ABSTRACT

Over the summer of 1866, the majority of the Swedish-speaking population on the Baltic island of Ruhnu (then part of the Russian Empire’s Livland province) sought conversion from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Despite interest from the Russian secular and ecclesiastical authorities, however, the conversions did not take place. The islanders used the threat of conversion to leverage concessions from the Lutheran consistory: once achieved, the community lost any interest in pursuing Orthodoxy further. The following article analyses largely unknown sources from both Estonian and Swedish archives to show how the island’s social structure and peculiar geographical position conditioned its inhabitants’ religious choices, thereby providing insight into a previously unstudied instance of peasant agency in the Russian Empire and contributing to studies of that polity’s environmental, ethnic, and confessional diversity.

摘要

1866 年夏天，波罗的海鲁努岛（当时是俄罗斯帝国利夫兰省的一部分）上的大多数讲瑞典语的人口寻求从路德教改信俄罗斯东正教。尽管俄罗斯世俗和教会当局对此很感兴趣，但皈依并没有发生。岛民利用皈依的威胁来利用路德教会的让步：一旦达成，社区就失去了进一步追求东正教的兴趣。以下文章分析了爱沙尼亚和瑞典档案中大部分未知的资料，以展示该岛的社会结构和特殊的地理位置如何影响其居民的宗教选择，