday Religiosity as the ‘Elsewhere’ of Socialist Reality: Spoken Narratives of the Orthodox Old Believers in Latgale

Summary/Abstract: The concept of ‘everyday religiosity’ is one of the significant characteristic features of the Orthodox Old Believers religious tradition. It defined the central place of religious practices, providing not only divine services and activities within a certain parish, but even opportunities of practicing prayer and other forms of religious behaviour within the private scope of family life. During the socialist period, especially the period of anti-religious propaganda and scientific atheism, open demonstration of religious beliefs was strongly restricted and controlled. Nevertheless, a relatively large group of Old Believers maintained their collective religious identity in spite of the gradually disappearing close links between individual believers and parishes. The aim of this study is to investigate the forms of religious behaviour in the Old Believers’ everyday experience during the Soviet period and to contextualize perceptions of religious experience in Socialist reality revealed in their spoken narratives. This exploration is based on the collection of in-depth interviews with Old Believers, recorded 2006–2016 in Latgale, and represents spoken narratives of various generations in terms of their everyday life during the Soviet period (1950s-1970s). These sources reflect a retrospective view on the controversial past that shapes the image of a very specific kind of imagined ‘ancestor’s world’ separated from the official, ‘compulsory’ world of workplace or public space.

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