“Our Common People Are a Vagrant Before Anything”: Wanderer-Pilgrims in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Landscape

This book examines the emerging figure of the Orthodox wanderer in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Beginning with an etymological explanation of the terms for wandering and pilgrimage in the Russian language, the study first seeks to establish the spiritual-cultural background from which nineteenth-century authors drew their depictions of religious peregrinators. From there it looks at why Russian authors were interested in such figures to begin with, documenting the rise of folklore studies in the first half of the nineteen century. Finally, it examines the multifarious ways various authors approached the wanderer, from those with a primarily ethnographic focus on this traveling figure (such as Nikolai Nekrasov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin) to those (such Fedor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy) who looked upon wanderers as exemplary Christians and spiritual beacons.