‘Everyday Saints’

Russian literature has a long history of dealing with Church themes. Pushkin, Leskov and Chekhov come to mind at once. However, these themes are also central in Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and more recently in Pasternak and Soloukhin, and in fact they are present in all Russian literature, as an underpinning and uniting background of spiritual and cultural values.

What is original about this book is that the author is not just a very talented writer with a sensitive artist’s heart, but he is also...