The “Spirit of Kerzhenets” at the Marx–Engels Institute

This work was meant to be presented as a paper at the scholarly and cultural forum “Avvakumovskie Chteniia” at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (September 28–30, 2020). The study is dedicated to the outstanding French Slavic scholar Pierre Pascal. The main objective of the article is to show how P. Pascal realized the need to study the Live of Archpriest Avvakum and the early history of the Old Believer Schism. The article also demonstrates the peculiarity of Pascal’s research approach and examines the problem of finding the correct artistic language for the French translation of the Life of Avvakum.