Orthodox Monasticism in Changing Times: The View from Nizhny Novgorod

The late American scholar William G. Wagner (1950–2021) has posthumously published a monograph dedicated to Orthodox female monasticism in the Russian Empire. At the centre of the work is the Nizhny Novgorod convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, extant in one form or another from the seventeenth century until 1935: thus, Wagner’s scholarship seeks to contribute to the growing historiography on Russian Orthodox monasticism in the imperial period. Using both central and local archival deposits, Wagner highlights the relationship between the convent and the modernising state and society around it. In the eighteenth century, the convent was transformed by state policies that sought to simultaneously limit monasticism, make monasticism socially useful, and subject monasticism to increased levels of both government and ecclesiastical control. Meanwhile, the social composition of the convent’s sorority suggests its close links with the commercial city of Nizhny Novgorod, with a preponderance of members being widows or older unmarried women from the merchant, army, and clerical estates. In the first half of the nineteenth century, consecutive abbesses successfully enforced the convent’s transformation from an idiorhythmic to a coenobitic community: this period also saw the convent offer new social welfare services and develop its financial resources through the creation of an endowment. By the early twentieth century, the convent had become one of Nizhny Novgorod’s largest and richest monastic communities, patronised by the imperial family, the city’s wealthy capitalists, and a wide variety of pilgrims. Through its successful combination of innovation and tradition, the convent became a strongly bound religious community thoroughly integrated with surrounding society, which enabled it to survive for seventeen years of severe restriction in the militantly atheist Soviet Union.