In this essay Professor Florovsky brings a rare combination of sympathetic understanding and restless questioning to the study of Russian culture. Cutting through a century of scholarly cliches about "Old Russia," he finds inadequate not only the cultural provincialism of erudite liberals like A. Pypin and S. Soloviev, whose real interests lay in post-Petrine Russia, but also the simplified explanations of Old Russian cultural development presented by church historians like Golubinsky and sympathetic students like Buslaev and Fedotov.1 As in his penetrating Ways of Russian Theology, he quietly draws attention away from easy answers to difficult but important questions. It would be presumptuous for anyone-let alone a non-Slav far inferior in age and wisdom to Father Florovsky-to pretend to answer them, but one can at least gain valuable guidance for a fresh appraisal of old Russia by facing up to four major tasks that his discussion sets before us: (1) distinguishing different periods and regions within pre-Petrine Russian culture, (2) accounting for its "intellectual silence," (3) analyzing its inner structure, and (4) appraising separately its historical fate and its intrinsic worth. (1) Any consideration of Old Russian culture invites one major division-which is both chronological and regional-between Kiev and Muscovy. There is, to be sure, a bridge between them through Vladimir-Suzdal; but the cosmopolitan, urban culture of the former centered on the Dnepr and the southwestern steppe is clearly distinct from the more monolithic and monastic culture of the latter centered on the Volga and the northeastern forests. The culture of Kievan Russia has been, as Professor Florovsky points out, exhaustively studied and somewhat idealized in recent years; but the impression has been created of a kind of cultural vacuum between the fall of Kiev and the rise of Petersburg.2