The Influence of the Hagiographic Genre on Written Confessions about the Transition from Schism: the Art of Life Narration in the Old Belief (1880 - 1905)

“What darkness surrounds the schismatic world ...” - such a phrase and many others similar can be found in the written confessions of former Old Believers who have converted to Orthodoxy. The analysis of such confessions as specific autobiographies and the influence of literary genres on their emergence is the focus of this research. The historical context for this work is the struggle of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Coreligionists against the spread of the Old Belief within the Russian Empire during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century. A significant aspect of this struggle was the use of denunciations of the Old Believers, distributed by journalistic materials in missionary magazines. However, this study will not focus on the typical propaganda texts of Orthodox missionaries opposing Old Believers. Instead, it will consider confessions of the former Old Believers, who converted to the Orthodoxy. On the one hand, these texts represent personal experiences related to disappointment in the Old Belief. On the other hand, these statements can be seen as public performative, as they were published in missionary newspapers. This makes them the product of missionary discourse. In this research paper, I will answer the question of which place in these texts takes the personal experience of the authors, and which the missionary discourse. Furthermore, the paper will examine the question of under what influence the tradition of writing biographies which are used by former Old Believers has developed. It is my assumption that the emergence of such "confessional" texts was influenced by the spread in the mass literature of the Russian Empire during the 19th-20th centuries of religious genres such as hagiographies and akathists . Therefore, the investigated confessions were likely not created based on confession as an oral religious practice, but rather based on hagiographic tradition.