Venerable Sergius of Radonezh and the Trinity Lavra he created

The late His Eminence Leonty, Metropolitan of Moscow, preparing to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Sergius (which occurred on September 25, 1892), expressed a desire for the Academy to write a special book for this occasion about St. Sergius and the Lavra. Writing the desired book, of course, was entrusted to me, as a professor at the Academy of Russian Church History. After A.V. Gorsky and S.K. Smirnov, of whom the first compiled a historical description of the Lavra1, and the second - its Church Historical Monthly2, I, for my part, did not feel inclined to write anything about the Lavra, so the Metropolitan’s desire took me by surprise. Referring to the fact that there is both a description of the Lavra and a biography of St. Sergius3, I could avoid unexpected work. But the late Bishop, on his first visit to the Lavra and the Academy, made such a good impression on all the academics that I myself did not want to upset him by refusing to fulfill his desire, and my comrades did not want me to do this. My task in writing the book, obviously, was to give in it a complementary work to the previous works about the Lavra and about St. Sergius - that’s how I tried to write it. The too insufficient time that was at my disposal (for the Most Reverend Leonty himself was appointed metropolitan of Moscow only on November 17, 1891), deprived me of the opportunity, despite my diligent efforts, to examine all the details with complete care. This, its second edition, for which I already had free time, is being published after a thorough revision and correction of the first edition. This second edition was prepared by me for printing back in September 1896, but I did not consider it possible to begin printing the book until the Academy sold out the copies of the 1st edition that belonged to it4. Their slow sales were the reason that the real 2nd edition is only now appearing. The misfortune that befell me - the loss of vision - deprived me of the opportunity to observe the printing of the book myself, which work was readily undertaken by my true good genius in publishing my works - Sergei Alekseevich Belokurov (my student at the Academy, its student from 1882-1886, currently a senior clerk in the Moscow Main Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). S. A. Belokurov also put into place in the book my additional notes made after 1896 in special notebooks, and, in addition, added information on the history of the monastery in recent times, borrowed mainly from the “Historical Description of the Holy Trinity St. Sergius Lavra”, published by it in 1902. All additions by S. A. Belokurov are enclosed in straight [ ] brackets. The difference between this 2nd edition and the 1st, in addition to significant additions to the text, is the photographs of buildings, shrines and ancient things included in it - more than 70 in total. Almost all of them (with a few exceptions - about 10) were intended to be placed by me, but all the work on photography and the production of cliches and phototypic tables was carried out under the supervision of the same S. A. Belokurov and cost him a lot of trouble. He also owns most of the explanations for the drawings at the end of the book. You might be interested in: