The (trans)national Russian religious imagination in exile: Iulia de Beausobre (1893‐1977)

Abstract The article offers a case study of how Russian Orthodox who migrated from the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 reimagined their religious identity and their church in a transnational setting. Iulia de Beausobre (1893‐1977) was a Russian aristocrat who fell victim to the Stalinist purges but survived the Soviet prison system and was helped to emigrate to Britain. Drawing on her significant written corpus, the article analyses her understanding of the ‘Russian’ nation in relation to the Russian Orthodox Church. It argues that this was shaped primarily by her spiritual formation in prison and the role that the practice of unceasing prayer in the hesychastic tradition played in her survival. De Beausobre draws on this experience to arrive at a vision of the transcendence of church and nation in the post‐Christian age as a transecclesiastical community of prayer.