1. Introduction
[1.1] On September 8, 2005, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on a new version of Harry Potter's adventures proposed by teachers at a Sunday school in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan (Nuykina 2005). The play, Easter Miracle, or The Repentance of Harry Potter, picks up after Goblet of Fire and immediately overturns the premise of the series. A dying Dumbledore confesses to Harry, "We always taught you that there is good magic and evil magic, but after this battle it became clear to me that good and evil magic are two sides of the same locket […] I taught you evil."
[1.2] To contextualize this analysis, a brief plot summary is necessary. Harry learns that Voldemort has won and Dumbledore is dying. In his last moments, Dumbledore tells Harry that all magic is evil and urges him to seek God. Harry flees Voldemort's followers and takes refuge in a church, where a priest named Mr. Blum explains that his parents had rejected magic and that his mother protected him through the sign of the cross. Blum sends him to Greece, the center of Christianity. There, an Orthodox family shelters Harry: Anastas, his sister Agnia, and their grandmother, who teach him the faith. The bandits pursuing him find their magic weakening on holy ground. Harry and his friends then defeat Voldemort with the sign of the cross at Easter (note 1).
[1.3] Methodologically, I rely on a textual and discursive analysis of the play's script, combined with an examination of its media reception in 2005. This follows Pratt's idea that literary works must be read as "linguistic activity which cannot be understood apart from the context in which it occurs and the people who participate in it" (1977, viii). The analysis therefore treats the play not as an autonomous aesthetic object but as a speech act designed to forge a specific ideological and religious consensus between the Orthodox educator and the young audience.
[1.4] The absence of empirical audience research limits any broad claims about the play's actual psychological impact on child spectators, though the text itself makes its didactic intent plain. My central question is: How does a church-sanctioned pedagogical play draw on the recognizable tropes of a global franchise to construct a reactionary, ideological fix-it narrative? Examining this case extends the category of transformative works to offline religious pedagogical theater, showing how educators appropriate global pop culture for localized, conservative ends.
[1.5] The Repentance of Harry Potter functions as Russian Orthodox catechesis for children. The play is not simply a polemic against a Western cultural import; it appropriates J. K. Rowling's narrative and converts it into a didactic tool for Orthodox instruction. Through specific theatrical strategies, symbolic motifs of water and fire, and an implicit Russian mediator figure, the play transforms Harry from a universal hero of magic into a familiar, by Russia called "our own" Orthodox God-seeker, offering a Russian answer to a global phenomenon.
[1.6] As Stanfill notes, scholarship that defaults to "progressive fandom" leaves the scientific community unprepared for the contemporary intertwining of reactionary politics and fannish practices (2020, 124). I situate the play within its Russian media and religious context, then analyze how it employs pro-theism and symbolic motifs to build its theological world. I trace Harry's character arc and step-by-step conversion guided by mentor figures. The play's project is ideological and cultural, making Harry Potter safe, comprehensible, and morally useful for a young Orthodox audience. The plot is then broken down into "building blocks" (Busse 2017, 135) to isolate its linking components.
2. "Our answer" as reader response
[2.1] The Repentance of Harry Potter was created at the height of Pottermania in Russia and serves as a direct response to fierce debates about the series within the Russian Orthodox community. As Borenstein (2025) explains, the Russian Orthodox Church initially viewed Harry Potter as a dangerous Western occult import, making it an early target in Russia's conservative culture wars. Critics, particularly between 2000 and 2007, frequently cast Rowling's magic as satanic and harmful to children, while liberal Orthodox figures like Andrei Kuraev defended the books, arguing for the value of secular literature. This polarized climate created demand for cultural products that could either neutralize the perceived threat of Harry Potter or co-opt its popularity for religious ends.
