The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Lestvitsa)
Лествица
Отречение от мира есть добровольная ненависть к веществу, отвержение естества ради нижеестественного.
Our renderingRenunciation of the world is a voluntary hatred of material things and a denial of nature for the sake of that which surpasses nature.
What it is
Written by the sixth-century abbot of the Sinai monastery, the Ladder of Divine Ascent presents a 30-step progression from renunciation of the world to the summit of love, using precise psychological observation to diagnose and cure the passions. A personal copy with red and gold embossed cover, inscribed 'A.F. Ts.S. March 1906,' was documented among Empress Alexandra's books recovered at Ekaterinburg, with multiple bookmarks and pencil annotations throughout. The Church of the Ladder (Tserkov Rizopolozheniya) within the Moscow Kremlin, built 1329, bears witness to the text's central role in Russian spiritual life across the entire Romanov dynasty. Its sustained use in the Eastern monastic tradition makes it one of the most closely studied works of practical spiritual theology in Orthodox Christianity.
Why it still matters
The Church prescribes reading the Ladder during Great Lent; reading one or two steps per week through Lent, using Archimandrite Lazarus Moore's translation or the Classics of Western Spirituality edition, provides a structured annual examination of conscience that the entire patristic tradition endorses.
Kept alongside
The Jesus Prayer
Молитва Иисусова
The short invocation 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner' has been the central personal prayer of Orthodox hesychasm for fifteen centuries, transmitted through the Desert Fathers, the Sinai tradition, and the Athonite hesychasts to Russian monasticism and lay piety. It appears within the Molitvoslov prayer rule documented as belonging to the Romanov family, and Empress Alexandra explicitly commended the prayer to her children by name in her letters and spiritual counsel. Elder Nikolai Guryanov later testified that Tsar Nicholas II recited it daily, though this oral tradition postdates the Tsar by decades and cannot be treated as primary documentation. The prayer's centrality to the Romanov spiritual world is well established; the personal frequency of its use by individual family members is plausible but cannot be confirmed from contemporary primary sources.
Canon to the Holy Guardian Angel
Канон ко Святому Ангелу Хранителю
The Canon to the Guardian Angel is a nine-ode liturgical canon addressed to one's personal guardian angel, included in every standard Orthodox Molitvoslov as part of the preparatory rule for Holy Communion and commonly used as an evening prayer. Because it is an integral part of the documented Molitvoslov used by the Romanov family, it was present in their devotional life by inclusion in that book rather than through any separately documented personal acquaintance. Orthodox children in Russia have been taught this canon from an early age as a component of basic prayer formation for at least three centuries. Its authorship and precise date of composition are unknown; the text is traditional and anonymous.
Orthodox Psalter (Chasoslovnyi Psaltyr)
Псалтирь
The complete Psalter, divided into twenty kathismata, was read through weekly at Orthodox services and served as the foundational personal devotional text across the entire Romanov era and the whole of Byzantine-Slavic Christianity. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich kept the Psalter among his personal desk-books alongside the Horologion, as documented by the Presidential Library of Russia. Empress Alexandra's Bible in Church Slavonic, recovered at Ekaterinburg with underlined passages and dried herbs pressed between pages, testifies to the Psalter's intimate daily use during captivity. The Psalter was also the primary text from which the Romanov children learned to read Church Slavonic.