Etymology of Khlyst

[Alexander Etkind]

Dear colleagues,

Since my book Khlyst. Sekty, literatura i revoliutsia (Moskva: NLO 1998) is indeed 
lengthy it is perhaps too much to hope that professor Daniel Rancour-Laferriere would 
read it. However, if he chose to do so he would find multiple descriptions of the Khlyst 
ritual on pp. 41-49, 75-82, and elsewhere; for a particularly bloody fantasy, see p.143.    

The etymologies of "Khlyst" and other terms that were used by Orthodox priests and 
missionaries to classify Russian religious dissenters are discussed at length in my 
introductory chapter. The mythological concept, "totalitarian sects", currently used by the 
Orthodox Church, reincarnates the same hostile discourse. Unfortunately, all this is not as 
simple and clear as the author of The Slave Soul of Russia would like. I argued that many 
of the hostile descriptions of sectarian rituals are unreliable. Precisely because we know 
little about the Khlysts some find it attractive to project various (but usually extreme) 
fantasies onto them. One of these fantasies was the idea of the proto-socialist character 
of the Khlysts' life; another has been the idea of its masochist nature. The author of the 
latter construction was of course Leopold Sacher-Masoch, a Slavic scholar of a sort who 
also described the rituals of Russian and Ukrainian sects and believed in the particular 
propensity of Eastern Slaves for pleasurable suffering. On his intellectual adventures see 
pp. 139-142 of my book.

    As for the Silver Age responses to the radeniia, dozens of authors re-imagined them in 
various genres, e.g. Bely, Kliuev, Gorky (in Klim Samgin and elsewhere), Berdiaev, 
Tsvetaeva, Pimen Karpov, etc. This is why my book is "lengthy".
 
Alexander Etkind
Reader of Russian Literature and Cultural History, King's College, Cambridge

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