Father Arseny

Real Or Fiction?

A couple of years ago, while I was attending a parish in Virginia, I checked out a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to read it, I had a nasty car wreck in which the book was destroyed. A few years later, I thought I had found a copy at a used-book store, but when I pulled it off my bookshelf to read about a month ago it turns out I had only purchased the 2nd volume. A little dejected, I wandered into my parish bookstore looking for something to read in its place, and another book caught my eye: Father Arseny: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father. It almost seemed like it was meant to be. An opportunity to put off the Gulag Archipelago, but still read about a prisoner from the Soviet Gulags. Having never heard of Father Arseny, with no idea what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised.