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Biography

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Saint Barsanuphius of Optina, known in the world as Pavel Ivanovich Plikhankov, was born in 1845 in Samara in the Russian Empire. He came from a merchant family of Orthodox Christian background. His mother died while he was still an infant, and he was raised by his father. After his schooling he entered the Imperial Russian Army, in which he served for many years and rose to the rank of colonel. He remained unmarried. Although he followed a secular career, he was drawn to prayer, fasting, and spiritual reading, and in middle age he increasingly sought monastic counsel.

In the later part of his military service he visited Optina Pustyn, the monastery in Kaluga province that had become a major center of the Russian starets tradition in the nineteenth century. Encouraged by the elders there, he retired from the army and in 1891, at about the age of forty-six, entered the Skete of Saint John the Baptist at Optina as a novice. In 1893 he was tonsured a monk and received the name Barsanuphius, after Saint Barsanuphius the Great of the sixth century. He was ordained to the diaconate and then to the priesthood, becoming a hieromonk of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later a hieroschemamonk.

Formed by the Optina tradition associated with Elders Leonid, Macarius, Ambrose, and their successors, Barsanuphius was in time entrusted with the work of spiritual fatherhood. He heard confessions, received pilgrims, and guided both monks and laypeople. Contemporary accounts describe him as combining the bearing of a former officer with monastic humility, and as possessing discernment in dealing with a wide range of spiritual and practical questions. He served during a period of growing social unrest in Russia, including the years around the revolution of 1905, and his recorded counsels often stress repentance, obedience, and watchfulness.

In 1912 the Holy Synod transferred him from Optina and appointed him abbot of the ancient Staro-Golutvin Monastery near Kolomna. He accepted the appointment as an act of obedience and spent only a short time in that office. He died on 1 April 1913 and was buried at Staro-Golutvin.

After the Soviet period, Optina Monastery was restored. In the 1990s the relics of Elder Barsanuphius were uncovered and translated to Optina Pustyn near Kozelsk, where they are now enshrined. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him in 1996 as one of the Venerable Elders of Optina. He is commemorated on 1 April, the anniversary of his repose, and on 11 October together with the Synaxis of the Optina Elders. He is venerated as a monk and spiritual guide of the late imperial period.

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