As often happens with collections of conference papers, the published result is diffuse rather than focused. Sacred stories originates from an event held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in February 2002. Fifteen authors present individual chapters; the 420 pages contain much information on religion in late imperial Russia, almost all of it new. The volume provides ample evidence of the resurgence in the study of Russian religion which is taking place in North America, where all except one of the authors are resident (the exception is Alexei Kurbanovsky, who writes on the avant-garde Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich and who works at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg).

This chapter on art, alone, is an indication of how wide is the scope of the originators of the conference and the commissioning of this volume. However, no title for the original conference is given and it is correspondingly difficult to review the volume as a whole. The two editors, Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, write a joint introduction, which does help one's orientation. Russia, in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the years up to the 1917 Revolution, was a turbulent, mystical, exalted and murderous place. It was beginning to experience the effect of industrialisation, urbanisation and literacy. Profound spirituality sat uncomfortably alongside superstition. It was the age of Rasputin. For the first time the hegemony of the Russian Orthodox Church had been broken by the more liberal religious laws forced upon the establishment in 1905, when the rights of both Protestants and Jews were acknowledged for the first time.

One misses here, though, a chapter which could have come at the beginning giving a detailed overview of the Orthodox Church as it was on the eve of the Revolution, with all its shortcomings set alongside the genuine and sometimes successful reforms which were now increasingly in place (a process which Lenin and the Bolsheviks singularly failed to take into account). Instead, one is plunged immediately after the introduction into a flurry of chapters on specialised themes.

In chapter i Christine D. Worobec ‘examines 247 miracles ascribed to the intercessory powers of Serafim of Sarov’ and two bishops, all three canonised in the two decades before the Revolution. Then Roy R. Robson, in chapter ii, takes us to a very specialised place indeed – the Arctic archipelago monastery of Solovki (which would soon be transformed into the paradigm of the Soviet prison system, the history of which was published by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag archipelago). Robson's account is affecting, well written and opens up a vista which was cloudy before history engulfed it in its subsequent horrors.

Then we come to an account of the influence of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God. The author, Vera Shevzov, says that she has read more than 300 sermons delivered in its honour. That must have been a quite repetitive task. We pass, by way of the ‘Social role for women’ and the sacrament of marriage (with divorce statistics), to the decree of 17 April 1905 which, for the first time, allowed conversion from one form of religious faith to another.

Heather J. Coleman (chapter viii) vividly recounts the conflict in a Cossack village resulting from the rapid expansion of a local Baptist community. Such research adds a great deal to our knowledge of the period, but the non-specialist, at this point, needs to be given at least an outline history of how the Protestants (not least the Lutherans, barely mentioned in passing in this volume) reached Russia in the first place.

Subsequent chapters cover, if anything, an even more scattered range of subjects. There is one on the Molokans (an ‘indigenous’ sectarian group) who tried unsuccessfully to build a legal house of prayer in Baku, Azerbaijan, followed by two on aspects of Judaism. Mark D Steinberg's valuable study of the ‘worker-poets’ of the early years of the twentieth century opens up a chapter of Russian literature which does not appear in the standard histories. Immediately we are plunged into an account of ‘The confluence of Nietzsche and Orthodoxy in Russian religious thought’ – another first for this volume, and surely presenting a thesis which will prove controversial.

Again, the sudden swerve into a study of the artist, Kazimir Malevich, is somewhat disconcerting, but the text is accompanied by helpful illustrations of his Black Square, Black Cross and Black Circle. It is thought-provoking and refreshing to see these works, recently on view at the Royal Academy in London, taking their place in a book which focuses on the religion of the period.

To sum up, Sacred stories contains many positives which do not quite add up to a satisfying whole. Paul Valliere, in a fine concluding chapter on ‘The theology of culture in late imperial Russia’, quotes an impressive passage from the priest-philosopher Fr Pavel Florensky, addressing the Moscow Theological Academy in January 1906 in these words:

Herein lies the tragedy of the Russian Orthodox Church on the threshold of the Revolution. Florensky's words form a fitting epilogue to the book, words not entirely irrelevant to the present.