From What I Have Seen and Lived Through

“From What I Have Seen and Experienced. Notes of a Russian Missionary” is the memoirs of Archimandrite Spiridon (Kislyakov), in which he recorded the years of his service as a missionary in Altai and in Siberian prisons and penal labor camps. “From What I Have Seen and Experienced” brilliantly conveys the church reality of the early century, the lives of ordinary people, the terrible lives of prisoners in penal labor. Buddhists and prisoners, peasants and priests—Kislyakov depicts them all with truly Gospel love and humility: much of the book is devoted to Kislyakov’s conversations with people and to the confessions of the detainees. But the value of Spiridon’s (Kislyakov’s) memoirs is not even in that: the completely direct experience of communion with God, the unpretentious service to Christian truth made “From What I Have Seen and Experienced” a classic of spiritual literature. Notably, Archim. Spiridon (Kislyakov) is compared to Francis of Assisi. Alongside them, we placed “The Confession of a Priest before the Church,” written by Kislyakov during the years of the First World War, when he realized that any compromise between the Church and this world is unacceptable— that violence and the Gospel are incompatible.