Almost Island Acknowledgements
“Doomsday Sects and Everyday Sects” contains excerpts, by kind permission, from Mikhail Epstein’s “cult classic” translated, by Eve Adler, as Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (Philadephia: Paul Dry Books, 2002)
The narrator’s voice and persona in these extracts we include here is, for the most part, not that of Epstein himself, but of professor Raissa O. Gubaydulina, a committed and evangelical atheist researcher into remnants of religious sects; the indented passages are quotes from Gubaydulina’s archive at the former Institute of Atheism. The book is supposedly a reprint of an obscure 1985 study from the Soviet era. Needless to say, it is not quite clear whether or not the cults that Gubaydulina presents to us have ever existed. As Epstein notes in his “auto-commentary”: “…the characters of the Comedy of Ideas, perhaps, need no names—they are well enough served by initials, abstracted from concrete names as ideas are abstracted from concrete persons.”