[2.2] The play fits squarely into a broader Russian cultural paradigm that Borenstein identifies as "our answer to Harry Potter" (2025, 51): a post-Soviet impulse to produce a "global transmedia sensation of its own" (87) by creating domestic alternatives to popular Western franchises. The expression itself paraphrases the 1920s Soviet slogan "Our answer to Chamberlain," carrying a subtext of defiant opposition to the West (Velikanova 2013, 57). Where many such answers take the form of parody, The Repentance of Harry Potter pursues a more complex strategy: transformative appropriation. Rather than creating a Russian rival to Harry, the play "fixes" the original character, rewriting his narrative to align with Orthodox values and presenting him as "our (in fact Russian) Harry": an Orthodox-centered hero. The move targets child fans directly, offering them a version of their beloved character who makes the "correct" spiritual choice.
[2.3] The play was written in 2003 by Maria Larionova (Nesterova), a Sunday school teacher with degrees from Saint Tikhon's Orthodox University and the Bashkir State Pedagogical University, and was staged at least seven times before gaining media attention in 2005. Larionova's background in religious education and her work adapting other children's stories for the church-affiliated youth center Preobrazhenie (Transfiguration) mark the play's primary function as catechesis. Her stated plan for a sequel—in which Harry would convert Hermione by debating Darwin's theory of evolution—further underscores its didactic and apologetic aims (Nuykina 2005). The play draws on the tradition of Christian fantasy: Larionova's social media profiles show engagement with C. S. Lewis's legacy—she followed fan communities dedicated to the Chronicles of Narnia and reposted quotes from him.
[2.4] I analyze the play as a transformative work, a category that encompasses fan fiction but also broader cultural adaptations that rework a source text. Whether or not Larionova was aware of online fan fiction, her play uses recognizable strategies of canon divergence and fix-it to address perceived flaws in the source material. Unlike the deliberately parodic Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles (2014), however, Larionova's play is a sincere educational project, performed live for children. It functions as a kind of response fic, but its goal is not merely to critique; it also aims to save Harry Potter for a religious audience by fundamentally altering his moral universe. Examining the play through the lens of transformative works reveals its dual nature: It is at once an act of media reception and an instrument of religious instruction.
3. Harry Potter and Christian reception: A review of scholarship
[3.1] Scholarship on Harry Potter is immense, as Rémi's (2020) bibliography demonstrates, but this study sits at the intersection of three fields: fan studies, religious reception of the series, and its interpretation in Russian academia. Fan studies have explored the quasi-religious aspects of fandom (Olsen 2021) and compared fan fiction to apocrypha (Larsen 2019), yet academic analysis of religious transformations of Harry Potter remains scarce.
[3.2] Anglophone scholarship on Harry Potter and religion runs in two relevant strands: analyses of Christian themes within the books, and studies of the controversies surrounding them. The second maps the Christian debate, framing it as a moral panic driven by conservative groups (Soulliere 2010), while documenting how liberal ministers used the novels in sermons (Duthie 2009). The first locates Christian symbolism and values in Rowling's work—scholars have read the series through Christian virtues (White 2001), resurrection symbolism (McCarron 2009), and parallels with the Gospels and medieval hagiography (Barber 2012; Hennequin 2013). More recent work traces themes of love and redemption (Lu 2023) and compares Harry's journey to that of Jesus (Galang 2023). Taken together, these studies confirm that Christian elements are available for interpretation in the source text.
[3.3] Russian academic engagement with Harry Potter through a religious lens has been more cautious. Some scholars argue that the Christian symbols and moral themes in Rowling's fantasy can support the spiritual development of young readers (Markov et al. 2018; Sizova 2023). Logunova and Zatsepina (2025) suggest that Harry Potter embodies Christian values (love, self-sacrifice, friendship, moral choice) and can complement Christian spiritual literature in children's moral and spiritual education. A pivotal study by the Yurenkos (2020) traces a shift in the Russian Orthodox community's reception of the series—from outright condemnation to more nuanced and even missionary readings. Their content analysis of clerical and lay discourse provides crucial context for the cultural moment in which The Repentance of Harry Potter was created.
