Nun Ignatia. Schema-nun Ignatia (Puzik, Petrovskaya)

The path of the nun Ignatia (Puzik) is amazing: a doctor of biological sciences, a world-famous professor, who spent most of her scientific life working in science as a secret nun.

Everywhere - both at school and at the college - teachers noted the girl's rare abilities and great diligence. Perhaps this was one of the incentives for continuing education. After graduating from college, Valentina Puzik enters the natural department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University (subsequently, the department was transformed into the Faculty of Biology), where her desire for research work quickly manifests itself.

In senior years, a gifted student was noticed by Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko, who at that time held the position of professor of anthropology at the Faculty of Biology.

Valentina fulfilled his first orders impeccably - the professor was pleased that he had such an assistant. In those years - 1923 -1925 - Vladimir Germanovich's workload was immense: experiments, lectures, reports, writing articles for German, French, American scientific journals - everything was scheduled by the hour and minute. From work, he simply suffocated, and getting to know Valentina was a great help to him.

Valentina Ilyinichna participated in many undertakings of Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko, in her last years he began to supervise her student scientific work, offered to carry out a serious study “Age-related development of the thyroid gland in humans”, which later became part of her diploma. The research carried out by Valentina Ilyinichnaya in her last years at the university was far superior in volume and depth to ordinary student work. And the materials of her diploma "The course of the tuberculosis process in patients of various types of constitution" interested foreign scientists and were published in one of the German scientific journals.

In 1926, having brilliantly defended her thesis, Valentina Ilyinichna was invited by her mentor Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko to the Central Tuberculosis Institute (CIT) to work together in the pathomorphological laboratory. Her first "scientific degree" was the position of preparator.

The first twenty years of her creative life (from 1926 to 1945) of Valentina Ilyinichna were marked by great scientific work. In particular, together with V.G. Shtefko, she created the “Pathological Anatomical Classification of Pulmonary Tuberculosis”. Their other common work was framed as a monograph “Pathology and Clinical Tuberculosis. Introduction to the constitutional pathological anatomy of hematogenous and lymphogenous forms of pulmonary tuberculosis, which was published in 1934, but is still a fundamental work today.

The thematic focus of Valentina Ilyinichna's activities at that time was caused by the urgent need, first of all, to study the pathogenesis of tuberculosis, since in the 20-30s of the last century in Russia there was a high mortality rate from pulmonary tuberculosis. And in those days and later, all the scientific work of Valentina Puzik convincingly answered the questions posed by life. The work of the scientist was not stopped by the war: she continued to study the pathogenesis of tuberculosis, based on the study of the human disease as a whole.

At the end of 1945, Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko died, and from that time on, for the next 40 years, Valentina Ilyinichna became the head of the pathomorphological laboratory of the CIT.

After World War II, she was one of the first to test and study the mechanism of action of the French BCG vaccine. Based on the developments of Valentina Ilyinichna, a new scientific direction in the problem of tuberculosis was subsequently discovered - immunomorphological. For the first time in the world, Valentina Ilyinichna and then her students studied the morphological reactions of the body during BCG vaccination. During vaccination, two stages of the evolution of the immunological process were identified, which were called paraspecific and specific stages of change. Similar steps in the immunological process have subsequently been described in the vaccination of other infections with other drugs.

In the same years, V.I. Puzik and microbiologist A.I. Kagramanov carried out joint fundamental studies of the initial stages of the development of infections and proved the presence of "latent microbiosis" in infected patients, when the pathogen is detected, and the body does not respond with tissue reactions of immunity. This phenomenon is called "tolerance" by immunologists. Thus was born the doctrine of the "small disease" in tuberculosis, which proceeds secretly and reflects the development of tissue reactions of immunity. Completing work on the “minor disease”, Valentina Ilyinichna argued that its study can and should be carried out jointly by microbiological and morphological sciences.

An important area of research by Valentina Ilyinichna and her students was the study of the mechanisms of healing processes in tuberculosis that occurred in an infected organism, both with a “minor illness” during self-healing, self-healing, and during treatment with antibacterial drugs in clinical forms of tuberculosis. These studies were started by V.G. Stefko. He assumed that the healing mechanisms are in the lymphatic vessels - and this guess was confirmed by the works of V.I. Puzik and then used by her in the future.

At first, healing was considered from the standpoint of the bacteriostatic effect of antibacterial drugs, but then it was found that antibacterial drugs also affect all systems of the macroorganism. Valentina Ilyinichna proved that the primacy of the macroorganism is preserved during antibacterial and pathogenetic therapy, this should be borne in mind when treating patients. A special place in the 50-60s of the last century in the works of V.I. Puzik and her students were occupied with the histopathological study of the nervous system in cases of human and animal tuberculosis.

One of the latest topics, the development and implementation of which was led by Valentina Ilyinichna, and V.F. Salov and V.V. Erokhin, was the method of electron microscopy in the practice of studying tuberculous inflammation and reactions in immunocompetent organs. This method allows deciphering at the cellular and subcellular level the protective and adaptive mechanisms of the body during the progression of infection, which was not possible before its development.

The first church impressions of Valentina Puzik were associated with the church of the supreme apostles Peter and Paul on Novaya Basmannaya. Later, she recalled how in 1921, during a catastrophic famine, dozens of emaciated people - refugees from the starving regions - were sitting or lying on the high mound of the temple, located not far from three railway stations. Young Valentine with her friends carried buckets of stew to the temple, which her mother and other women cooked for the suffering.

