Types of Religious Lives

Mother Maria Skobtsova died on Good Friday, 1945, in Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin. The "crime" of this Orthodox nun and Russian refugee was her effort to rescue Jews and others being pursued by the Nazis in her adopted city, Paris, where in 1932 she had founded a house of hospitality. (For a detailed life, see Fr. Sergei Hackel's biography, Pearl of Great Price. For a short biography, see Jim Forest's "Mother Maria Skobtsova: Nun and Martyr.") The following essay was written in 1937 and discovered in 1996 by Helene Klepinin-Arjakovsky in the archive of S.B. Pilenko. The Russian text was published in the summer of 1998 by the Paris-based journal, Vestnik, No. 176 (II-III 1997), pp. 5-50, and is also posted on the St. Philaret web site in Moscow at: https://www.stphilaret.org/types.html .