This book is an open window into provincial Russian church life at the beginning of the 21st century, through which everyone can see its main nodes, fault lines and those turns that may have turned out to be fatal. Through the prism of vivid, but at the same time very typical and easily recognizable artistic images, the church reality of the early 2000s is revealed to the reader, and documentary accuracy is discerned behind the fictional storylines. The book retains the author’s spelling of the prefix “without”, corresponding to pre-reform spelling