While studying at the university, another event occurred that determined the subsequent life of a young girl. In February 1924, before her Angel Day, she came to the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and "quite by accident" went to confession to Archimandrite Agathon (Lebedev; † 1938), in the recent past - a resident of the St. Smolensk Zosima Hermitage, who moved to Moscow after closing native abode. This first visit to the Petrovsky Monastery and the meeting with the elder were described by her in the book “Starship in the Years of Persecution” (part 2).

Acquaintance with Father Agathon opens before her an exciting prospect of spiritual life, the existence of which she had only vaguely guessed before. She becomes a parishioner of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and the spiritual daughter of Archimandrite Agathon (in the schema of Ignatius). The life path of the elder - perhaps the most famous among the confessors of the Petrovsky Monastery - will end tragically. In the spring of 1935 he will be arrested and, despite a serious illness (parkinsonism), sentenced to five years in the camps. Father Ignatius will not survive this period. On the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist in 1938, he will die in an invalid camp near the city of Alatyr (Chuvash ASSR) from pellagra and heart failure.

From the mid-1920s, a spiritual family began to take shape around Father Ignatius, and some of its members clearly gravitated toward the monastic path. Having left the walls of their native monastery, the Zosimovians believed that, despite the persecution, monasticism should not fade away. The main thing is to preserve the spiritual life, the culture of Orthodox monasticism: prayer, senile guidance, communal life. And the particulars can change: let it be monasticism without monastic walls and clothes, let there be secular work instead of monastic obedience, so long as the new monks do it “with all responsibility, with all love.”

The brethren of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, imperceptibly for most of the worshipers, began to replenish with monks and nuns - young men and women who were already taking the vows in secret. They remained in their secular, "Soviet" work or study, which was part of their monastic obedience, and at the same time, under the guidance of the elders, comprehended the foundations of spiritual life. So, in the words of the nun Ignatia herself, the Vysoko-Petrovsky monastery became “a desert in the capital”.

Characteristically, during the years of church divisions, the Petrine fathers and their spiritual children considered it essential to remain faithful to the hierarchy of the Russian Church in the person of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky). It was not a political, but a conscious spiritual choice, the choice of those who sought to preserve spiritual life, monasticism and the entire Church where, it would seem, there was no place for it.

In 1928, Valentina Puzik was secretly tonsured into a cassock with the name Barsanuphius, in honor of St. Barsanuphius of Kazan. The tonsure was performed by her spiritual father at the apartment of the senior spiritual sister. This house, located at Pechatnikov Lane, Building 3, Apartment 26 (now it is a non-residential attic), the spiritual children of Fr. In early 1939, after the death of her spiritual father, she took the robes at the hands of one of the mentors of the Zosima Hermitage, Archimandrite Zosima (Nilov). The name in the mantle was given to her in memory of her elder - in honor of the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-bearer.

With the blessing of her spiritual father, mother Ignatius continued to work in her specialty. Research activity, understood as an obedience similar to a monastic one, became an integral part of her monastic work for many years. In 1940 she defended her doctoral thesis, in 1947 she was awarded the title of professor.

For 29 years (1945-1974) she was in charge of the pathomorphological laboratory of the Central Research Institute, in which some of her spiritual sisters worked with her - of course, without advertising their clergy. By 1974, when she finished her professional career, she had written more than 200 scientific papers in various fields of medicine, including seven monographs. Many of them are recognized as major theoretical works.

She raised more than one generation of researchers. Under her leadership, 22 doctoral and 47 master's theses were completed, and the list of fundamental works of her students occupies more than a dozen pages. In fact, she became the founder of her own school of TB pathologists who work throughout the former Soviet Union. Scientific activity of V.I. Already in the 1940s, Puzik found recognition among her foreign colleagues, with whom she communicated during business trips. At the same time, despite her fame and even awards (the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, nine medals, the title of Honored Worker of Medicine), nun Ignatia never became a member of the Academy of Sciences, although she could count on it due to her scientific merits. When colleagues raised this issue before the “instances”, they confidentially pointed out to her: “You understand, Valentina Ilyinichna, you can’t ...”, hinting at her non-partisanship and the well-known “who needs it” church spirit.

She understood and did not rush into the ranks of the scientific nomenclature, because scientific activity for her was obedience, her offering to God.

If nun Ignatia was only a prominent scholar, this would already put her on a par with such church figures of the twentieth century as St. Luke (Voyno-Yasenetsky), Metropolitan John (Wendland), Archpriest Gleb Kaleda. However, her service to God and the Church was not limited to science-obedience.

Since the mid-1940s, her scientific activity has been supplemented by literary work of spiritual content. Later, she admitted that the skill of written confession of thoughts instilled by her father Ignatius became the source of her literary creativity. At a certain stage, from the revelation of thoughts, prayerful reflections began to grow about the events of church life, about the fate of their loved ones, about the books they read. Gradually, these reflections took shape in books, large and small, of which, by the end of her life, according to the most general estimates, more than three dozen had accumulated. What are these books about?

