The “tale” of the Athonite monk Parthenius about his wanderings in the East and Russia left a deep mark on Russian artistic culture thanks not only to the lexical-semantic originality of the narrative that stood out sharply from the general background, but also to the ennobling effect on the souls of readers, especially the intelligentsia. Apollo Grigoriev argued that “all seriously reading Rus', from young to old, read it, this brilliant, talented and at the same time simple book - there may be quite a few moral revolutions, but, in any case, it has made quite a few moral upheavals , this simple, unpretentious, completely unimpressive confession of deep inner life.” In this study, for the first time, an attempt has been made to identify and analyze the scale of the impact that “The Tale” had on Russian literature and Russian spiritual culture of the second half of the 19th century.