N. Yu. Bubnov
Staroobriadcheskaia kniga v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVII v.: istochniki, tipy i evoliutsiya.
Saint Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1995. First edition. 434 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6" x 8.25", displays creasing to spine and is otherwise in fine condition, with solid binding, clean and bright pages.
Summary in English present:
"Scholarly interest to the Russian old-belief phenomenon as an original social and cultural movement which at the same time forms an integral part of the human history grows. This movement may be regarded as the people's negative reaction to a tendency of the Europeanization of the country, as a prolonged antagonism of the Russian orthodox medieval culture to the Western-European culture and the evaluation of the New Times.
The monography resumes the results of a complex analysis of the old-believers' manuscript tradition of the second half of the XVIIth century. The old-believers' writings created under certain historical circumstances and circulating in a great number of manuscript copies served as an ideological weapon against initiators of the church reform carried out in 1653-1667 and had a strong influence on the outlook of the considerable part of the people. Important tasks of the present book are to search and reconstruct the whole primary repertory of the old-believers' works of the epoch (some of them have not been known before) and the most popular manuscript collections. The author has come to a conclusion about textological, ideological, and literary interdependence of the old-believers' writings, as well as he reveals their sources and gives a possibility to define the informational originality of a writing and consequently to judge its significance and role in the process of the old-believers' ideology formation.
Summing up the study of the old-believers' letters the author aspires to point out unsolved problems and the ways of further searching."