In 1945, a significant and milestone year, her voice grew stronger in order to speak about those who were silent for almost ten years, but whose fates bled in their hearts like an unhealed wound. So her first book appeared - the biography of the spiritual father. After another seven years, reflecting on her path and the experience of witness, encouraged by the spiritual sisters, she again turned to the beginning of the path. Now, in 1952, she wrote about the brainchild of Father Ignatius - the monastic community he created. The image of a spiritual father - a mentor and a new martyr, who to the end testified to Christ's love - was her answer to a world distraught with pain, and the "chronicle" of his work, his spiritual family, created and living in spite of his death, in spite of persecution and loss, was her message. contemporary Russian monasticism.

Later there were other books - a kind of diaries-reflections about the life of the Church, its history and about the actions of the Providence of God in the modern world and in the life of modern man, seemingly completely abandoned by grace. It seems that nun Ignatia wrote her most mature works in the 1970s and 1980s, and the best of them are still waiting for publication.

Since the early 1980s, nun Ignatia has been trying her hand at hymnographic work. Part of the services created by her entered the liturgical use of the Russian Orthodox Church. These are, first of all, services to Saints Ignatius Bryanchaninov and Patriarch Job, Right-Believing Prince Dimitry Donskoy, Rev. Herman Zosimovsky and Zosima (Verkhovsky), services to the cathedrals of Belarusian, Smolensk and Kazan saints, the Valaam Icon of the Mother of God, as well as services to a number of saints presented for glorification .

At the same time, she worked on a series of articles on Orthodox hymnography (St. Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Kosmas of Mayum, Joseph the Songwriter, Theodore the Studite, St. Herman of Constantinople, Nun Cassia, etc.), which were published in Theological Works and later in the journal Alfa and Omega.

It should be noted the role of "Alpha and Omega" and personally the editor M.A. Zhurinskaya in popularizing the work of the nun Ignatia. It was on the pages of this magazine that her memoirs about the elders of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, about His Holiness Patriarchs Sergius and Alexy I, as well as her books of the 1940-1980s appeared. Some of these works were then published in separate editions: "Elderhood in Rus'", "Elderhood in the years of persecution", "St. Ignatius - God-bearer of Russia." Nun Ignatia became a regular contributor to the Alpha and Omega magazine - under the pseudonym Nun Ignatia (Petrovskaya) - and even wrote a number of new works especially for this publication.

In the 1990s, she again returned to where her literary work began - to testify to the feat of her spiritual mentors - the elders of Zosima Hermitage, the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. It can be said without exaggeration that it was thanks to her testimony that in December 2000 the Monk Martyr Ignatius (Lebedev), the spiritual father of the nun Ignatius, was glorified among the saints.

She truly became one of the links in the golden chain, which, according to Simeon the New Theologian, consists of "saints coming from generation to generation" and "which cannot be easily broken."

On April 24, 2003, on Maundy Thursday, she was tonsured into the great schema with the preservation of her name, but now the recently glorified Martyr Ignatius, her spiritual father, has become her heavenly patron. It was important and significant for her that the tonsure was performed by representatives of the clergy of the church of St. Sergius of Radonezh in the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery.

The circle of her contacts in recent years was exceptionally wide. Both venerable scholars, her colleagues at the institute, and very young students of the Sunday school, where, despite her infirmities and prudent exhortations, she considered it her duty to teach, came to her house on Begovaya Street. Among those who came to her, there were almost no her peers - everyone was two, three, or even five times younger than her, but in terms of freshness of perception of life and clarity of mind, the hostess was in no way inferior to the young.

She passed away to the Lord at the age of 102, of which she lived as a monk for 76 years.

: doctor of biological sciences, world-famous professor, who spent most of her scientific life working in science as a secret nun.

In senior years, a gifted student was noticed by Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko, who at that time held the position of professor of anthropology at the Faculty of Biology.

Valentina fulfilled his first orders impeccably - the professor was pleased that he had such an assistant. In those years - 1923-1925 - Vladimir Germanovich's workload was immense: experiments, lectures, reports, writing articles for German, French, American scientific journals - everything was scheduled by the hour and minute. From work, he simply suffocated, and getting to know Valentina was a great help to him.

At the end of 1945, Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko died, and from that time on, for the next 40 years, Valentina Ilyinichna became the head of the pathomorphological laboratory of the CIT.

An important area of research by Valentina Ilyinichna and her students was the study of the mechanisms of healing processes in tuberculosis that occurred in an infected organism, both with a “minor illness” during self-healing, self-healing, and during treatment with antibacterial drugs in clinical forms of tuberculosis. These studies were started by V.G. Stefko. He assumed that the mechanisms of healing are located in the lymphatic vessels - and this guess was confirmed by the works of V.I. Puzik and then used by her in the future.

The first church impressions of Valentina Puzik were associated with the church of the supreme apostles Peter and Paul on Novaya Basmannaya. Later, she recalled how in 1921, during a catastrophic famine, dozens of emaciated people, refugees from the starving regions, were sitting or lying on the high mound of the temple, located not far from three railway stations. Young Valentine with her friends carried buckets of stew to the temple, which her mother and other women cooked for the suffering.

