The mystery genre in Russian cultural and spiritual tradition

This article examines the genre of the religious mystery play in the Russian cultural and spiritual tradition, from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Drawing on historical and literary scholarship, it analyzes the reasons for the near-total absence of religious theatre in medieval Russia — patristic resistance to theatre, the predominance of iconography, the already strongly theatricalized Byzantine liturgy — before tracing the gradual emergence of liturgical dramatic forms such as the Washing of the Feet, the Procession of the Ass, and the Act of the Furnace. The article then shows how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, clerics such as Simeon of Polotsk and Metropolitan Dimitri of Rostov developed an original form of spiritual dramaturgy, synthesizing Western influences with Orthodox sensibility. The principal contribution lies in the identification of a distinctly Russian "mysterial vision," one that favors symbolic suggestion over the literal representation of the sacred.