I have suspicions that on the cover of her book “Two Stories of Love”, its author, Irina Denisova, deliberately did not advertise her monastic title. This decision, I must say, is very wise and far-sighted. Because somehow readers are not used to nuns writing about love. But it depends on what kind of love it is. More precisely, depending on what you mean by the word “love.” There is a lot of debate about the nature of love. They try to give a scientific explanation, invent terms... But all these searches lead to absolutely nothing, because everything about love has already been said long ago - in the Gospel. It is about this that Irina Denisova writes: about love that “does not seek its own, does not think evil, believes everything, hopes everything, endures everything.” And she put this ancient Gospel truth into a completely modern form. Irina Denisova’s book “Two Stories of Love” is the story of a man and a woman: doctor Sergei Sentsov and music teacher Arina. A classic, one might say, story of a meeting between a doctor and a patient. The heroes are not young, both are divorced and have adult children. Arina, moreover, is a believing Orthodox Christian with well-established principles and spiritual values. Their relationship has everything: long courtship, romantic experiences, reverent declarations of love... True, there is much that is not in them: vulgarity, for example, irresponsibility, rash actions under the influence of emotions. And therefore their love is strong and real. There is another love in this story, also mutual and boundless: man for God, and God for man. Without this main love, no other would have happened. It is she who spiritualizes and fills the love of a person for a person with meaning. The main character, Arina, understands this perfectly. And he even writes poetry about it. An entire chapter of the story consists of her poems alone: lyrical, moving and, in the best sense of the word, truly feminine. By the way, the whole story is told on her behalf. Of course, the almost one hundred percent consonance of the names of the heroine and the author does not yet give us the right to judge the autobiographical nature of the work, but it is easy to believe that all this is not only a figment of the writer’s imagination, but an experience drawn from real life. An experience that may at some point useful to each of us. And when the time comes to think about how not to let the quivering light in our heart go out, and where to get the strength to support it for the rest of our lives, it’s worth opening and reading Irina Denisova’s thin, bright and life-affirming book “Two Stories of Love.” Literary navigator with Anna Shepeleva"