[3.4] These studies illuminate the context of Christian reception, but few focus on transformative works as a specific mode of response. Crome's (2014) work on Christian My Little Pony fan fiction shows how canon characters can be placed in Christian scenarios to serve as shorthand for theological concepts. However, fan studies scholarship has historically focused on progressive, online, and anglophone fandoms, often overlooking offline, reactionary, or institutionally powered fannish practices. I build on Crome's premise but shift the focus to a church-sanctioned theatrical production in a nonanglophone context. A close reading of The Repentance of Harry Potter provides a vital case study of how transformative works can be used not to subvert traditional norms but to enforce them, thus moving beyond passive religious interpretation into active, didactic textual transformation.
4. Pro-theism and proteism: The form of the work
[4.1] Larionova labels her text a "fairy tale" (Anonymous 2005), which fits the genre: The Orthodox fairy tale belongs to "Orthodox children's literature, with its genre spectrum including fantasy, fairy tale, and socio-psychological prose," alongside which Orthodox fantasy has developed (Makhinina 2016, 246). Harry Potter has also been read as structured like a folktale in Propp's terms: Lack/villainy launches the plot, after which the hero is dispatched, receives magical agents, faces escalating trials, confronts the villain, and ends in victory and return/recognition. Characters and episodes align with folktale roles (villain, donor, helper, false villain/hero) and paired functions (prohibition/violation, reconnaissance/delivery, struggle/victory, pursuit/rescue), making each book—and the series—a familiar linear move (Hunter 2012).
[4.2] The Repentance of Harry Potter similarly follows a fairy-tale structure: a monomythic journey, binary good/evil, a truth quest, supernatural trials, helpers, and a final confrontation. Harry leaves the magical world, is guided by wise figures, is pursued by evil, and reaches a decisive liminal trial (midnight on Easter). The plot resembles European moral fairy tales (Perrault/Andersen), where victory comes through inner change and rejecting false strength, not power or skill.
[4.3] Considering the intended performance, the staging is markedly intermedial: props and interaction plus a recited letter about the final battle; an ambient soundscape; a song about God and finally a liturgical chant; shadow theater of Voldemort's silhouette; and the dramaturgy of light (oil lamps and special effects in the finale). The music is fused as a spiritual weapon and pedagogical tool. Agnia sings a lullaby about the Resurrection to comfort Harry, and the play concludes with the characters singing a liturgical Orthodox chant (the Paschal sticheron), replacing magical incantations with communal worship. The playwright also gamifies Orthodox Christianity through Harry Potter cosplay to teach children. Role-playing as experiential education is common; fandom studies likewise documents collaborative student projects, usually online (e.g., The Blogging Hobbit by Sauro and Thorne [2020]). Turning to fan fiction writing in particular, we find cases in theory (Curwood 2013; Leigh 2020; Thomas 2006) and practice (Howell 2018; Lammers 2017; Black 2006), again mainly online (Howell 2018; Black 2006; Thomas 2006).
[4.4] As a theater piece, the play could be read as an adaptation were it not for its transformative nature. In terms of form, it resembles a script fic: "In the early fanzines, one could find such a story in play or script form every once in a while, but these seldom appeared after 1980" (Verba 2003, 3).
[4.5] The play's central theological move is what Penner calls "pro-theism," the wish for God to exist (2015, 326), transplanted directly into the Harry Potter universe. The wish emerges from the collapse of the magical world's moral framework. When Dumbledore declares that "good and evil magic are two sides of the same locket," Harry falls into an existential crisis: "If our beloved Hogwarts—if our good magic—is evil, then what is good? Maybe good doesn't exist at all?" Dumbledore's answer ("Good—real, pure good—does exist, and it is immeasurably stronger than any magical power") sends Harry on his quest. The play follows what Epstein terms "proteism": a protagonist at a spiritual threshold, moving away from a known past (magic) toward an unknown future (faith) (2017, 250). On the other hand, "'pro-theism' is protean" (Kahane 2011, 694–96): The wish for God can take distinct, shifting evaluative forms. Proteus was a sea deity, and water motifs recur throughout the play.
