The strannik is a pilgrim who wanders from monastery to monastery and church to church, seeking the truth and living on the charity of the faithful. He may thus travel right across the Russian Empire, led by his fancy or attracted by the reputation for holiness enjoyed by particular places or persons.
The staretz is an ascetic who usually lives in a monastery, though sometimes in solitude—a kind of guide of souls to whom one has recourse in moments of trouble or suffering. Quite frequently a staretz is an ex-strannik who has given up his old wandering life and taken up an abode in which to end his days in prayer and meditation.
Dostoïevsky gives the following description of him in The Brothers Karamazof:
“The staretz is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you select your staretz you surrender your will, you give it him in utter submission, in full renunciation. He who takes this burden upon him, who accepts this terrible school of life, does so of his own free will in the hope that after a long trial he will be able to conquer himself and become his own master sufficiently to attain complete freedom by a life of obedience—that is to say, get rid of self and avoid the fate of those who have lived their lives without succeeding in sufficing unto themselves.”
God gives the staretz the indications which are requisite for one’s welfare and communicates the means by which one must be brought back to safety.
On earth the staretz is the guardian of truth and the ideal. He is also the repository of the sacred tradition which must be transmitted from staretz to staretz until the reign of justice and light shall come.
Several of these startsi have risen to remarkable heights of modern grandeur and become saints of the Orthodox Church.
The influence of these men, who live as a kind of unofficial clergy, is still very considerable in Russia. In the provinces and open country it is even greater than that of the priests and monks.
The conversion of the Czarina had been a genuine act of faith. The Orthodox religion had fully responded to her mystical aspirations, and her imagination must have been captured by its archaic and naïve ritual. She had accepted it with all the ardour of the neophyte. In her eyes Rasputin had all the prestige and sanctity of a staretz.
Such was the nature of the feelings the Czarina entertained for Rasputin—feelings ignobly travestied by calumny. They had their source in maternal love, the noblest passion which can fill a mother’s heart.