“Blessed Are the Homesick”: Home in the Imagination of Russian Religious Exiles, 1700-1917

There are three kinds of home for religious migrants who face persecution or exile. There is the old home they are compelled to leave; the new home where they settle; and the home they await in the world to come. By blending population and religious census data collected by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Russian ethnographic studies, and immigrants’ chronicles, spiritual songs, prophecies, and sacred writings, Prof. Clay will break down the constructions of home in the imaginations of Russia’s historically diverse array of religious exiles. He will specifically focus on the migration of the semeiskie, religious dissenters exiled to Buriatiia under Catherine II in the mid to late 18th century; the nekrasovtsy, religious Cossacks who revolted against Peter the Great in the early 18th century and settled in the Ottoman empire before returning to the USSR in the 1960s; and the Spiritual Christians, who were forcibly exiled to the Caucasus in the 1830s and then emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. All three of these groups composed extensive poems and spiritual songs during their movement that helped define their sense of home.