[4.6] The transformation is structured around water and fire, which the play pulls from universal archetypes and loads with Orthodox meaning. Water purifies and heals throughout. The first instance is quiet: Hagrid tends to the dying Dumbledore by moistening a cloth and placing it on his forehead in a gesture resembling last rites, washing away the fever of his magical sin. The motif sharpens in Greece, a land where divine power is palpable. Harry arrives in rain, a cleansing of his past. Anastas later leads him to a holy spring, where water heals a bruise and triggers revelation. For the audience, the point lands plainly: Orthodox holy water does what magic cannot.
[4.7] Fire functions differently. It guides the faithful and punishes evil. Mr. Blum, the priest, gives Harry an altar lamp—a lampada—representing faith's guiding flame. Against this, the bandits in Greece suffer a consuming heat. "This Greece is like an oven. It burns like it's red-hot!" one complains. "Ever since we got here, all my magical items have lost their power." The sacred ground itself disables demonic magic. The two elements converge when Agnia throws holy water on the bandits. "I think it was fire," one cries. His partner drinks from the spring and recoils: "Ow! Ah! It hurts!" The play stages a miracle for children: "The holy burns evil." By collating water and fire, the play translates a difficult theological idea—holiness as punishing force for the sinful—into fantasy spectacle a child can hold onto.
[4.8] Agnia's name may evoke not only the agnus dei but also the Indian agni (fire), especially in the context of Slavic fantasy, where Indo-European elements often circulate. She herself sings a song about God in which "eternity's flame" gleams "on the golden cupolas of churches": It is worth noting that thematic focus on overcoming death in the song ("Death is no more again!") anticipates developments in the later Harry Potter books, though in a different key. In Rowling's novels, this is tied to the power of a mother's sacrificial love, the fragment of Voldemort's soul, the choice of remaining in limbo in favor of life, and—crucially—the Deathly Hallows. In Larionova's play, by contrast, it is faith alone.
5. Genre shift to Christian fantasy
[5.1] Harry Potter fantasy develops into distinct subgenres—here, Christian fantasy—through genre shifting by an author who chooses "to read the series within alternative generic traditions" (Jenkins 1992, 173), thereby repositioning it among adjacent genres. The Repentance of Harry Potter achieves its didactic purpose through a deliberate genre shift, recasting Rowling's secular fantasy as what Manlove defines as Christian fantasy: "a fiction dealing with the Christian supernatural, often in an imagined world" (1992, 5). The foundational rules of Rowling's universe are replaced wholesale: Protective faith supplants protective magic, the sign of the cross becomes the ultimate weapon, and burning holy water enters as a tangible supernatural force. Sacred places and numinous power move to the foreground, with Greece serving as sacred ground where magic fails and miracles are routine. The play even frames itself under the alternative subtitle Easter Miracle.
[5.2] The play takes up the journey motif central to Christian fantasy but redirects its goal. Harry does not pursue a magical object or esoteric knowledge; he pursues God. The priest Mr. Blum articulates this, redirecting Harry's search for "the One who created everything" from London to Greece, turning the journey into a pilgrimage. Manlove (1992) argues that imagination serves this genre as a conduit to the divine, and the play stages the process directly. At the holy spring, Agnia points to the crucifix: "Look—that's Him." Harry's confusion at Christ's suffering draws out a tactile image of God Pantocrator from the grandmother: "Imagine a heavy ball covered all over with sharp spikes. The hand that lifts it will be pierced through." The exercise moves Harry from curiosity to emotional understanding, which the play treats as the precondition for conversion.
