02 — The Sources Problem

The flagship source-critical section of the collection. Nearly the whole received life of St. Matrona descends from one late devotional Life — Zinaida Zhdanova’s Skazanie (1993) — and from the canonical Life the Moscow Patriarchate’s canonization commission produced by correcting it, removing material it judged unreliable (above all the apocryphal Stalin visit). These files inventory that source situation and state the exact rules the collection follows.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1999/2004)

This section stands before the narrative sections by design: the frame it establishes governs how every later claim should be read. It treats the Church’s own commission correction — the rare case of a canonization process publicly separating attested from unattested in a saint’s most popular Life — as its central subject.

Files

File	Description
the-zhdanova-life-and-its-corrections.md	The Skazanie, what it is and is not, the commission’s correction, and what is well-attested vs. contested
attestation-and-method.md	The sources as dated artifacts, the four-class attestation framework, the rules the collection follows, and the theology of glorification

See Also

• The Stalin-Visit Question — the episode the commission excluded, treated in full
• The John of Kronstadt Meeting — the claim the commission retained, assessed
• St. Xenia of Petersburg: Methodology — the repository’s model thin-source case
• METHODOLOGY.md — the repository citation and verification standard
• Collection README — the full navigation and sourcing note