Between 1821 and 1891, the Optina Pustyn Monastery of Konzel'sk, in Russia's Kaluga Government, was the site of an unprecedented - and as yet unequaled - period of religious and literary flowering. Optina Pustyn was a mecca for many of Russia's most prominent writers and thinkers. Distinguished visitors included Ivan Kireevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy. This study explains why Optina and its renowned -elders- held a special attraction to Russia's literary giants. It reveals how the elders' use of language was rooted in the -iconic vision- of Optina's fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition of contemplative monasticism. It is the first study to examine Optina's social gravity against the broad background of nineteenth-century institutions of Church and Intelligentsia."