About the book: year / The story of the death of Paphnutius (+ 1477), the founder and first abbot of the Paphnutius Borovsky monastery, written by Paphnutius's student, the monk Innocent. Before us is a story not about the miraculous death of a saint, but about the death of a man who in his last days comprehended all the vanity of a passing life, and this story is remarkable not only for its vivid and deep transmission of the spiritual state of a dying man, his actions hour after hour in these days, but also the liveliness and spontaneity with which Innocent describes the life of the monastery, his own feelings and thoughts, the behavior of the monastery brethren and everyone who visited the monastery at that time.D. S. Likhachev writes that this work is “a kind of literary “miracle” of the 15th century: “... there are literary phenomena that consciously enter literature much later. What we have before us is, as it were, an unconscious, spontaneous medieval naturalism. Before the character of a person was discovered in literature, here we see a very clearly outlined individuality: a strong-willed, very decisive person, unusually strong and domineering, senilely irritable and stubborn” (Likhachev D.S. Man in the literature of Ancient Rus'. M., 1970, p. 129). The text of Innokenty’s story is published according to the list - RSL, f. 113, collection Volokolamsk Monastery, No. 515, collection of the 16th century, l. 395—419.