Restoring Books and Faith: The Siberian Old Believer Skete as a “Territory of Salvation”

Abstract

The article deals with non-verbal ways of reproducing and transmitting the Old Believer culture of desert-dwelling, going beyond the study of book restoration as a purely technical operation. The studied case is a Siberian skete of Old Believer Wanderers founded in the 1830s and still active today, with its library of handwritten and printed books in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. The skete's approach to managing its book collection and the methods of book restoration employed by its inhabitants are used as a tool for initiating peasants into the monastic tradition and are examined in the context of the social history of a taiga settlement. The visible traces of paper, binding, and cover repairs, as well as corrections and additions to prayer and didactic texts, are assessed in terms of their alignment with the symbolism of the Christian book and the skete dwellers' self-perception as guardians of the “territory of salvation” of ancient books and of the true faith. Methodologically, the study is based on the mediative approach to religion (B. Meyer) and the practices of analyzing the material and visual aspects of religious books (M. P. Brown, T. Lentes).