The purpose of the article is to give an outline of those multilateral changes which the speech genre of anathema has undergone in Russian culture of the XIX–XXI centuries, and to shed light on the causes of these changes. Since anathema belongs to sacred performatives, whose pragmatic success directly depends on a set of metaphysical views peculiar to the Middle Ages, the fate of their entire subsystem in the conditions of global spiritual shifts of Modern and Postmodern eras is traced by means of an example of that genre.