[5.3] C. S. Lewis's apologetic fantasy shapes the script throughout. The conflict mirrors Narnia's: deceptive, lesser reality (magic) set against higher divine truth. Dumbledore's final words—denouncing magic as a "lie" and an "evil" he taught—push Harry toward that truth. His journey becomes a quest for the "Wholly Other" (Manlove 1992, 241), achieved by dislodging his habitual assumptions about power. The pivotal scene has Harry offer, out of habit, to demonstrate his "good magic" with his wand. Agnia stops him: "Harry, understand—there is no such thing as good magic." The moment works like one of Lewis's moral "push-buttons" (Manlove 1992, 238), forcing a definitive choice. The ultimate weapon against evil turns out to be an act of faith rather than a spell, the sign of the cross tied to the liturgical reality of the Resurrection. And following Lewis's use of "wonder with distance" (Manlove 1992, 238), the source of divine truth moves away from familiar Hogwarts to Greece—foreign, aspirational, sacred.
6. Harry in the role of the Russian God-seeker
[6.1] God-seeking is a main line in the plot of the play. Historically, it was a late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century movement in the Russian intelligentsia and emerging philosophy, associated above all with Nikolai Berdyaev. The "great longing, the unceasing God-seeking embedded in the Russian soul" (Berdiaev 1998, 36) was expressed as spiritual thirst and a search for the kingdom of God, including new forms of church life. In the USSR, where the Church was persecuted to varying degrees, Orthodoxy and related movements changed; God-seeking ceded ground to "God-building" and was framed as sectarianism or dissent. After the USSR's collapse, it regained a public voice and took a new form in Russian fantasy, where the God-seeker hero emerged, "shaped in part by the religious component in the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis" (Chepur 2010a, 16).
[6.2] As Chepur (2010b) argues, unlike the traditional folktale structure discussed earlier, this hero's journey is defined not by struggle against gods (theomachy) but by a spiritual search for them, typically beginning with existential crisis. The play engineers precisely such a crisis for Harry. Dumbledore's deathbed confession shatters his worldview and pushes him to question whether good exists at all—the starting point for his God-seeking.
[6.3] Following the God-seeker archetype, the playwright strips the hero of his most defining trait: magic (Chepur 2010b). Magic is reframed as a fundamental obstacle to faith. When Harry reaches for his wand, Agnia rebukes him: "You'll also feel how painful it must be for Him if each time you seek help from some wand, and not from Him." Harry's journey becomes an apostasy from magic. If Eliezer Yudkowsky's famous fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010–15) rewrites Harry as an intellectual of Enlightenment science and critical reflection, Harry's path here runs the opposite direction: unreflective faith, submission to clerical authority, and acceptance of everything his new mentors tell him without asking why, only how.
[6.4] The play stages this transformation through defamiliarization, or ostranenie. As Shklovsky (1925) argues, art must make the familiar strange again to force fresh perception. Here the technique lands on Orthodox Christianity itself, filtered through Harry's naïve, astonished eyes. Entering a church for the first time, he exclaims, "What a strange house! And the pictures on the walls are strange. I've never seen anything like this." He calls the cross "that strange sign" repeatedly. For the intended Russian child audience, these objects carry familiarity; Harry's bewilderment cracks that familiarity open. The church becomes a "strange house" of wonders; the cross becomes a "strange sign" of immense power. Orthodox realities read as magical as anything at Hogwarts.
[6.5] The God-seeker's path culminates not in doctrinal understanding but in a moral test centered on love for humanity (Chepur 2010b). Harry faces this test in his final confrontation with Voldemort. His spells fail; he reaches for an Unforgivable Curse. Voldemort's reply marks the nadir: "Oh! So you've used an Unforgivable Curse. You are ready to kill a man. Now nothing separates us." Harry has descended to the Dark Lord's level. Anastas and Agnia intervene with the sign of the cross, and Harry grasps what power actually means. His victory comes not through violence but through miracle—the God-seeker narrative's central element (Chepur 2010b). Making the sign of the cross himself, Harry abandons killing and chooses faith, completing his passage from wizard to God-seeker.
