Between 1821 and 1891 the Optina Pustyn Monastery of Konzel'sk in Russia's Kaluga Government
was the site of an unprecedented - and as yet unequaled - period of religious and literary
flowering. Optina Pustyn was a mecca for many of Russia's most prominent writers and thinkers.
Distinguished visitors included Ivan Kireevsky Nikolai Gogol Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev
Tolstoy. This study explains why Optina and its renowned elders held a special attraction to
Russia's literary giants. It reveals how the elders' use of language was rooted in the iconic
vision of Optina's fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition of contemplative monasticism. It is the
first study to examine Optina's social gravity against the broad background of
nineteenth-century institutions of Church and Intelligentsia.
