In the 1830s and 1840s, increasing numbers of Russians renounced the modernized, secularized, Westernized Russia created by Peter the Great in an effort to revive alternative lifestyles based on Orthodox spirituality and values. This effort found expression in a revival of monasticism that began in the era of Nicholas I and would last for the duration of the imperial period, brought to an end only by the cataclysm of revolution and repression of the new Bolshevik regime. Suppressed by the communists, Russian monasticism experienced another revival in the post-World War II era and again in the...