LAUSR

Famously, the myth of Moscow as the Third Rome was allegedly forged by the Pskovian monk Filofej in a letter to tsar Vasilij III in 1511. The most often quoted sentence of this letter reads: “Two Romes have fallen, one stands, a fourth there shall not be [...].” In 2011, Jardar Østbø defended his Ph.D. dissertation on contemporary elaborations about the myth of the Third Rome at the University of Bergen. Now, the Norwegian scholar presents an updated version of his valuable and important dissertation. At the core of his book lie four case studies in which he examines the Third Rome myth as advanced by Vadim Cymburskij (1957–2009), Aleksandr Dugin (born 1962), Natalija Naročnickaja (born 1948) and Egor Cholmogorov (born 1975). Østbø describes these four authors in view of their conceptualization regarding the relation between Orthodox religion and the Russian territory. He organizes his systemic approach in the following table: