“THE BISHOP” BY HIEROMONK TIKHON (T. P. ANDRIEVSKY): FROM NEW RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS TO MODERN SPIRITUAL PROSE

The novella “The Bishop”, believed to have been written by priest Tikhon Andrievsky shortly after 1904, is very popular today, as evidenced by its publishing history. The work was created in an atmosphere of intense controversy in Russian society at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries around the issues of renewal of Christianity and the Orthodox Church, and many ideas and problems posed not so much by theologians as by representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were introduced into the text of the book. They are expressed by the characters of the story and immediately realized in the plot — in the “house building” of Fr. Gerasim and his flock, in the lifestyle of Fr. Paul, in the influence that the preaching word of the Bishop has on the parish. For a modern reader, not only the book is of interest, but also the personality of the author himself, his life path, restored by the historian Yu. M. Sukharev and in many ways clarifying the ideological space of the novella. T. P. Andrievsky, a former archpriest, soon after 1917 became an “anti-religionist” and worked in Soviet institutions. However, judging by his letters, he was a contradictory and restless person. The article makes an attempt to outline the range of ideologies used by the author of the book in their connection with the ideas of Russian literature and social thought of that time, as well as to understand the reasons for the current popularity of the work.