Vladimir Pecherin
Vladimir Sergeyvich Pecherin (Владимир Сергеевич Печерин) (27 June 1807 – 28 April 1885), was a Russian nihilist, Romantic poet, and Classicist, who later became a Roman Catholic priest in 19th-century Ireland.
Acting on behalf of Tsar Nicholas I, Uvarov invited Pecherin to continue his studies as a Classicist at State expense at Friedrich Wilhelm Royal University in Berlin.
Before joining the faculty in January 1836, Pecherin completed and defended his doctoral thesis at the University of St Petersburg in order to fully qualify for his promised position.
After only one term, Pecherin decided to quietly leave Russia to openly embrace Russian nihilism and creative freedom in Western Europe.
Although he had officially remained a member, Pecherin was also offended by the traditional subservience of the Russian Orthodox Church to both Tsarist autocracy and control by the State.
After using the pretext of visiting Berlin for personal reasons, Pecherin was granted official permission to travel abroad and left Russia on 23 June 1836.
Due both to his decision to permanently leave his country for political reasons and send a letter to the Tsar explaining why, the 1836 emigration of Vladimir Pecherin is sometimes compared with the defection to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by Prince Andrey Kurbsky during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.
After four years as part of the literary bohemia of Europe and at times being reduced to complete poverty, Pecherin unexpectedly converted to Roman Catholicism on 19 July 1840.
He lived in a monastery in Clapham, near London and later in Ireland, where his skills as an orator attracted large audiences and made Pecherin's sermons very popular.
John Henry Newman invited Pecherin to preach a St Patrick's Day sermon in the chapel of the newly founded University College Dublin.
An attendee later recalled how Pecherin used the sermon to covertly express his own Irish nationalist and anti-colonialist views, "One year... the famous Russian missionary, Father Petcherine, appeared in the pulpit and preached the panegyric of the Saint in a truly wonderful address.
This foreigner, with a command in English which the most practiced orators might have envied, not only analyzed the character and motives of St. Patrick, and described his career with extraordinary and spirit-stirring power, but also evinced a pathetic sympathy - the interest of the heart - with the woeful history of the people whose cause for religious sake he had made his own, which moved not a few of those present to tears.
[23] In 1863, the extreme Slavophile Moscow Gazette argued that Pecherin's return to Russia might be welcome, but only if he would agree to facilitate better relations between the Government and the Catholic clergy, who were alleged to have singlehandedly instigated the recent nationalist January Uprising against Tsarist rule in Congress Poland.
[24] In response, Pecherin reached out to his former St Petersburg University friend Feodor Chizhov and began making arrangements to write and publish his memoirs.
These are the reasons for the bitterness sometimes expressed in his memoirs; in which either Pecherin or his editor Chizhov, "described his years in the Redemptorist Order as spiritual slumber and his entire Catholic experience as a fatal error of judgment.
"[28] There were other reasons for this, however, according to Pecherin scholar Natalia Pervukhina-Kamyshnikova, "Aware of the incomprehensibility of his conversion and his readers' insatiable curiosity about his motivation, he tried to minimize the significance of his Catholic experience in their eyes.
Despite Chizhov's best efforts to edit the draft into an acceptable form to the government during an era of the limited relaxation of censorship in the Russian Empire under Tsar Alexander, "political considerations" still prevented the publication of Pecherin's memoirs.
[30] After a three-month long illness, Vladimir Pecherin died in the boarding house of Miss G. M. Furlong, 47 Lower Dominick St., Dublin on 17/29 April 1885.
[31] His obituary in the Freeman's Journal commented, "Father Pecherin will be deeply regretted for his great piety, unassuming demeanor, gentleness of disposition, and charity."
[34] Pecherin's memoirs remained unpublished until his eventual biographer, Mikhail Gershenzon, acquired the manuscript while researching it's author and began publishing limited excerpts in 1910.