While studying at the university, another event occurred that determined the subsequent life of a young girl. In February 1924, before her Angel Day, she came to the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and "quite by chance" went to confession to Archimandrite Agathon (Lebedev; † 1938), in the recent past - a resident of the St. Smolensk Zosima Hermitage, who moved to Moscow after closing native abode. This first visit to the Petrovsky Monastery and the meeting with the elder were described by her in the book “Starship in the Years of Persecution” (part 2).

The brethren of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, imperceptibly for most of the worshipers, began to replenish with monks and nuns - young men and women, already secretly tonsured. They remained in their secular, "Soviet" work or study, which was part of their monastic obedience, and at the same time, under the guidance of the elders, comprehended the foundations of spiritual life. So, in the words of the nun Ignatia herself, the Vysoko-Petrovsky monastery became “a desert in the capital”.

Characteristically, during the years of church divisions, the Petrine fathers and their spiritual children considered it essential to remain faithful to the hierarchy of the Russian Church in the person of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky). It was not a political, but a conscious spiritual choice, the choice of those who sought to preserve the spiritual life, monasticism and everything where, it would seem, there was no place for it.

In 1928, Valentina Puzik was secretly tonsured into a cassock with the name Barsanuphius, in honor of St. Barsanuphius of Kazan. The tonsure was performed by her spiritual father at the apartment of the senior spiritual sister. This house, located at Pechatnikov Lane, Building 3, Apartment 26 (now it is a non-residential attic), the spiritual children of Fr. At the beginning of 1939, after the death of her spiritual father, she was tonsured into the mantle by one of the mentors of the Zosima Hermitage, Archimandrite Zosima (Nilov). The name in the mantle was given to her in memory of her elder - in honor of the holy martyr.

For 29 years (1945–1974) she directed the pathomorphological laboratory of the TsNVIT, in which some of her spiritual sisters worked with her - of course, without advertising their churchness. By 1974, when she finished her professional career, she had written more than 200 scientific papers in various fields of medicine, including seven monographs. Many of them are recognized as major theoretical works.

She understood and did not rush into the ranks of the scientific nomenclature, because scientific activity for her was obedience, her offering to God.

If the nun Ignatia was only a major scholar, this would already put her on a par with such church figures of the twentieth century as St. Luke (Voyno-Yasenetsky), Metropolitan John (Wendland),. However, her service to God and the Church was not limited to science-obedience.

In 1945, a significant and milestone year, her voice got stronger in order to speak about those who were silent for almost ten years, but whose fates bled in the heart as an unhealed wound. So her first book appeared - the biography of the spiritual father. After another seven years, reflecting on her path and the experience of witness, encouraged by the spiritual sisters, she again turned to the beginning of the path. Now, in 1952, she wrote about the brainchild of Father Ignatius - the monastic community he created. The image of the spiritual father - a mentor and a new martyr, who to the end testified to Christ's love - was her answer to the world distraught with pain, and the "chronicle" of his deed, his spiritual family, created and living in spite of his death, in spite of persecution and loss, was her message. contemporary Russian monasticism.

Later there were other books - a kind of diary-reflections about the life of the Church, its history and about the actions of the Providence of God in the modern world and in the life of modern man, seemingly completely abandoned by grace. It seems that nun Ignatia wrote her most mature works in the 1970s and 1980s, and the best of them are still waiting for publication.

It should be noted the role of "Alpha and Omega" and personally the editor M.A. Zhurinskaya in popularizing the work of the nun Ignatia. It was on the pages of this magazine that her memoirs about the elders of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, about His Holiness Patriarchs Sergius and Alexy I, as well as her books of the 1940-1980s appeared. Some of these works were then published in separate editions: "Elderhood in Rus'", "Elderhood in the years of persecution", "St. Ignatius - God-bearer of Russia". Nun Ignatia became a regular contributor to the journal Alpha and Omega—under the pseudonym Nun Ignatia (Petrovskaya)—and even wrote a number of new works especially for this publication.

She truly became one of the links in the golden chain, which, according to Simeon the New Theologian, consists of "saints coming from generation to generation" and "which cannot be easily broken."

The circle of her contacts in recent years was exceptionally wide. Both venerable scholars, her colleagues at the institute, and very young students of the Sunday school, where, despite her infirmities and prudent exhortations, she considered it her duty to teach, came to her house on Begovaya Street. Among those who came to her, there were almost no peers of her age - everyone was two, three, or even five times younger than her, but in terms of freshness of perception of life and clarity of mind, the hostess was in no way inferior to the young.

She passed away to the Lord at the age of 102, of which she lived as a monk for 76 years.

“Mother Ignatia became a bridge through which the Lord through the decades connected the secret communities of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and the revived monastery of our days.A pupil of the Petrovsky elders, after a whole epoch, she seems to have grafted the church life renewed on Petrovka into the historical tree of the tradition of this place, ” hegumen Peter (Eremeev), rector of the Church of the Resurrection of the Word at the Vagankovsky cemetery, abbot of the Vysoko-Petrovsky monastery.

PUZIK VALENTINA ILYINICHNA (in the schema Ignatius, born February 1, 1903, Moscow - died August 29, 2004, Moscow) - a scientist in the field of phthisiopathology, professor, Orthodox hymnographer, schema nun.

Valentina was lucky to be born into a friendly, pious and religious family. In a family where children loved and honored their parents. Where from an early age industriousness, modesty, obedience, kindness and compassion for people were brought up in them. These wonderful qualities, laid down by believing and loving parents, Valentina Ilyinichina will keep for the rest of her life.

In 1920, Valentina graduated from the gymnasium with honors and entered the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Moscow State University. It was during this period of her life that she had two meetings that determined her further scientific and spiritual life. These were meetings with Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko and Father Ignatius.

After graduating from the university in 1926, the future schema nun began working in the field of pathomorphology of tuberculosis under the guidance of the famous phthisiopathologist V.G. Stefko. From 1945 to 1974 headed the laboratory of pathomorphology of tuberculosis at the State Tuberculosis Institute (later the Central Research Institute of Tuberculosis of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences). In 1940 she defended her doctoral thesis, and in 1947 she was awarded the title of professor. She owns more than 200 scientific papers in various fields of medicine, including seven monographs. Scientific merits of V.I. Puzik was awarded (Order of the Red Banner of Labor, nine medals, the title of Honored Worker of Medicine), and her research activities in the 1940s were recognized by foreign colleagues.

After the end of his professional activity in 1974, V.I. Puzik devoted herself entirely to monastic work.

The first church impressions of Valentina Ilyinichna are connected with the church of the supreme apostles Peter and Paul on Novaya Basmannaya in Moscow. Even while studying at the university, an important event occurred that determined the entire subsequent life of a young girl. In 1924, during a fast during a visit to the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, she met at confession with Archimandrite Agathon (Lebedev) (Ignatius in schema). She became his spiritual daughter. Since the mid-1920s, a spiritual family has been formed around Father Ignatius, many of whose members gravitated towards the monastic path; within the walls of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, many young men and women began to take secret tonsure. Here, under the guidance of the elders, they comprehended the basics of spiritual life, while remaining at their secular work or study, which was part of their monastic obedience.

In 1928, Valentina was secretly tonsured into a cassock with the name of Barsanuphius, in honor of St. Barsanuphius of Kazan. At the beginning of 1939, nun Varsonofia took the vows into the mantle, which was performed by Archimandrite Zosima (Nilov). The name in the mantle was given to her in memory of her elder - in honor of the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-bearer. With the blessing of her spiritual father, Mother Ignatius continued to work in her specialty, perceiving research activities as an obedience, similar to a monastic one.

From the mid-1940s, her scientific activity was supplemented by literary work of spiritual content. In 1945, her first book appeared - a biography of the spiritual father, Schema-Archimandrite Ignatius (Lebedev). In 1952, she wrote a book about the monastic community he created. Later, other books were written in which Mother Ignatia reflected on the life of the Church, its history, the actions of God's Providence in the modern world and in the life of modern man. Among them are memories of the elders of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, of the patriarchs Sergius and Alexy I.

Schematic nun Ignatia died on August 29, 2004 at the age of 102, of which she lived as a monk for 76 years. She was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery.

20.09.2018

Schema-nun Ignatia (in the world Valentina Ilyinichna Puzik), was born in Moscow. Phthisiopathology scientist, professor, Orthodox hymnographer.

Valentina Ilyinichna's father came from the peasants of the Grodno province in Belarus. After military service, he remained in Moscow and worked as an employee in the management of the Kiev-Voronezh railway, died in 1915 from tuberculosis. Mother - Ekaterina Sevostyanovna (nee Abakumtseva).

She studied at the Nikolaev Women's Commercial School on Novaya Basmannaya. After graduating from a commercial school in 1920, she entered the natural department of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of the 1st Moscow State University, and after organizing the biological department in 1923, she continued her studies there.

After graduating from the university in 1926, she began working in the field of pathomorphology of tuberculosis under the guidance of the famous phthisiopathologist V. G. Shtefko. From 1945 to 1974, she headed the laboratory of pathomorphology of tuberculosis at the State Tuberculosis Institute (later the Central Research Institute of Tuberculosis of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences). In 1940 she defended her doctoral thesis, and in 1947 she was awarded the title of professor. She owns more than 200 scientific papers in various fields of medicine, including seven monographs. Many of them are recognized as major theoretical works. In fact, she became the founder of her own school of TB pathologists who work throughout the former Soviet Union. Scientific merits of V. I. Puzik were awarded (Order of the Red Banner of Labor, nine medals, the title of Honored Worker of Medicine), and her research activities already in the 1940s were also recognized by foreign colleagues. After the end of her professional career in 1974, V. I. Puzik devoted herself entirely to monastic work.

In 1928, at the hands of her spiritual father Ignatius, Valentina was secretly tonsured into a cassock with the name Barsanuphius, in honor of St. Barsanuphius of Kazan. At the beginning of 1939, nun Varsanuphiia took the vows into the mantle, which was performed by Archmandrite Zosima (Nilov). The name in the mantle was given to her in memory of her elder - in honor of the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-bearer. With the blessing of her spiritual father, Mother Ignatius continued to work in her specialty, perceiving research activities as an obedience, similar to a monastic one.

hymnography

Since the early 1980s, nun Ignatia has been engaged in hymnographic work. Some of the Services she created have become part of the liturgical routine of the Russian Orthodox Church. Services include:

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov;
Patriarch Job;
Right-Believing Prince Dimitry Donskoy;
Venerable Geman Zossimovsky
Saint Zosima (Verkhovsky)
Cathedral of Belarusian Saints
Cathedral of the Smolensk Saints
Cathedral of Kazan Saints
Valaam Icon of the Mother of God
a number of saints presented for glorification

Publications

Nun Ignatia is the author of a series of articles devoted to the study of the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church, in particular Orthodox hymnography:

Saint Cosmas of Maium and his canons (1980)
Rev. John of Damascus in his ecclesiastical hymnographic work (1981)
The Liturgical Heritage of St. John the Songwriter (1981, 1984)
Saint Herman, Patriarch of Constantinople, as a church hymnographer (1981)
Church songwriting works of nun Cassia (1982)
The Place of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete and His Other Works in the Songwriting Heritage of the Church (1983)
Songwriting by St. Theodore the Studite in the Lenten Triodion (1983)
The Life and Works of St. Theophan the Inscribed (1984)
Works of Russian songwriters in the Kiev period (1986)
The Experience of Liturgical Theology in the Works of Russian Songwriters (1987)

On April 24, 2003, on Maundy Thursday in the Church of St. Sergius of Radonezh Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, nun Ignatia was tonsured into the great schema with the preservation of her name, but now the newly glorified Martyr Ignatius (Lebedev) - her spiritual father - has become her heavenly patron.

Schematic nun Ignatia died on August 29, 2004 at the age of 102, of which she lived as a monk for 76 years. The funeral service took place on August 31 in the temple of Pimen the Great in Novye Vorotniki. Schematic nun Ignatius was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery.

