Living in the End Times, livre ebook

A Note from the Author

Living in the End Times was anticipated by a film, a creative documentary I made with filmmaker Klára Trencsényi, which follows the same Russian Old Believer community portrayed in the book. Filmed over the period of three years, Birds' Way (2009) offers an intimate portrait of a vulnerable community whose historical memory gives meaning to the present and hope for the future. It speaks of failed rituals, the lack of priests, a haunted past and the loss of tradition, with warmth, respect, and humour. It was the film's final scene, pointing to their uncertain future, that ultimately motivated the making of the book. While the film captures a moment of crisis and the possibility of their world coming to an end, the book examines this possibility in depth, tracing how Old Believers have responded to such challenges and their method of hope.

The film and the book speak to each other across multiple registers. While the visual and textual narratives stand on their own, they converge in the story they tell and their shared aesthetic sensibility. They also complement each other, bringing into conversation two distinct modes of attending to history as it is made by particular people, through collective rituals, ethical practices, and the cultivation of hope. Paired with the book or specific chapters that discuss the stories and characters it portrays, the film provides a different register of engaging with them. It renders visible the immediacy of interactions and emotions that cannot be fully captured in writing. Thus, the film is not just an illustration of the book, nor does the book only contextualize the film. Waves of social change, from internal divisions and migration to external secularization and modernization, have reinforced this community's commitment to the old Orthodox rites and customs, as well as their long-standing conviction that the end times are imminent.

Living in the End Times offers an in-depth ethnographic and historical exploration of the persistence of this community in contemporary Romania. Vlad Naumescu examines their ways of making history, pursuing continuity, and inscribing their historical experience into a narrative of radical hope. The interwoven life stories of the Old Believers challenge broader dichotomies of the secular and the religious, socialist and post-socialist, and continuity and rupture, revealing a community whose obligation to bear the past sanctifies the present and gives scope to the future. Against the threats of spiritual doubt, ritual failure, and lacking priesthood that have defined centuries of religious crisis, Old Belief has already provided its adherents the means to turn rupture into continuity, loss into creative transformation, and endings into beginnings.

Living in the End Times reveals how the most orthodox of Eastern Christians became modern by staying true to their faith, inviting us to reconsider the nature of orthodoxy, historicity and modernity.

Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Names
Introduction
1. Beginnings
2. Challenges
3. Exemplars
4. Doubts
5. Promises
Conclusion
References
Index