ABSTRACT

The colossal influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian culture has been acknowledged for some time. 1 While there are names that feature more regularly in the largely one-sided conversation in which Russian thinkers began to engage their Western peers and forebears from the end of the seventeenth century, the relative unanimity of adulation that characterizes Boehme’s reception is striking. Hegel and Schelling are by turns exalted and denounced in the fickle world of the Russian intellectual, yet Boehme can be ignored but almost never reviled. The exceptions to this rule include certain “official” parties in state and church, although both spheres contained sympathizers. 2 His writings, as well as his life and personality, form one of the most consistent backdrops to the birth of the Russian literary tradition as well as Russian religious philosophy, from the early mason-mystics to consummate philosophers such as Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) and from early Gothic novelists such as Vladimir Odoevsky (1803–69) to symbolist experimenters like Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927). Many of these figures, unlike in the West where readers of the German mystic tended to belong to heterodox communities outside the mainstream churches, were Orthodox Christians who regularly attended the divine liturgy, a fact that lends a particular temper to the Russian reception of Boehme and which points toward a certain inner resonance between the cobbler-mystic and Orthodox liturgical culture. Indeed, Boehme’s texts often appear to perform a function not dissimilar to the ceremonial absorption of the individual believer within liturgical space, enfolding not only the mind and will of their Russian reader but also his very sensual being. In this context, Boehme’s writings not only take on properties of sacred utterances; 3 they themselves are treated as instruments of transformation which, in the right hands, can lead their reader to an experience of the authentically divine. For this reason, the account that follows necessarily involves recognizing the dynamic relationship between the text and its readers as well as simple source analysis.