7. Conversion to Orthodox
[7.1] Harry's journey as a God-seeker culminates in his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Each scene functions as a stage in his catechesis, introducing him to Orthodox practices and theological concepts—a process the play frames as metanoia, a change of mind and heart (Dionisii 2007). He renounces magic, is healed by holy water, and joins a church community his parents, as Mr. Blum reveals, had already joined. His journey ends at the Paschal Vigil.
[7.2] The final confrontation is structured as a symbolic baptism (Georgii 2007). The Russian word for baptism, kreshchenie, shares its root with the word for cross, krest. When Harry makes the sign of the cross over Voldemort, he resolves the conflict through faith rather than force—confession, or exomologesis (Dionisii 2007)—recognizing God in the world, experiencing umilenie—a tender affection in which everything becomes cute—and undergoing theognosy—the cognition or knowledge of God. His exchange of the paschal greeting with Anastas—"Christ is risen!" "Truly He is risen!"—and their joint singing of the sticheron mark his full entry into the Church.
[7.3] Harry's arrival in Greece to a church in order to master the skill of making the sign of the "improvised cross" as a God-given combat technique against magic and Voldemort is comparable to Jane and Elizabeth Bennet's "trips to the Orient" to become "students of Shaolin," to master combat arts and be ready that their "last breath is offered to God" in the fight against zombies—that is, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 mashup of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813).
[7.4] The play explicitly raises the topic of magic versus religion, yet it frames Orthodox practice in magical terms throughout. This is a feature of folk Orthodoxy, and here it serves a didactic purpose: making faith legible to children raised on fantasy. The holy spring dispenses healing potions; the sign of the cross functions as a defensive spell, physically repelling the bandits when Anastas makes it; Greece operates as sacred territory, an antimagic field; prayer stops a plane from crashing. Even sin takes on a physical form through Voldemort's claim of a blood brotherhood with Harry, broken only by the cross. Religion does not replace magic in this framework; it replaces magic by outperforming it, with God as the ultimate archmage. The play redeems Harry Potter by making him Orthodox while preserving the sense of supernatural power that made the original appealing.
8. Implicit Russian mediator—Agnia
[8.1] The play's mentors are the priest Mr. Blum and the Greek youth Anastas, but the central figure guiding Harry's conversion is Agnia. Though the setting is ostensibly Greek, Agnia functions as an implicit Russian mediator, channeling a Russian Orthodox worldview to Harry and the audience alike. Several markers support this reading.
[8.2] First, Agnia asks, "Harry—don't you have a subject called Law of God?" Zakon Bozhii (Law of God) is a traditional religious school subject in Russia. Her brother, Anastas, is also implicitly Russian, as he mentions playing the game Battleship during this specific class. Second, Anastas calls Agnia an otlichnitsa (straight-A student), a culturally specific term for a student who consistently receives the highest grade (a 5) in the Russian educational system. Third, Agnia repeatedly addresses Harry as bratishka ("bro" or "little brother"), invoking a specific Russian cultural concept of spiritual and social brotherhood (Khrul 2021). Fourth, her grandmother acts as a catechist shaped by post-Soviet church pedagogy, initiating Harry into an Orthodox worldview (Vrublevskaya et al. 2019). Finally, Agnia's song emphasizes "golden church cupolas," an architectural feature quintessentially associated with the Russian Orthodox Church.
[8.3] The play is an author tract, so an authorial figure can be posited within the text. There is no direct self-insert or Mary Sue, but there may be an author surrogate—a fictional character based on the author (Pandey 2005). Besides Harry, there are few characters, and Anastas and Agnia substitute for Ron and Hermione. Anastas's name hints at resurrection. Mr. Blum is not an author figure but the playwright's instrument—a manicule pointing Harry in the right direction, making the sign of the cross, and performing an alchemy of purifying hearts. When he says, "You're just like your father," he recalls a Snape substitute. The grandmother takes over Dumbledore's role: a guardian of wisdom, catechesis, and eschatological time, symbolized by the clock counting down to Easter, when magic, embodied by dark forces, will disappear and the world's ontological status will be transfigured.
