About the book: year / Publishing house of V. D. Smirnova.S. printing house. – St. Petersburg, Ekaterininsky Canal, No. 45. Preface. The purpose of this work is to answer the question: what is the true meaning of the feats of “foolishness” and “pillarism”? These exploits during the life of St. holy fools and stylites aroused surprise in some, censure in others. And at the present time, when a reassessment of values ​​is being carried out, much of the life of these ascetics is incomprehensible to some, and positively aimless for others. In the types of popularizes of the Higher Moral Variant of the above exploits, the publisher and took on the print of the real compound. Letting the book in a book, the publisher is flattered by the hope of theological curiosity all, who is interested in the issues of asceticism. The text of the text was received as a result VU. There may be errors in the text that arose during recognition and went unnoticed during processing. Some of the quotations in the old spelling were replaced with text from modern sources, the original text of the quotations was moved to footnotes. Links to sources are formatted in Roman numerals. There is a modern monograph on this topic “Blessed Obscene” by Sergei Arkadyevich Ivanov.