04 — The Writings

Men’s durable work is a body of books written over thirty years in a village parish, none of which could be published in the Soviet Union in his lifetime. They went abroad in manuscript and were printed in Brussels by the Russian-language house Zhizn s Bogom under pseudonyms, chiefly E. (Emmanuel) Svetlov, then came back into the USSR as samizdat: Son of Man, his life of Christ, and the six-volume history of religion In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

Almost every argument about Men — for and against — is finally an argument about these books. His admirers point to a corpus that gave two generations of Russians their first intelligible account of Christianity; his critics point to specific pages and specific formulations in the same corpus. Neither case can be assessed without knowing what he actually wrote, in what order, for whom, and under what constraints.

The constraints matter. Men wrote as a Soviet parish priest with no access to a university library, no possibility of peer review, no editor, no legal publisher, and a readership that had been deprived of religious education for two generations. He was writing simultaneously as scholar, catechist and apologist, for readers who had never seen a Bible. That the result is uneven is not surprising; that it exists at all is remarkable.

Section Contents

  • Son of Man — the life of Christ: its composition, its method, its reception, and why it was the book that reached the most people
  • In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press — the six-volume history of religion, the biblical handbooks, and how the pseudonymous Brussels publication and the samizdat return actually worked

See Also