Мормоны в России

After returning from serving my mission in St. Petersburg, Russia, I have followed what I refer to as the “Russian news” (news about Russia, not necessarily in Russian) closer than I ever did before.  The people I came to understand and appreciate and the places I shed tears over as the plane took off as I departed St. Petersburg meant a great deal to me and I wondered how their great yet still somewhat mysterious country was doing.  Just as I didn’t follow Russia much in the news before I left on my mission, I rarely followed what was happening with the Church in the news before my mission.  We always got the Church News in the Deseret News, but I rarely cracked it.  There was a feature on the back page that typically told a little story like the stories in the back of the Ensign, and I read it sometimes, but that was it, and that feature hardly qualified as news.  I tend to pay a little more attention to the news of the Church nowadays.  It is not much of a stretch to think that just as my mission made Russia more important to me, it made the Church more important to me.

In Мормоны в России: Путь длиной в столетие (ISBN: 9-785-91189-005-6), or Mormons in Russia: A Century-long Path (my translation), by Sergei Antonenko, these two newer interests of mine are brought together in an academic, historical essay on the Church in Russia.  Antonenko gives a brief history of the Church, including its founding, Brigham Young leading the Saints to Utah, and its relative stability and growth since that time.  He also discusses in rather finite detail the theology of the Church.  The next big portion of the work is dedicated to what various pre-Soviet writers and intellectuals in the imperial Russia wrote and thought about the Church.  Dostoevsky and Tolstoy get specific mention.  Finally, the history of the Church in post-Soviet Russia is discussed.  Since this includes the late 1980s when missionaries traveled to the Soviet Union from Finland for the weekend only, it might be slightly inaccurate to say “post-Soviet Russia.”  As with the rest of the book, the writing about the Church in Russia has less to do with specific incidents such as organizational changes, legal registrations, or sensational events like missionaries being kidnapped, and more to do with how the Church has fit or not fit into Russian society and the general Russian consciousness.  It is, in places, a fascinating look into the perceptions — and souls — of Russia’s great people.

Overall, I thought the book was good.  I appreciated Antonenko’s even-handedness.  Discussions of Mormon doctrine can be fraught with misconceptions and sometimes outright lies when done by one who isn’t a member of the Church.  While Antonenko’s presentation wasn’t 100% doctrinally sound, it was very close.  I also found his pointing out of parallels in other world religions or in the scriptures to be refreshing.  His point over and over seemed to be that although Mormons have a bad reputation for believing some rather outlandish things, a person who is truly a student of religion would know that those things really aren’t that outlandish and are often rather mainstream thinking within certain groups or at certain times in the world’s history.  Antonenko is a religious studies expert and personally involved in multi-denominational cooperation efforts, which only adds to the respectability and sincerity of his presentation.  At one point he went so far as to note that he wondered why Mormons take so much heat from fellow Christians.  In fact, he couldn’t find anything wrong in being a Mormon and living a clean life free of alcohol and full of hard work, health, and effort toward strong family relations; it’s even better, he said, than claiming to be orthodox and being a drunkard, unhealthy, and having poor relationships with one’s family.  There were, of course, some things I thought could’ve been improved upon.  One, for example, was that I hoped the book would spend more time on actual members of the Church or the Church organization in Russia instead of so much discussion of Mormon doctrine and pre-October Revolution press about the Church.  Another would be the typical fascination with polygamy and other aspects of the Mormon Church that, although presented fairly and almost completely accurately, are secondary in a discussion of what constitutes Church doctrine.  More ink could’ve been spent on eternal families and the all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ.  Finally, I would’ve liked the book more had it been less philosophical and geared toward understanding the Russian psyche and more about the specific people and incidents that have given rise to two stakes of Zion in Russia.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.

Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip

As a young boy — and to be honest, still today — World War I aircraft fascinated me.  Biplanes and triplanes seemed so exotic and were firmly a part of the romantic age of flying.  The appearance on the scene of monoplanes as the war drew to a close always seemed rather anti-climatic to me and even somewhat disappointing.  Thanks to a bit of help from my dad, I once even presented a special, extra-curricular report in school on WWI aircraft.  Only later did I learn of the stalemate trench warfare that was such a hallmark of WWI.  It was even later, probably in high school, that I was told that one man, then termed a revolutionary, now termed a terrorist, essentially started WWI through his actions alone.  When a Serbian assassin killed Franz Ferdinand of the ruling Hapsburg family, WWI was set in motion.  The high school teachers and textbooks forget that it was really wasn’t that simple, but the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, remained an interesting figure from an interesting part of the world.

Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip by Tony Fabijančić (ISBN: 978-0-88864-519-7) is a travelogue that traces the route of Gavrilo Princip’s travels through the former Yugoslavia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Set largely in the modern-day Balkans, the book uses Princip and his story as a way to understand the region’s complicated history and its rather sticky present through observation, interviews, and referencing historical sources.  The author, rather sympathetic to Princip before undertaking his research and travels, was also optimistic at the outset about the chances for the various ethnic and religious groups of the former Yugoslavia to mend things up a little bit.  By the end of his efforts and the end of the book, after traveling through thick forests, high alps, Mediterranean coastline, and the smog of big cities, he has changed his tune on both counts, considering Princip to have misjudged the impact of his actions, and not just misjudged, but having brought about more harm than good as well as coming to the realization that the peoples of the region, harboring some of the same prejudices and stereotypes as those held about 100 years ago as WWI broke out, aren’t breaking out of those molds any time soon. 

Tracing the life and travels of Princip proved an interesting motif and an interesting background to the pictures of the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia.  I was most struck by the fact that in the larger cities, much had been repaired or rebuilt when it came to buildings or infrastructure, but when it came to people’s feelings, most of those whom the author spoke with had experienced no rebuilding at all since the fall of Communist Yugoslavia.  The author, partially of Croatian descent himself, seemed to think that, much like Communist Russia’s experience, the ethnic harmony of the Communist time in Yugoslavia was not genuine.  While the Left likes to play this type of ethnic and racial strife up in America, I am of the opinion that very little of these types of feelings exist in America, and I think it is because of this that Americans, myself included, have such a hard time understanding an sympathizing with the people of the Balkans.  We’d rather worry about our own families’s welfare, our jobs, and our favorite sports teams than whether or not we should hate the people next door because they say a few words differently than we do, have a different last name, or belong to a different church.  The book was an interesting, although not gripping read, and there are better works out there if one is after pure history, but this provided a slightly lighter approach to both the history and the state of current affairs.

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The Three Musketeers

I have always been a firm believer in reading the book before I see the movie.  I guess there are a few reasons for this, but one is that I prefer to not have a movie’s set, costumes, actors, and incomplete story line influence my reading.  I find that my mind’s eye can usually come up with better scenery, more vivid characters, and increased excitement, passion, and other feelings than any movie can.  I also enjoy the fuller plots, characters that are explored in greater detail, and being able to catch the intangibles that just don’t port over from an original work to a reinterpretation, no matter how true to the original the copy is.  While there have been multiple theatrical releases of Dumas’ famous work, The Three Musketeers, during my lifetime, I have never watched a single one.  My general lack of interest in movies contributed to this, but I also wanted to read the book first.

As those more in tune with pop culture than me know, The Three Musketeers (ISBN: 0-679-60332-8) by Alexandre Dumas tells the story of the young d’Artagnan and his three protectors and friends, the eponymous three Musketeers, who go by their pseudonyms, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos.  Duelling brings d’Artagnan and the Musketeers together, and from there they fight duels and more serious battles together, continually looking out for each other.  They manage to get themselves mixed up in high-level intrigue as the queen of France, Cardinal Richelieu, the king of France, and the Duke of Buckingham play out their political ambitions, romantic interests, and personal aspirations in Paris’s parlors, on battlefields, and through behind-the-scenes intrigues involving soldiers, churchmen, and criminals.  There is a decent bit of action with horse rides, pistol fights, sword fights, battles between armies and between minds, and seduction.  In the end, the bad guys get what is coming to them, and in what seems to be a bit of a pattern for Dumas, not all of the good guys make it out alive.  D’Artagnan and his friends are more or less unscathed and have lived up to their immortal motto, “All for one, one for all!”

I, obviously, cannot compare the book to the unseen movies, but standing on its own, I enjoyed the book.  I was not sure what to expect after being slightly disappointed by The Count of Monte Cristo.  I thought there was a good mix of action, strategy, and romance.  I enjoyed the lack of philosophizing by the main characters.  The storyline flowed and was more or less believable (maybe this shouldn’t be a requirement for fiction, but the Count’s inhuman abilities to remember things as well as his supposedly oriental medicinal abilities were part of my underwhelming read of that other immortal Dumas story).  I thought the story was fun and easy to read, which cannot be said of all classics, but probably help make and keep this story a classic.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.