[8.4] What remains is Agnia. The authorial signature is her song, given Larionova's training in music education; even the name Agnia subtly echoes Maria. Although she is not a Mary Sue, her name—Agnes—means "pure" and "chaste," implying idealization (Anastas calls her a "straight A"). Agnia serves as the bearer of knowledge, providing Harry with basic religious instruction as a catechist, mirroring Larionova's professional activities. She is also framed as the girl who can fix him, and the most plausible romantic interest for Harry.
[8.5] Returning to the fairy-tale genre, the play echoes the structural mechanics of the Russian folktale Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka (1863). In the folktale, Ivanushka disobeys, drinks from an enchanted puddle, and becomes a kid goat; his sister's singing ultimately leads to his rescue and the witch's burning. The parallels are structural: Agnia, like Alyonushka, protects a younger figure from a fatal step (magic instead of a puddle); water acts as a status-changing threshold; and singing is treated as a saving grace. This connection demonstrates how the author maps a British fantasy hero onto a recognizable, comforting Russian cultural template to make his conversion legible to local children.
[8.6] Together, they construct Agnia as a familiar figure for the Russian audience: the ideal product of post-Soviet church pedagogy—knowledgeable, devout, and gentle but firm. She doesn't lecture Harry; she guides him through soft power, correcting misconceptions and offering theological explanations in plain terms. This makes her an author surrogate, a character voicing the author's perspective.
9. Conclusion, Interpretatio Christiana
[9.1] The Repentance of Harry Potter is a complex transformative work marked by genre hybridity, pedagogical gamification, and religious appropriation. The play stages not an abstract turning to God but a highly specific conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. By utilizing water-and-fire symbolism, sacralized spaces, and mentor figures like Agnia—who acts as both an implicit Russian mediator and an author surrogate—the play dismantles the epic distance of Rowling's universe. Through what Bakhtin calls "familiarization" (2000, 227), Harry is stripped of his magic and rendered a simple, relatable boy whose ultimate victory relies on faith rather than witchcraft.
[9.2] Patronizing adoption of the hero and literal textual adaptation are paradigmatic features of Russian—and specifically Orthodox—"our answers" to the Harry Potter franchise. The play stages not an abstract turning to God but a conversion to Christianity—more precisely, to Orthodoxy. As Lunkin observes, it advances "the idea of confrontation between Orthodoxy and Western culture" (2006, 281): Harry Potter's homeland is portrayed as godless, whereas Greece—and by implication other countries of an Orthodox bloc—stands on the right side.
[9.3] For the field of fan and transformative works studies, this play offers a crucial intervention. Historically, the literature of fan studies has focused heavily on progressive fandoms, highlighting how fans rewrite texts to explore gender, sexuality, and marginalized identities. However, The Repentance of Harry Potter demonstrates that transformative works move in a variety of directions, some of them deeply conservative. Authors claim and rewrite texts to "fix" them in ways that suit their specific religious, cultural, or ideological beliefs. Larionova's play is a textbook example of a fix-it fic, but one driven by Orthodox catechesis rather than progressive politics.
[9.4] Furthermore, this case study challenges the anglophone and online-centric biases of fan studies. The play functions as a localized, offline, theatrical answer to Western popular culture. It proves that the fannish impulse to identify with literary characters and alter their journeys to reflect the reader's worldview is not exclusive to Western internet culture. By transforming Harry Potter from a global wizarding icon into "our own" Orthodox God-seeker, the play reveals how global franchises are weaponized in local culture wars, making an ostensibly secular text safe, comprehensible, and morally useful for a traditionalist audience. Future research might fruitfully compare this play with other national or religious appropriations of global franchises, further expanding our understanding of how pop culture is mobilized in pedagogical and ideological contexts worldwide.
10. Acknowledgments
[10.1] My study was supported by the Foundation of German Business (Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft). I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer for his invaluable support.