“The desert fathers and the blameless wives...” - these lines of Pushkin are dedicated to them, the great Christian ascetics of the 4th century, the anchorite monks of the Egyptian desert. Anthony the Great, Paul of Thebes, Macarius of Egypt and Macarius of Alexandria are just the most famous names of the Desert Fathers. What motivated these people? Why did they abandon family, property, and their usual way of life and go into the uninhabited desert? How did they manage to create a culture that survived them for many centuries and had a huge impact on the entire Christian world? The book of the French researcher, Benedictine monk Father Lucien Regnier, who devoted almost his entire life to the study of the spiritual heritage of the Egyptian Fathers, is by no means only of educational interest, especially for the domestic reader. Getting to know the everyday life of anchorite monks who lived one and a half thousand years ago allows us to understand something in the thousand-year history of Russia and Russian monasticism, the origins of which also go back to the spiritual feat of the inhabitants of the Egyptian desert.