Editor’s Introduction

Three occasional sermons bound together in one pamphlet, plus a publisher’s closing note. The first two belong to the same terrible week: on March 1, 1881, Emperor Alexander II was killed by a bomb in St. Petersburg, and Father John preached first during the following week of Lent, then again at the funeral liturgy. Grief, unconcealed anger at the assassins, and an unflinching call to national repentance run through both. Kronstadt reads the murder as a summons to Russia’s conscience, not only a crime to mourn. The third sermon turns to a happier occasion, the birthday of Alexander Alexandrovich while he was still heir to the throne (soon to reign as Alexander III), and reflects more generally on birth, motherhood, and the particular weight of being born to rule.

The publisher’s closing note is a curiosity in its own right: it describes introducing a different sermon entirely, preached years later on the anniversary of Nicholas II’s accession, matching none of the three sermons actually printed here. The mismatch appears to be inherited from the original edition itself rather than introduced in translation, and is reproduced as found.