Expanding upon his article about the representations of “spiritual wandering” (strannichestvo) in the writings of Nikolai Nekrasov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Lev Tolstoi, and Fedor Dostoevskii, Charles Arndt adds works by Pavel Melʹnikov-Pecherskii and Nikolai Leskov. He also provides background information about “spiritual wandering” and the factors sparking these nineteenth-century literati’s interest in the phenomenon.

That background information takes up half the book. Arndt begins by briefly discussing early Kyivan Rusʹ spiritual wanderers who headed for the Holy Land and later Muscovite Orthodox wanderers who sought the desert of the Russian forests to pursue a contemplative ascetic life in imitation of Christ. The future saints of the forests eventually attracted followers, leading to the foundation of contemplative monastic institutions. These peregrinations and settlements, Arndt soundly argues, sacralized the Russian landscape. He also explains the numerous Russian terms for pilgrimages and religious wanderings and their practitioners that became standard in the modern period. Besides imitators of Christ, religious wanderers could include beggars seeking alms in Christ’s name, singers of spiritual verses, monks from official and schismatic Orthodox institutions, and collectors seeking donations for the construction of churches in their respective parishes. All these types, described by the burgeoning populist ethnography of the mid-nineteenth century (defined here broadly to include any interest in Russian peasants), attracted Russian intellectuals’ attention. Several of Arndt’s fiction writers became fascinated with Old Believer practices, particularly those of the extremist Stranniki-Beguny (“runaway wanderers”) in the Trans-Volga region who mid-nineteenth-century government officials (including Saltykov-Shchedrin) investigated for the criminal activities that they pursued in a land they believed was ruled by the Anti-Christ. Intellectuals were also intrigued with an 1855 travelogue. Having begun his religious wanderings on foot initially as an Old Believer from Moldavia, the pilgrim author traversed Russia areas eastward to the Trans-Volga searching for Old Believer sites, before heading to the Old Believer monastery in Austria and finally to Mount Athos, where he was tonsured as the Orthodox monk Parfenii. He completed his ascetic religious wanderings by visiting the Holy Land and Constantinople on his return to Russia. Some intellectual readers of Parfenii’s travel account concluded that this holy man exemplified the authentic religious beliefs of nineteenth-century Russian peasants, although Arndt does not question that romanticized populist assumption.

While much of this information is pertinent to the Russian writers’ portrayals of religious wanderers, it is not always presented effectively. Definitions of key concepts such as Slavophilism, Old Believers (priestly and non-priestly), the major seventeenth-century religious schism that produced them, and revolutionary populism and its 1874 movement to the countryside are missing. Historical context for events and movements is sometimes omitted, buried in a footnote, or provided several pages after the first mention or even in a subsequent chapter. The lack of an index, for which Arndt tries to compensate by occasionally footnoting page numbers for previously discussed topics, exacerbates the problems. Finally, a reader unfamiliar with the history of religious dissent beginning in mid-seventeenth-century Orthodox Muscovy could easily assume incorrectly that the exotic sect of Stranniki-Beguny represented most of Russia’s Old Believers.

Irrespective of repetitive materials from earlier chapters, Arndt reaches his stride in the book’s second half with careful content analyses of his authors’ literary representations of spiritual wanderers and pilgrims. While Nekrasov was uneasy with wanderers’ association with the growing social ill of begging and peasants’ naivete regarding these individuals seeking alms in Christ’s name, Saltykov-Shchedrin depicted an elderly character in his 1856–57 Provincial Sketches who valued virtuous wanderers but was cognizant that others “may escape to the ‘desert’ for selfish, worldly reasons as well as for spiritual sacrifice and ascetic struggle”(106 n 59). Labelling self-willed wanderers without passports as vagrants, in accordance with Russian law (originating with Peter I), Melʹnikov-Pecherskii saved his animus for the Stranniki-Beguny. He accordingly described one of his fictional wanderers as a thief and arsonist who fomented “hatred, suspicion, and intolerance” for salvation’s sake. Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer, in Arndt’s reading, is closer to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a repentance story in reverse, in spite of the enchanted protagonist’s largely secular itinerary. Ultimately, Arndt ends with Dostoevskii’s depictions of genuine Russian Orthodox wanderers and pilgrims as purveyors of ancient religious wisdom that trumped modern destructive secular values and Tolstoi’s late embrace of the Russian spiritual wanderer for his own persona and search for redemption. Arndt’s suggestions at the book’s end that a definitive portrayal of all wanderers in Russian literature and a full history of Russian pilgrimages should be undertaken are welcome, although he seems unaware of some of the ground-breaking work on the latter subject.