Medieval Culture and Modern Exile
Subtitle: The Middle Ages in the Russian Religious Émigré Imagination
By: Brittany Paige Pheiffer
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2020
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: This study looks at how three religious thinkers in the Russian émigré community, Nicholas Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky and George Fedotov, imagined the Medieval as a model for Russian culture abroad in interwar Paris. Each thinker constructs a narrative of origin for the current crisis of the Russian diaspora, a crisis that is, for all three, primarily spiritual. Images and texts from the medieval provide a blueprint for religious life in Paris and a broader corrective to the religious and theological fallacies of modernity. Looking at polemical and scholarly texts, I demonstrate how the émigré community self-consciously created and perpetuated the (new) Middle Ages as a historical reality and an imagined golden age. I argue that their medieval models functioned to create a narrative of historical and cultural continuity with Russia, the West and antiquity.
Notes: Department: Slavic Languages.

Thesis advisor: Valentina B. Izmirlieva.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2020.