The classic work of the outstanding French Slavist Pierre Pascal (1890–1983), which brought him well-deserved world fame, has been translated into Russian for the first time. For him, the future professor of the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the Sorbonne was awarded the academic degree of Doctor of Slavic Studies “with the highest honors.” Immediately after its first publication in 1938, the monograph for many decades became a reference book on the history of the Russian religious cataclysm of the second half of the 17th century and has not lost its scientific value to this day. The book, written on the basis of a comparative study of numerous primary sources with which the French scientist had the opportunity to work in the Moscow archives in the 1920s and 1930s, is the most complete biography of Archpriest Avvakum in the world, a kind of encyclopedia of the early Old Believers. Written in excellent literary language, with the use of a huge layer of documents of that era, the work, which can be called an example of scientific prose, details and objectively traces the deep causes of the Schism of the Russian Church, the tragic consequences of which are still felt today.