Possessed: Women, Witches, And Demons In Imperial Russia

-- Women known as "shriekers" howled, screamed, convulsed, and tore their clothes. Believed by many to be possessed by demons, these central figures in the cultural drama of klikushestvo stirred various reactions among those who encountered them. While peasants and clergymen sheltered the shriekers, others analyzed, diagnosed, and objectified them. The Russian Orthodox Church played an important role, for, while moving toward a scientific explanation for the behavior of the klikushi, it was reluctant to abandon the ideas of possession and miraculous exorcism.

Possessed is the first book to examine the phenomenon of demon possession in rural Russia. Drawing from a wide range of sources -- religious, psychiatric, ethnographic, and literary -- Worobec looks at klikushestvo over a broad span of time but focuses mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when all of Russian society felt the pressure of modernization.

Worobec's definitive study is as much an account of perceptions of the klikushi as an analysis of the women themselves. Engaging broad issues in Russian history, women's history, and popular religious culture, Possessed carries rich implications for understanding the ways in which a complex society treated women believed to be out of control.