This book for the first time under one cover contains classical works on icon painting and icons of the greatest Russian thinkers and researchers of Christian culture and Old Russian art: Evgeny Trubetskoy, Sergius Bulgakov, Nikolai Pokrovsky and others. Collected together, these vivid works provide a holistic, at the same time artistic, historical and religious interpretation of the ancient Russian icon. You will learn why icons are needed, how they were created and how to understand their symbolic language, what place the icon occupied in the life of a Russian person in past centuries, what folk beliefs and customs are associated with icons, where the miraculous power of holy miraculous icons comes from.