Tver Theological Seminary
Alexander Matveevich Bukharev was born on August 2, 1824, in the village of Fedorovskoye, Korchevsk Uyezd, Tver Governorate, Russian Empire (now Tver', Russian Federation). He was in the family of Deacon Matvey Lukich Bukharev and his wife Martha.
Alexander Matveevich studied at the Tver Theological College (1832-1837) and the Tver Theological Seminary (1837-1842), where he attracted attention with his talent. Then he studied at the Moscow Theological Academy. At the end of his studies, on June 8, 1846, he became a monk with the name of Fedor. At the end of the academic course, he got the 3rd master and stayed at the academy as a bachelor in the department of scripture.
When Alexander Matveevich finished his studies at Moscow Theological Academy at the end of 1846, he became an ordinary professor and worked there since 1854. He was close to Nikolai Gogol in the last years of his life. In the study Three letters to N.V. Gogol, written in 1848, he proved the absence of a contradiction between Gogol’s artistic work and his book Selected Fragments from Correspondence with Friends. According to Bukharev, starting with his early works, Gogol had a spirit of Christian love for people. Its highest expression is the poem Dead Souls, filled with hope for the resurrection of dead souls.
In 1854-1858, Alexander Matveevich was a professor and inspector of the Kazan Theological Academy, from 1858 - a member of the Saint Petersburg Committee for Spiritual Censorship. The censorship of the newspaper Home Talk led him to the acquaintance with Viktor Askochensky, as a result of which Bukherev was transferred to the Pereslavl Nikitinsky Monastery.
In 1862, after the Synod's prohibition of the long-standing work Research of the Apocalypse, Alexander Matveevich filed a petition for withdrawal from monasticism, which was satisfied in 1863. He believed that the main thing in Christianity is the incarnation of God the Son, who atoned for all the sins of mankind. Hence the following ideas appeared: combining the secular with the spiritual, introducing Orthodox principles into life; emphasis on personality-humanistic issues: all genuine knowledge and all types of human activity (science, art, commerce, amusements, etc.) are charitable since Christ truth can be brought into them ("Orthodoxy in Relation to the Present").
Most of the critical journalistic articles of Alexander Matveevich were included in the collection On the contemporary spiritual needs of thought and life, especially Russian. In the article Our, Secular, and Spiritual Magazines, he singled out Sovremennik from secular magazines for "the truthfulness of the dominant trend", but he saw in its articles a "tough claim to monopoly" in resolving various issues and a dangerous tendency to "sophisticated resourcefulness" in controversy. In the article Analysis of two novels concerning important difficulties and issues of modern thought and life, Alexander Matveevich evaluated Chernyshevsky’s What to do?. He pointed to the unusual "Sense of Truth" inherent in the author, to the moral influence of Rakhmetov’s ascetic personality.
Alexander Matveevich was the author of numerous works on the Bible. He released A book for teaching Russian reading and writing. Interest in the personality and work of Bukharev increased at the beginning of the twentieth century among representatives of Russian religious and philosophical thought.
