Russia (bbabo.net), - Father Alexander Men's life was filled with meaning. But we still do not have a life before us, and the biographer Mikhail Kunin (his grandfather Iosif Kunin once wrote about Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in the ZhZL series), who knew Father Alexander from the age of 18, builds, first of all, the logic of the life of a person who decided to realize his extraordinary abilities on the spiritual path. And going to the goals set before him until the very last day.
Growing up from infancy in the midst of the priesthood, who hid in the underground from Soviet power, avidly read Dante at school, and brilliantly passed both hunting science and Marxism at the institute, Men welcomed village old women, and Galich and Solzhenitsyn in the courtyard of his church. The total circulation of his books exceeded nine million. Now, finally, in the most famous biographical series of the Young Guard publishing house, a book has been published - about him.
"Once I found him in a potato store, where he was raking potatoes from onions. In the pauses between unloading cars, he wrote something, putting the bag on his knee." There are many such episodes in the book of Mikhail Kunin, which plunges into an era when works like "The Son of Man", which student Men wrote then in a vegetable store, were not published in our country, and church life was centered around rural parishes and cemetery churches, whose parishioners were grandmothers who still remembered Patriarch Tikhon.
The author takes the reader to the Paleontological Museum, where Alik, a student of the great animal painter Vatagin, draws fossil skeletons. He puts the reader in a camping tent, in which Alexander sings his "Biology and Hunting" with fellow students. In the garden pavilion of the parish in Alabino near Moscow, the reader is greeted by the rector Father Alexander in a shirt painted abstractly like a Pollock painting. And, finally, the reader gets with him under the arches of the Olimpiysky sports complex on Easter days in 1990.
Until the tragedy that ended his life. And about which Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) recently spoke: "If it is proved that Father Alexander's death was a martyr's death, he canonized."
Life taught Alexander Men to be free from conventions, which he, an encyclopedically educated person, was able to distinguish from the main thing, to see Christianity in all its scale, "above the barriers", following the "controversial" philosophers of the Russian religious revival - Vladimir Solovyov, Berdyaev, Florensky, volumes which Men found in the 1950s at the Irkutsk market among nails and guinea pigs.
Mikhail Kunin's book came out detailed, full of quotations, between which the author imperceptibly makes his way: the image of Father Alexander comes to life in the written memoirs of dozens of people about different stages of his life.
Someone tells Kunin about meetings with Men, at which, according to Mikhail Zavalov, a parishioner of the last church of Father Alexander in Novaya Derevnya, he "given himself and his own with some kind of excess."
From those very excesses - and the fundamental work of Mikhail Kunin.
bbabo.Net