Preface to the English Edition
(by Eve Adler)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have heard plenty of post-mortems on the communist economic and political project. But the Soviet Union was also the first great attempt to realize the ancient dream of an atheist society. How did that experiment turn out? Did Soviet atheism take root in Russian souls? Did it manage to form a radically new type of human being, to change the landscape of the human heart, to replace the typical spiritual experiences of Western civilization with unheard-of novelties? Do today’s Russians still belong to the same spiritual world as today’s Americans, today’s Europeans? On these questions there has been a resounding silence. Of course we can read plenty of statistics and anecdotes bearing upon church attendance in today’s Russia— the ups and downs of the reconstituted Russian Orthodox Church. But, since the fundamental question concerns people’s inner life, all this information remains dumb without a special sort of guide to make it speak to us intelligibly. Mikhail Epstein’s book is such a guide, with the sympathetic heart of a participant, the erudition of a scholar, and the cool eye of a curious observer. But above all — Mikhail Epstein hears voices, and his literary art enables us to hear those voices for ourselves.