The article studies the polemical orientation of the hagiographical Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself in relation to the author's earlier works, The Answer of the Orthodox, and other texts that were included together with the Life in the Pustozersk Collection. An analysis of the creative evolution of Avvakum's thought will demonstrate that the Life's appeal to holy foolishness at its narrative climax was its strongest ideological weapon against the new Church elite (the Nikonians). This appeal gave rise to an unprecedented emphasis on the author's personal life experience that was meant to be proof of the “theoretical” arguments against Nikonian rationalism in the The Answer to the Orthodox. As a demonstration of a mystical-experiential approach to knowledge of God, his dramatized holy foolishness justified his choice to present his own biography as a publicistic hagiographical narrative.

Globalization is the main trend and reality of the modern world social processes, which is opposed by a national and cultural, but above all, religious tradition. Globalization and traditionalism have nonlinear vectors and ambivalent models of interaction, which is most vividly traced in the study of the history and a current state of the Old Believers in Russia and abroad. The tragic events of the split of the Russian Church put the Old Believers outside the law, caused them to flee to the borderlands of the state and beyond. The flight took the character of migration flows, shaped the transnational ethno-confessional Russian religious diaspora of Old Believers in different parts of the world. The modern Old Believers are in a difficult search for self-determination in modern times answering global challenges in very polar variations: migration/archaization, glocality/entrepreneurship, literacy/strength in faith, practicality and activity/orientation to spiritual needs. In general, the Old Believers have adapted the globalizing modernity in accordance with their ideas. If for most of their history the Old Believers were perceived as a countercultural phenomenon, marginal to the dominant culture, be it Orthodox or Soviet, now the Old Believers are taking shape of a rather noticeable religious traditionalist subculture with a high adaptive potential in the context of globalization.

The paper includes the results of research into the language reflected in the texts of Old Believers' council decisions. For that purpose a large diachronic corpus of such texts of speech genre was used. The research focused on the concept “sobor”, one of the central concepts in the discourse on Old Believers and very frequent in their sources. The analysis consisted of a lexical-semantic description based on the interrelation between the language material and the socio-cultural context of the corresponding historical period. The methods of sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics and lexical semantics were combined in order to obtain a new approach to the texts of Old Believers' council decisions. The result of the research is a detailed overview of the specific way the concept “sobor” evolved in the Old Believers' sources. It outlines the dynamics within that confessional community and compares the development of the described concept to the processes in the standard Russian language.

The article describes an expedition to the Old Believer communities located in the states of Paraná and Mato Grosso of Brazil (January-February 2013). The route of the trip is described, information is given about the history of the migration of the Old Believers from China to Brazil; and characterized their modern life. The materials of interviews with both Old Believers and Brazilians - representatives of other faiths-were used.

Ivan Nikiforovich Zavoloko (1897-1984) - a well-known figure of the Old Believer movement, historian, local historian, folklorist, collector of antiquities, educator, who had great authority both among the Old Believers and the scientific community. He actively collaborated with the Pushkin House and the Library of the USSR Academy of Sciences (BAN) in Leningrad in collecting manuscripts in the Baltic States and studying them. The published correspondence covers the period from 1972 to 1983 and includes 46 documents. Those are letters from I.N. Zavoloko to the curator of the manuscripts of the BAN N.Yu. Bubnov, to other employees of the Manuscript Department; and some response letters.