Valentina Ilyinichna, the future nun Ignatia, was born in Moscow into a poor family, where both father and mother worked day and night to ensure a comfortable life. In 1915, her father died of tuberculosis, and difficult years dragged on for Valentina. After studying at school, she managed to enter the Nikolaev Commercial School.
Everywhere - both at school and at the college - teachers noted the girl's rare abilities and great diligence. Perhaps this was one of the incentives for continuing education. After graduating from college, Valentina Puzik enters the natural department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University (subsequently, the department was transformed into the Faculty of Biology), where her desire for research work quickly manifests itself.
In senior years, a gifted student was noticed by Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko, who at that time held the position of professor of anthropology at the Faculty of Biology.
Valentina fulfilled his first orders flawlessly - the professor was pleased that he had such an assistant. In those years - 1923-1925 - Vladimir Germanovich's workload was immense: experiments, lectures, reports, writing articles for German, French, American scientific journals - everything was scheduled by the hour and minute. From work, he simply suffocated, and getting to know Valentina was a great help to him.
Valentina Ilyinichna participated in many undertakings of Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko, in her last years he began to supervise her student scientific work, offered to carry out a serious study “Age-related development of the thyroid gland in humans”, which later became part of her diploma. The research carried out by Valentina Ilyinichnaya in her last years at the university was far superior in volume and depth to ordinary student work. And the materials of her diploma "The course of the tuberculosis process in patients of various types of constitution" interested foreign scientists and were published in one of the German scientific journals.
In 1926, having brilliantly defended her thesis, Valentina Ilyinichna was invited by her mentor Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko to the Central Tuberculosis Institute (CIT) to work together in the pathomorphological laboratory. Her first "scientific degree" was the position of preparator.
The first twenty years of her creative life (from 1926 to 1945) of Valentina Ilyinichna were marked by great scientific work. In particular, together with V.G. Shtefko, she created the “Pathological Anatomical Classification of Pulmonary Tuberculosis”. Their other common work was framed as a monograph “Pathology and Clinical Tuberculosis. Introduction to the constitutional pathological anatomy of hematogenous and lymphogenous forms of pulmonary tuberculosis, which was published in 1934, but is still a fundamental work today.
The thematic focus of Valentina Ilyinichna's activities at that time was caused by the urgent need, first of all, to study the pathogenesis of tuberculosis, since in the 20-30s of the last century in Russia there was a high mortality rate from pulmonary tuberculosis. And in those days and later, all the scientific work of Valentina Puzik convincingly answered the questions posed by life. The work of the scientist was not stopped by the war: she continued to study the pathogenesis of tuberculosis, based on the study of the human disease as a whole.
At the end of 1945, Vladimir Germanovich Shtefko died, and from that time on, for the next 40 years, Valentina Ilyinichna became the head of the pathomorphological laboratory of the CIT.
After World War II, she was one of the first to test and study the mechanism of action of the French BCG vaccine. Based on the developments of Valentina Ilyinichna, a new scientific direction in the problem of tuberculosis was subsequently discovered - immunomorphological. For the first time in the world, Valentina Ilyinichna and then her students studied the morphological reactions of the body during BCG vaccination. During vaccination, two stages of the evolution of the immunological process were identified, which were called paraspecific and specific stages of change. Similar steps in the immunological process have subsequently been described in the vaccination of other infections with other drugs.
In the same years, V.I. Puzik and microbiologist A.I. Kagramanov carried out joint fundamental studies of the initial stages of the development of infections and proved the presence of "latent microbiosis" in infected patients, when the pathogen is detected, and the body does not respond with tissue reactions of immunity. This phenomenon is called "tolerance" by immunologists. Thus was born the doctrine of the "small disease" in tuberculosis, which proceeds secretly and reflects the development of tissue reactions of immunity. Completing work on the “minor disease”, Valentina Ilyinichna argued that its study can and should be carried out jointly by microbiological and morphological sciences.
An important area of research by Valentina Ilyinichna and her students was the study of the mechanisms of healing processes in tuberculosis that occurred in an infected organism, both with a “minor illness” during self-healing, self-healing, and during treatment with antibacterial drugs in clinical forms of tuberculosis. These studies were started by V.G. Stefko. He assumed that the healing mechanisms are in the lymphatic vessels - and this guess was confirmed by the works of V.I. Puzik and then used by her in the future.
At first, healing was considered from the standpoint of the bacteriostatic effect of antibacterial drugs, but then it was found that antibacterial drugs also affect all systems of the macroorganism. Valentina Ilyinichna proved that the primacy of the macroorganism is preserved during antibacterial and pathogenetic therapy, this should be borne in mind when treating patients. A special place in the 50-60s of the last century in the works of V.I. Puzik and her students were occupied with the histopathological study of the nervous system in cases of human and animal tuberculosis.
One of the latest topics, the development and implementation of which was led by Valentina Ilyinichna, and V.F. Salov and V.V. Erokhin, was the method of electron microscopy in the practice of studying tuberculous inflammation and reactions in immunocompetent organs. This method allows deciphering at the cellular and subcellular level the protective and adaptive mechanisms of the body during the progression of infection, which was not possible before its development.
The first church impressions of Valentina Puzik were associated with the church of the supreme apostles Peter and Paul on Novaya Basmannaya. Later, she recalled how in 1921, during a catastrophic famine, dozens of emaciated people - refugees from the starving regions - were sitting or lying on the high mound of the temple, located not far from three railway stations. Young Valentine with her friends carried buckets of stew to the temple, which her mother and other women cooked for the suffering.
While studying at the university, another event occurred that determined the subsequent life of a young girl. In February 1924, before her Angel Day, she came to the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and "quite by accident" went to confession to Archimandrite Agathon (Lebedev; † 1938), in the recent past - a resident of the St. Smolensk Zosima Hermitage, who moved to Moscow after closing native abode. This first visit to the Petrovsky Monastery and the meeting with the elder were described by her in the book “Starship in the Years of Persecution” (part 2).
Acquaintance with Father Agathon opens before her an exciting prospect of spiritual life, the existence of which she had only vaguely guessed before. She becomes a parishioner of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and the spiritual daughter of Archimandrite Agathon (in the schema of Ignatius). The life path of the elder - perhaps the most famous among the confessors of the Petrovsky Monastery - will end tragically. In the spring of 1935 he will be arrested and, despite a serious illness (parkinsonism), sentenced to five years in the camps. Father Ignatius will not survive this period. On the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist in 1938, he will die in an invalid camp near the city of Alatyr (Chuvash ASSR) from pellagra and heart failure.
From the mid-1920s, a spiritual family began to take shape around Father Ignatius, and some of its members clearly gravitated toward the monastic path. Having left the walls of their native monastery, the Zosimovians believed that, despite the persecution, monasticism should not fade away. The main thing is to preserve the spiritual life, the culture of Orthodox monasticism: prayer, senile guidance, communal life. And the particulars can change: let it be monasticism without monastic walls and clothes, let there be secular work instead of monastic obedience, so long as the new monks do it “with all responsibility, with all love.”
