Medieval Culture and Modern Exile

This study looks at how three religious thinkers in the Russian émigré community, Nicholas Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky and George Fedotov, imagined the Medieval as a model for Russian culture abroad in interwar Paris. Each thinker constructs a narrative of origin for the current crisis of the Russian diaspora, a crisis that is, for all three, primarily spiritual. Images and texts from the medieval provide a blueprint for religious life in Paris and a broader corrective to the religious and theological fallacies of modernity. Looking at polemical and scholarly texts, I demonstrate how the émigré community self-consciously created and perpetuated the (new) Middle Ages as a historical reality and an imagined golden age. I argue that their medieval models functioned to create a narrative of historical and cultural continuity with Russia, the West and antiquity.