A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. Compiled and Edited by G.
P. Fedotov. (Sheed and Ward. 2s.) BOTH secular literature and sectarian writings have been excluded from the field of thi§ anthology of Russian—that is, Russian Ortho- dox—spirituality. Its material is taken almost entirely from the lives of saints, from ascetic and mystical treatises, and from what Mr. Fedotov calls, a little loosely perhaps, spiritual autobiographies, In an excellent short introduction he sums up the history of Russian spiritual life with its dual impulse of social and, mystical thought and discovers its highest motive in the " kenotic " ideal—the imita- tion of Christ in His voluntary suffering. The extracts, each of them prefaced by an explanatory note that the English reader will find helpful, start with the life of Theodosius—the first representa- tion of kenoticism—from the eleventh-century Chronicle of Nestor (the life is a remarkable documentary source, incidentally, for our knowledge of everyday things in Kievan Russia), and continue with the life of Sergius, the most popular of Russian saints, and the teachings of Nilus Sorsky. The translations from the Church Slavonic of these hagiographical and devotional writings are mostly the work of Helen Iswolsky and represent a considerable feat. As literature much the most impressive thing in the volume is the fragment from the splendid and astonishing seventeenth-century autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, which was first intro- duced to the English reader by D. S. Mirsky. The representatives of the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods are the reactionary John of Cronstadt and Father Alexander Yelchaninov,
who died in exile in 1934.
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