The brethren of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, imperceptibly for most of the worshipers, began to replenish with monks and nuns - young men and women who were already taking the vows in secret. They remained in their secular, "Soviet" work or study, which was part of their monastic obedience, and at the same time, under the guidance of the elders, comprehended the foundations of spiritual life. So, in the words of the nun Ignatia herself, the Vysoko-Petrovsky monastery became “a desert in the capital”.
Characteristically, during the years of church divisions, the Petrine fathers and their spiritual children considered it essential to remain faithful to the hierarchy of the Russian Church in the person of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky). It was not a political, but a conscious spiritual choice, the choice of those who sought to preserve spiritual life, monasticism and the entire Church where, it would seem, there was no place for it.
In 1928, Valentina Puzik was secretly tonsured into a cassock with the name Barsanuphius, in honor of St. Barsanuphius of Kazan. The tonsure was performed by her spiritual father at the apartment of the senior spiritual sister. This house, located at Pechatnikov Lane, Building 3, Apartment 26 (now it is a non-residential attic), the spiritual children of Fr. In early 1939, after the death of her spiritual father, she took the robes at the hands of one of the mentors of the Zosima Hermitage, Archimandrite Zosima (Nilov). The name in the mantle was given to her in memory of her elder - in honor of the Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-bearer.
With the blessing of her spiritual father, mother Ignatius continued to work in her specialty. Research activity, understood as an obedience similar to a monastic one, became an integral part of her monastic work for many years. In 1940 she defended her doctoral thesis, in 1947 she was awarded the title of professor.
For 29 years (1945-1974) she was in charge of the pathomorphological laboratory of the Central Research Institute, in which some of her spiritual sisters worked with her - of course, without advertising their clergy. By 1974, when she finished her professional career, she had written more than 200 scientific papers in various fields of medicine, including seven monographs. Many of them are recognized as major theoretical works.
She raised more than one generation of researchers. Under her leadership, 22 doctoral and 47 master's theses were completed, and the list of fundamental works of her students occupies more than a dozen pages. In fact, she became the founder of her own school of TB pathologists who work throughout the former Soviet Union. Scientific activity of V.I. Already in the 1940s, Puzik found recognition among her foreign colleagues, with whom she communicated during business trips. At the same time, despite her fame and even awards (the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, nine medals, the title of Honored Worker of Medicine), nun Ignatia never became a member of the Academy of Sciences, although she could count on it due to her scientific merits. When colleagues raised this issue before the “instances”, they confidentially pointed out to her: “You understand, Valentina Ilyinichna, you can’t ...”, hinting at her non-partisanship and the well-known “who needs it” church spirit.
She understood and did not rush into the ranks of the scientific nomenclature, because scientific activity for her was obedience, her offering to God.
If nun Ignatia was only a prominent scholar, this would already put her on a par with such church figures of the twentieth century as St. Luke (Voyno-Yasenetsky), Metropolitan John (Wendland), Archpriest Gleb Kaleda. However, her service to God and the Church was not limited to science-obedience.
Since the mid-1940s, her scientific activity has been supplemented by literary work of spiritual content. Later, she admitted that the skill of written confession of thoughts instilled by her father Ignatius became the source of her literary creativity. At a certain stage, from the revelation of thoughts, prayerful reflections began to grow about the events of church life, about the fate of their loved ones, about the books they read. Gradually, these reflections took shape in books, large and small, of which, by the end of her life, according to the most general estimates, more than three dozen had accumulated. What are these books about?
In 1945, a significant and milestone year, her voice grew stronger in order to speak about those who were silent for almost ten years, but whose fates bled in their hearts like an unhealed wound. So her first book appeared - the biography of the spiritual father. After another seven years, reflecting on her path and the experience of witness, encouraged by the spiritual sisters, she again turned to the beginning of the path. Now, in 1952, she wrote about the brainchild of Father Ignatius - the monastic community he created. The image of a spiritual father - a mentor and a new martyr, who to the end testified to Christ's love - was her answer to a world distraught with pain, and the "chronicle" of his work, his spiritual family, created and living in spite of his death, in spite of persecution and loss, was her message. contemporary Russian monasticism.
Later there were other books - a kind of diaries-reflections about the life of the Church, its history and about the actions of the Providence of God in the modern world and in the life of modern man, seemingly completely abandoned by grace. It seems that nun Ignatia wrote her most mature works in the 1970s and 1980s, and the best of them are still waiting for publication.
Since the early 1980s, nun Ignatia has been trying her hand at hymnographic work. Part of the services created by her entered the liturgical use of the Russian Orthodox Church. These are, first of all, services to Saints Ignatius Bryanchaninov and Patriarch Job, Right-Believing Prince Dimitry Donskoy, Rev. Herman Zosimovsky and Zosima (Verkhovsky), services to the cathedrals of Belarusian, Smolensk and Kazan saints, the Valaam Icon of the Mother of God, as well as services to a number of saints presented for glorification .
At the same time, she worked on a series of articles on Orthodox hymnography (St. Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Kosmas of Mayum, Joseph the Songwriter, Theodore the Studite, St. Herman of Constantinople, Nun Cassia, etc.), which were published in Theological Works and later in the journal Alfa and Omega.
It should be noted the role of "Alpha and Omega" and personally the editor M.A. Zhurinskaya in popularizing the work of the nun Ignatia. It was on the pages of this magazine that her memoirs about the elders of the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, about His Holiness Patriarchs Sergius and Alexy I, as well as her books of the 1940-1980s appeared. Some of these works were then published in separate editions: "Elderhood in Rus'", "Elderhood in the years of persecution", "St. Ignatius - God-bearer of Russia." Nun Ignatia became a regular contributor to the Alpha and Omega magazine - under the pseudonym Nun Ignatia (Petrovskaya) - and even wrote a number of new works especially for this publication.
In the 1990s, she again returned to where her literary work began - to testify to the feat of her spiritual mentors - the elders of Zosima Hermitage, the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. It can be said without exaggeration that it was thanks to her testimony that in December 2000 the Monk Martyr Ignatius (Lebedev), the spiritual father of the nun Ignatius, was glorified among the saints.
She truly became one of the links in the golden chain, which, according to Simeon the New Theologian, consists of "saints coming from generation to generation" and "which cannot be easily broken."
On April 24, 2003, on Maundy Thursday, she was tonsured into the great schema with the preservation of her name, but now the recently glorified Martyr Ignatius, her spiritual father, has become her heavenly patron. It was important and significant for her that the tonsure was performed by representatives of the clergy of the church of St. Sergius of Radonezh in the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery.
The circle of her contacts in recent years was exceptionally wide. Both venerable scholars, her colleagues at the institute, and very young students of the Sunday school, where, despite her infirmities and prudent exhortations, she considered it her duty to teach, came to her house on Begovaya Street. Among those who came to her, there were almost no her peers - everyone was two, three, or even five times younger than her, but in terms of freshness of perception of life and clarity of mind, the hostess was in no way inferior to the young.
She passed away to the Lord at the age of 102, of which she lived as a monk for 76 years.

Based on materials from the site http://www.pravmir.ru/

"Ascent" A film about the secret nun Ignatius. The heroine of the film (Valentina Puzik) is 100 years old. Almost 80 of them she lived as a secret nun (Ignatia). Her mentors were the elders of Zosima Hermitage