Church Periodicals of the Era of St. Theophan the Recluse of Vysha: An Attempt at Systematization

Abstract

The article describes church periodicals, newspapers and magazines that were print­ed in the 40s–90s of the XIX century, that is, during the earthly life of St. Theophan (Govor­ov). Certain attention is paid to magazines and newspapers directly related to the personality of the saint. The article also presents studies of the past and the present, which characterize the process of the formation of the system of church periodicals. Periodicals and studies alto­gether are considered as an information resource that must be kept in mind in order to char­acterize and evaluate the participation of the saint in the work of the church periodical press. Determining the sufficiency / insufficiency of the available resource to characterize this side of St. Theophan’s activities, as well as determining the structure of this resource, was the pur­pose of the article. The desired goal was achieved using the appropriate methodology: system sampling of facts, their assessment based on a historical approach, comparison, analysis, argu­mentation involving alternative opinions. The essay proposes the structure of an information resource, which provides a form for the historical reconstruction of the personal participation and contribution of St. Theophan the Recluse from Vysha to the formation of church journal­ism. The article provides an analysis of the historical conditions in which the activities of rep­resentatives of the clergy were carried out in the field of organizers, editors, journalists of pe­riodicals. Sources and studies on the history of censorship and its impact on the church press are named and briefly characterized. Attention is paid to sources of personal origin: memoirs, notes of hierarchs of the Church, government officials, and public figures are named, which contain a private, sometimes subjective, view of the complex process of the development of the church press in the 19th century. Preliminary results have shown that there is a sufficient information resource for a detailed and well-reasoned assessment of the activities of St. The­ophan (Govorov) in the field of publicist. Although the article pursues an applied practical goal, the sum of the collected facts allows us to say with confidence that the saint is an outstanding church publicist of the mid-late 19th century; this thesis is often declared, but in our article, it receives argumentation, which constitutes a new and important aspect of theophanistics.