Vladimir Pecherin

Vladimir Sergeyvich Pecherin (Владимир Сергеевич Печерин) (27 June 1807 – 28 April 1885), was a Russian nihilist, Romantic poet, and Classicist, who later became a Roman Catholic priest in 19th-century Ireland.

A member of the hereditary Russian nobility from Odessa, Pecherin grew up witnessing his father regularly beating both the servants and his own mother. After he was an adult, he briefly served as a Professor of Classics at the University of Moscow, but left both his faculty position and the Russian Empire to become a dissident intellectual who rejected and denounced both Christianity and Tsarism.^[1]

After several years of living in Europe, Pecherin shocked everyone who knew him by converting from Atheism to the Roman Catholic Church. He eventually was ordained to the priesthood and spent the remainder of his life ministering to the poorest of the poor in the tenement slums and hospitals of Dublin, Ireland.

As a former Westernizer, Fr. Pecherin's autobiographical notes and in his letters to other Russians provide a historical context to the ideological evolution of the Russian intelligentsia during the 1860s and 1870s. Pecherin's writings present the Russian Zeitgeist^[2] of the period artistically. He is also believed to have inspired many characters in Russian literature, particularly in the novels of Mikhail Lermontov and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Early years

Pecherin was born in the town of Velyka Dymerka in the Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine) on 27 June 1807.^[3] He was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church.^[4]

Pecherin was attracted to the moral and religious ideology of Utopian socialism. He entered Moscow University, as a student of Classical linguistics, and he wrote manuscripts of poetry that circulated among his university companions. Pecherin was sent abroad for two years on a government scholarship to complete his education.

In 1835, after returning to Moscow University from his travels, even before completing his degree, Pecherin was appointed as Professor of the Greek Language and the Classics. After one term, in 1836, he left Russia to pursue Russian nihilism in Europe. In a letter explaining to the authorities, Pecherin stated that he would never return to a country among whose inhabitants it was impossible to find the imprint of their Creator. He is considered by some to have been the first Russian political emigrant.

Self-exile

In 1840, after four years of exploring Europe, at times reduced to complete poverty, Pecherin unexpectedly converted to Roman Catholicism and became a member of the Redemptorists whose mission was to work among the poorest of the poor. He lived in a monastery in Clapham, near London and later in Ireland, where his skills as an orator attracted large audiences and made Pecherin's sermons very popular.^[5]

In 1855, he was the last person to be prosecuted for blasphemy in Ireland.^[6] The trial, which was a major public event, took place at Kingstown. Fr. Pecherin, who had been spearheading a campaign against immoral literature, stood accused of burning copies of the Protestant King James Bible in the same bonfire with immoral and pornographic literature upon Guy Fawkes Day. Despite many witnesses, the jury returned a verdict of not proven. Fr. Pecherin's acquittal was raucously celebrated by the Catholic population of Dublin.

Later life

In 1862, after 20 years of service as a missionary, Pecherin left the Redemptorists. He spent the last 23 years of his life serving as a chaplain at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. During his time in Dublin, he wrote his memoirs, Apologia pro vita mea (Notes from Beyond the Tomb). His memoirs were so controversial, critical of both the Russian government and the Catholic Church of the time, that they were not published in Russia until a hundred years after his death. They contain an account of his experiences in Europe, particularly in Belgium, after leaving Russia, and his fight against poverty.

Pecherin died in Dublin on 29 April 1885.

Quotes

• "How sweet it is to hate one's native land and avidly desire its ruin - and in its ruin to discern the dawn of universal rebirth."

In popular culture

• According to Pecherin scholar Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova, Mikhail Lermontov is believed to have named the Byronic hero of his 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time "Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin" in a deliberate reference to Vladimir Pecherin.^[7]
• According to Pecherin scholar Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova, Fyodor Dostoevsky, as a passionate believer in Tsarism, Russian Orthodoxy, Caesaropapism, Slavophilism, and anti-Catholicism, considered Pecherin, "to be the emblematic figure of a Westerniser, a person who had lost his identity and human worth by severing his Russian roots."^[8] It is accordingly believed that Dostoevsky's anti-materialist "one secluded thinker" in The Idiot is an allusion to Pecherin.^[9] The early life and Romantic poetry of Stepan Trofimovoch Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's The Possessed are also a deliberate satire of Pecherin.^[10][11] Furthermore, the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, "uses arguments that Dostoevsky attributed to Catholics like Pecherin."^[12]
• In the movie The Russia House, starring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer's character "Dante," a Russian scientist, quotes Pecherin.

References

Further reading

• Vladimir Pecherin (2008), The First Russian Political Émigré: Notes from Beyond the Grave, or Apologia Pro Vita Mea, University College Dublin Press.