Wandering Russia for Christ's Sake

The name of Sergey Vasilyevich Maksimov, a writer, ethnographer, and researcher of folk life, is well known to connoisseurs and enthusiasts of domestic history and culture. The book "Wandering Russia for Christ's Sake" (1877) was written by Maksimov based on his impressions from a trip to the Northwestern Territory, where he was commissioned in 1868 by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society: the writer traveled through the Smolensk, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Vilnius, Grodno, and Minsk provinces. In the book, Maksimov addresses a phenomenon of folk life known as pilgrimage — with its various socio-cultural and domestic peculiarities. Pilgrims, Christ-lovers, hermits, beggars, wandering cripples, homeless brothers, and others — among them were true professionals in their field, connoisseurs of customs, beliefs, and signs, performers of spiritual poems and epic tales. Pilgrimage appears not only as a way of life but also as a spiritual quest for an Orthodox person, for whom value and meaning are embedded in the very idea of a journey.