But years passed, new publications were accumulated, scattered in periodicals, archival finds multiplied. In the mid-1960s, during the reign of the atheists and the most severe persecution of the Holy Church of Christ, Hieromonk Mark (Lozinsky) of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra did an extremely important job of collecting and assimilating printed and archival materials, which he used as the basis of his master's thesis "The Spiritual Life of a Layman and a Monk from the Works and Letters of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov" (1967-1968). The dissertation consisted of eight volumes of typewritten text, in which, in addition to an extensive biography of the saint, there is a volume of his unpublished works and a large number of valuable documents relating to the activities of Bishop Ignatius. The corpus of letters presented in the collection of Hieromonk Mark is 200 units longer than the one known from previous issues. The epistolary heritage of the saint is an integral part of his theological works. And perhaps the full publication of the letters of the great spiritual writer-ascetic makes the new edition of his works even more valuable and significant. Of course, all of Fr Mark's archival research, as well as all the new archival materials discovered after his death, will be included in the next volumes of the Complete Works of St. Ignatius, which is offered to readers.

In preparing this edition, the editors sought to adhere to the requirements for compliance with the author's writing and punctuation features. All published materials were carefully verified, Russian correspondences were given to quotations from the Holy Scriptures according to the Synodal translation (highlighted in italics); the historical figures mentioned in the "Life" are revealed and explained; Editorial inserts are in square brackets. The textual principles of this publication rest on the following foundations: the spiritual writings of an outstanding figure of Orthodoxy, now canonized, are of national importance, representing a great monument of Russian culture in general and of the culture of the Russian language in particular. The renewal of spelling and punctuation norms should not affect the language skills of the writer, preserving all the significant originality of his written speech, without violating even the most subtle semantic shades. The editors also strove with the utmost attention to observe the stable graphic features of Brianchaninov's texts, and at the same time, the use of lowercase and uppercase letters, other visual elements of the text, for example, italics and quotation marks, should coincide as fully as possible with modern norms of the external design of texts. The final volume of the Collection, devoted to the letters of the saint, is supposed to be provided with a large number of illustrations.

The editorial board intends to carry out the entire publication within two years.

A. N. Strizhev

BIOGRAPHY

BISHOP IGNATY

BRYANCHANINOVA,

compiled by his closest disciples in 1881

Remember your leaders, who have spoken the word of God to you: who look upon the end of life, imitate their faith.

(Heb. 13. 7).

Prelude

12 years have passed since the peaceful repose of the ever-memorable Holy Hierarch-monk of the Russian Church of the XIX century, His Grace Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov. His time is still close to us, many of his contemporaries, fasting companions, and disciples are still alive, and yet the radiant personality of the saintly saint of God already stands high above us, shining brightly for us with the light of his Christian virtues, the feats of his strictly monastic life, and his ascetic writings. The beauty of monasticism in our age, the saint is an active teacher of monks, and not only in his writings, but also in his entire life, he presents a wondrous picture of self-denial, close to confession, of man's struggle with passions, sorrows, illnesses, a picture of life, which, with the help and action of the abundant grace of God, was crowned with victory, attracted to the ascetic many rare gifts of the Holy Spirit. Following with reverence this long-suffering and much-sorrowful procession of the ascetic to spiritual success, and at the same time clearly contemplating the special guidance of God's Providence in his entire life, one involuntarily feels a living knowledge of faith in the paternal care of God, our Creator and Saviour, for us, and one is imbued with the desire to imitate, to the best of one's ability, this contemporary example of Christian perfection.

All works in general, and spiritual and moral works in particular, have the property that they quite accurately express the inner life of their authors. Thus, the works provide abundant material for the biographer to outline the characteristics of the person, this essential part of the biography; but in order to depict the life of His Grace Ignatius in true features, it is necessary to study and experience something that he studied and experienced. Study here is so little accessible, the experiments are so exceptional, that they depend less of all on man's own efforts and will. Whoever by God's Providence has been placed on such a path and has been partially led into the crucible of such trials, only he can know the whole peculiarity of such experiments and from this point of view it is more correct to evaluate the activity of their representative. The biographies of especially remarkable or advanced people are distinguished by the sign that in them, predominantly, some one side is manifested, from which the activity of these persons is especially manifested, which distinguishes them by sharp, characteristic features and concentrates all attention on itself: it is, as it were, the face of all their activities, hiding behind it all the others. In the biographies of such personalities it is necessary to grasp this sign and carry it out completely from the beginning to the end of the biography; then it will have its characteristic endurance. In this respect, the life of Bishop Ignatius has a special advantage: it represents such a distinctive side that completely distinguishes his personality from other spiritual figures of his time. Such an aspect of his life consists of complete self-denial for the sake of the exact fulfillment of the Gospel commandments in the secret monastic spiritual podvig, which has served as the subject of a new, ascetic-theological teaching in our spiritual literature—the teaching about the inner perfection of man in monastic life and his relationship to other spiritual beings who influence him both from the inner man and from the external or physical side. This is the peculiarity that distinguishes Bishop Ignatius among other spiritual writers of our time, a sharp feature, but not precisely seen by everyone, correctly distinguished.