The documentary novel "Blessed Are the Pure in Heart" allows the reader to encounter absolute reality from the inside—experiencing the life of Russia from 1905 to 1925—and also learning the later fates of most of the characters. Adults and children keep diaries, write poems and letters, and later—memories. This is the text of the novel. Its main event is the creation in the hungry 1920 year of one of the first school-colonies in Russia. The children who became outcasts—children of recent factory owners and recent revolutionaries, seekers of God and scholars, musicians and poets, the theosophists and Tolstoyans—save themselves from the hunger and madness of the era. They work together, learn to think, educate themselves, and even create an elementary school for village children.
The novel is life itself. The author of the book is the granddaughter of the main heroine of the novel and the daughter of one of the school’s pupils—Alena Davidovna Armand. With the help of the miraculous preservation of half-rotted documents, she managed to restore the unified fabric of a grand storyline. Her collecting and literary feat is akin to the feat of resurrecting ancestors written about by the Russian philosopher Fedorov.