Laurie Manchester opens her innovative and insightful book on the sons of Russian Orthodox priests by evoking—and dispensing with—the literary stereotype of the drunken and dissipated village cleric. The great progressive literary critic, Vissarion Belinskii (1811–1848), asked the writer Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) in 1847, “Is not the Russian priest regarded by everyone as a symbol of gluttony, avarice, sycophancy, bawdiness?” (14). Yet, even as he attacked the clergy, Belinskii himself could not deny his own heritage; his grandfather had been a priest, a member of that curious, peculiarly Russian caste-like social estate from whose ranks came so many members of the intelligentsia. In fact, Manchester argues that the sons of priests (known as popovichi in Russian) played a crucial role in the development of the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia in the century before the revolutions of 1917. Despite his denigration of the clergy, many of the secular Belinskii's values—his didacticism, his strong sense of morality, his service ethic, and his inability to compromise—had also been cultivated in the families of priests. From the 1860s, when increasing numbers of clerical sons left their estate to enter government service or the professions, the popovichi exerted an ever greater influence over the intelligenty whose ranks they joined.

Through his tax policies, Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725) had inadvertently created the caste-like character of the clerical estate. Because priests were exempt from Peter's new poll tax, introduced in 1718, members of the taxable estates (peasants and townsmen) could not join the clergy without burdening their communes, who would have had to make up the state's lost revenue. Likewise, the Russian nobility had to serve the state in the military or the state administration, and few nobles desired to give up their privileges for a life as a village pastor. Over time, the system of clerical education further differentiated the clergy and their families from the rest of Russian society. Priests, deacons, and their children attended special schools with subjects such as Latin and theology that almost no one else studied. Only in the 1860s did a series of reforms designed to modernize Russian society and break down the old estate system allow large numbers of popovichi to leave the service of the church. But even as they gave up their traditional calling to be priests and pastors, the popovichi brought with them their family values, which, Manchester argues, significantly shaped the Russian intelligentsia in the years leading to 1917. Whether atheist or pious, popovichi valued self-sacrifice, sought to serve the people, believed in causes greater than themselves, idolized their clerical fathers, emphasized the moral struggle between good and evil, strongly identified themselves with the Russian nation, and were suspicious of foreign, especially Western, influences. The intelligentsia, originally formed by disaffected cosmopolitan nobles in the 1830s and 1840s, dramatically changed its character as these “new men” from the clergy joined it.

To demonstrate her case, Manchester has tirelessly mined both unpublished sources in central and provincial archives and the extensive ecclesiastical press to identify 207 individuals (listed in an appendix) who left the clerical estate and composed personal texts (such as autobiographies, diaries, confessions) recounting their lives. The book consists primarily in an engaging analysis of these texts. The first three chapters put the clerical estate in its historical context by describing its formation (chapter 1), clerical critiques of other social estates, especially the nobility (chapter 2), and the prescriptive norms of piety and patriarchy that governed the lives of priests, deacons, sacristans, and their families (chapter 3). The next three chapters analyze the three phases in the life of the popovich: a childhood at home, which was almost always remembered as idyllic, despite hardship and poverty (chapter 4); the bursa, a pre-seminary boarding school for priests' sons, always remembered as a hellish experience (chapter 5); and the exit from the clerical estate for those popovichi who did not follow their fathers' vocation (chapter 6). The final chapter describes how these secularized popovichi created secular versions of salvation, often through professional success, political action, or scholarly work.

Manchester's approach works well for eliciting the common values shared by clerical sons. She also effectively contrasts those values with the aristocratic ethos of the cosmopolitan nobility, the rival social estate, by citing vivid examples of priestly alienation from the gentry. One popovich, hired as a tutor for noble children, described his embarrassment when he was addressed in French by his employer's foreign guests: “I was completely dumbfounded and, like a madman, I cast my eyes upon them, opened my mouth, and spread my arms” (38). Always a sympathetic and careful reader of her sources, Manchester maintains the necessary critical distance as she analyzes the cultural values expressed in their letters and autobiographies.

Manchester makes a few errors and omissions. Arguably, the earliest autobiography of a popovich was written not in 1802 (9) but in the 1670s by the defrocked Archpriest Avvakum Petrov (1620–1682), a leader of the Old Believer schism, while he was in an underground prison in Pustozersk. Manchester curiously never mentions the prominent figure Alësha Popovich, the trickster hero of Russian epic tales [byliny], known for his cunning. And, contrary to Manchester's claim (21), priests did indeed occasionally violate the confidentiality of the rite of confession and report crimes to the authorities, as Nikolai G. Vysotskii demonstrated in his publication of trial transcripts.

Most significantly, Manchester makes a carefully nuanced case for Russian exceptionalism and a unique Russian path to modernity. Although the Russian intelligentsia certainly adopted Western ideas, much of its character in the last decades of the old regime was the result of distinctively Russian conditions. With its tradition of a married parish clergy organized as a caste-like estate, the Orthodox Church created a cadre of young men with a peculiar upbringing. Self-conscious, resentful of the nobility, committed to service, these men “believed they could shape themselves and control their universe” (5). Curiously, these profoundly modern ideas arose from a deeply traditional Russian religious environment. By elucidating the peculiarly Russian features of the intelligentsia and its hidden links to the Orthodox Church, Manchester has made a major contribution to the historiography not only of Russia, but of European modernity. Manchester's work supplements and corrects the works of earlier cultural historians, such as Reinhard Bendix and Liah Greenfeld, who have tried to discern religion's role in the rise of modernity.