Saint Dimitrii Rostovsky--a monk, theologian, and preacher; a poet and playwright--was in many ways a typical figure of Russian literary life of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But his fame as a writer was not for his theological treatises or his baroque sermons, but rather for his collection of saints' lives, which has been read and appreciated for centuries by generations of Eastern Orthodox faithful not only in Russia but in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania. Dimitrii Rostovsky's Zhitiia sviatykh (Lives of the Saints, 1689-1705) was an ascetic labor of love by an Orthodox writer who united in his work the hagiographic achievements of Eastern and Western branches of Christianity.

Saint Dimitrii, metropolitan of Rostov, was born Daniil Savvich Tuptalo in December 1651 in the small town of Makarov, not far from Kiev, into the family of the sotnik (Cossack lieutenant) Savva Grigor'evich Tuptalo. In...