LITERATURE

LITERATURE. This word has wide application. The Orthodox “library” already includes the Scripture, Church Fathers, liturgical books (qq.v.), writings of ascetics, scriptural commentary, liturgical commentaries, hagiography (q.v.), doctrine, ethics, etc. The Church also inherited the library of classical and Hellenistic Greece and Rome, together with that of the Near East, each of which had its own contributions to make to Holy Tradition (q.v.). Literature in the modern sense, i.e., poetry, prose, theater, etc., is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Orthodox world. To be sure, during the Byzantine era (q.v.) there were examples of a secular literature that included histories, encyclopedias, grammars, philosophy, and epical and lyrical poetry. Save for the first two, the production is of small significance in comparison with the Medieval and Late Medieval West, if only because Byzantium’s (q.v.) fall was succeeded by a Dark Age of several centuries.

When one does find literature (in the modern sense) in Orthodox countries, it is one that has developed on the basis of Western European models of the 18th c. and 19th c. Nonetheless, the inheritance of the Church is still discernible. Russia is surely the most important contributor to world literature in Eastern Europe. Its greatest writers, e.g., Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol (q.v.), Dostoevsky (q.v.), Tolstoy, down to Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet period, have been touched by and reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the great themes of the Orthodox Church’s liturgy and (less so) its theology (qq.v.). Over the past century, the main writers of Greece, for example the poets Palamas, Cavafy, Seferis, and Elitis, or the fiction writers Kazantzakis, Papadiamantis, etc., have provided a similar example of inherited cultural-religious values integrated-or sometimes clashing-with the forms and philosophies received from the West.