‘Religious Life of Russians According the Testimonies of Foreign Writers of the Sixteenth – Seventeenth Centuries’ is a monograph by a historian common-day life, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy Lev Pavlovich Ruschinsky, published by the Imperial Society of the Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University in 1871. The work was the first in the Russian historiography presenting a collection of foreign testimonies on popular religions.
The author starts with mentioning that Russian ecclesiastic historians were skeptical about testimony of foreigners who could not properly ‘look at the internal structure of ecclesiastic life and the course of Church affairs’. The author notes that information on the external side of religious life is no less significant, since external manifestations serve to express internal beliefs. He selected original and new data on the Russian history, and also demonstrated the attitude of Orthodox people to representatives of other religions and vice versa. The author cited a list of works, which gave information about the authors: more than forty names, including Catholic theologian John Sakran, envoys Herberstein, Kobenzel, Fletcher, Meyerberg, English merchant Horsey, Collins – a court physician of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, etc. The author specified whether the selected author was a direct witness to Russian reality, whether he wrote from eyewitnesses or compiles sources.
The work is divided into seven chapters on various aspects of ecclesiastic life: I. The religious life of Russians. II. The position of the clergy in Russia. III. The Church structure. IV. The state of spiritual and religious education in Russia. V. The attitude of Russians towards non-believers and foreigners, in general. VI. Collision with the Protestant world. VII. The general view of foreigners on Russians in religious terms. Concerning religious life, for instance, the author notes that foreigners were surprised with a custom when the owner of an icon prayed to it and forbid others to do the same. At that, the author marks that Russians could not pray without icons, although some persons rejected icon veneration. Many foreign writers noted the piety of Russian people and a long duration of their services, the abundance of churches, etc. In relation to the clergy, R. does not make such generalizations and notes that testimonies were rather different, although the ‘dark colours’ prevailed.
The work, as it was remarked by the author himself, was a kind of sequence to ‘Tales by Foreigners (XV-XVI) on the Moscow State’ (1866) by V. O. Kliuchevsky. The author focuses on the description of religious life and relationships between representatives of various confessions. That book was not only a historical and ethnographical source, but also one of the first attempts to reconstruct religious common-day life.