prized objects as much as literal texts. Their leaders wrote polemics against the
official Church’s apologists and pietistic works for the faithful, including hagio-
graphical autobiographies by Avvakum and Epifanii and a secular hagiography of a
dynamic female leader, Feodosiia Morozova; they preserved founding documents
of their dissent, including the“Secure Shield of Faith”and the petition of the monk
Avraamii. By the 1690s the learned Denisov brothers at Vyg in Karelia consolidated
and expanded the corpus of Old Believer texts. They and others wrote martyrol-
ogies to create a non-consecrated sainthood, polemical defenses, and histories of the
Old Belief, including Ivan Filippov’sHistory, Semen Denisov’sVinograd rossiiskii,
and a history of the Solovetskii Monastery’s resistance. They developed an oral
culture of stories and poems (dukhovnye stikhi) to spread the faith and disseminated
it with manuscripts and icons, painted in the old style or even stamped in metal
(considered less changeable and thus more authentic).
The Old Belief also forged itself as a community by evolving strict interpret-
ations of ritual and social behavior. Already in 1702 the Vyg community had
adopted an austere, monastic rule of community life; other communities did as
well. Priestly and priestless Old Believers defined rites rigidly,fixing rituals of bows,
prostrations, and censing while the official Church was loosening or lessening such
practices. While in official Orthodox churches men and women mingled and
moved around the interior during services, Old Believer men and women stood
on separate sides, quietly in place. They maintained old customs of singing while
the official Church was developing polyphonic church music. The priestless
insisted that all converts needed to be rebaptized with laymen presiding. Old
Believers adhered in practice and in visual representation to the traditional two-
fingered sign of the cross altered by Nikon; their icons rejected the Italianate style
popular in the eighteenth century. Their church interiors replicated traditional
Orthodox churches, but the priestless eventually substituted a prayer table for the
iconostasis and separate altar and sanctuary. Old Believers’devotion to the old
books made them as a rule more literate than the general populace and distin-
guished them as a community defined by text as much as by ritual. Like the official
church at the time, and perhaps more successfully, they rejected folk customs and
policed lay morality in the spirit of the 1551 Church Council’s critique.
Old Believers also defined community through dress, everyday life, and moral
standards. They dressed modestly, replicating peasant garb, with full beards
and kaftans for men, loose sarafans for women, even for prosperous merchant
Old Believers living in the capital cities. Priestless Old Believer communities
observed taboos on contact with the outside world, particularly around food;
they punished with penance any member who ate with non-Old Believers and
ritually purified food purchased from non-members with prayer. Old Believer
concords lived in tight communities, worshipped regularly together, and
preached the virtues of ascetic life, particularly around sexual behavior. They
espoused an ethics of self-control and moderation. Men and women were to
work hard, provide for their dependents, and modelfidelity and morality. They
were to be thrifty and pious; drinking was discouraged, and the focus was on
cultivating strong family households, not frequenting sites of secular sociability,
418 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801