Kelsey Rubin-Detlev

“The Bible in Enlightenment Russia” offers the first monograph-length analysis of the Bible’s role in Russian intellectual life between the 1660s and the 1820s. Although Biblical translation into modern Russian was restricted well into the 19th century, Biblical material loomed large in cultural debates and fueled literary experiments throughout the era. Russians, like their Western neighbors, turned the Bible into one cultural monument among many, but did so through literary creativity rather than Western-style translation and scholarship. Broadening our understanding of the place of religious texts in ostensibly secular culture, this study explores how Russian writers created a diverse body of Biblical literature separate but not wholly divorced from the Church Slavonic tradition.