concept
Molokans
also: молоканы, Molokan
Members of a Russian Spiritual Christian sect (the name from "moloko," milk, for their practice of drinking milk during Orthodox fasts) who rejected icons, formal clergy, and much Orthodox ritual; the Samoylovka tenant farmers who nearly drown Merik under the ice on suspicion of horse theft are identified as Molokans, marking them as religious and social outsiders within the story's peasant world.
Reading notes
- The Murder §33 Molokanism
The gendarme's guess is a misidentification: the Molokans (from moloko, "milk," for drinking milk during Orthodox fasts) were a rationalist Spiritual Christian sect centered in the Caucasus who rejected icons, ritual, and clergy outright, whereas Matvei's account describes ecstatic collective trembling and dancing -- practices associated instead with the Khlysts (see section 47 and the glossary note there). The gendarme's confident but wrong guess is itself characteristic: sectarian variety was widely conflated by outside observers of the period.
- Thieves §56 Molokans
A Russian Spiritual Christian sect (the name from "moloko," milk, for their practice of eating dairy during Orthodox fasts) that rejected icons and much of Orthodox ritual and clergy; identifying the Samoylovka tenant farmers as Molokans marks them, within the story's peasant world, as a distinct and somewhat separate religious community -- context for why some thirty of them acted together, and with such violence, against a man merely suspected, on flimsy grounds, of horse theft.
- Thieves §56 Molokans
Merik's account of being nearly killed under the ice by a Molokan mob (sections 56-58) is the story's other major act of extrajudicial violence besides Chirikov's murder and the inn's eventual burning -- delivered, like those, in a flat, unpunished, uncommented register that Chekhov never resolves into either justice or clear condemnation.