The monograph by F. was the first attempt of a large-scale reconstruction of a complete picture of the folk religiosity of Russian peasants based on their spiritual poetry. For F., the study of the ‘religious phenomenology’ was not so much a research task, as a search for the spiritual foundations of the life of Russian people, developed by F. in his works on Old Russian saints, and was taken by him as “one of the urgent tasks of our Christian and national revival”.
The monograph consists of six parts. The first two parts, ‘What are Spiritual Verses’ and ‘The Favorite Plots’, give an overview of the main sources of spiritual poetry, it is also said about the main researchers of this genre up to 1917. In five sections of the third part ‘Heavenly Powers’ (The Trinity, Christ, Theotokos, Angels and Saints, Mother Earth), such topics as the system of folk theology and the folk ‘confession of faith’ are raised; the author noted: The Trinity is the ‘Deuce’ in fact, since “in it, behind the threefold name, rather the main religious double structure is presented: the male and female divine principle – Christ and the Mother of God”. In the part entitled ‘Human Life’, which consists of four sections (The Sinful World, The Moral Law, The Church, Holiness) the problems of religious ethics are discussed, which are based on three ‘moral laws’: telluric, ritual, and caritative ones, and also the ‘ethics of purity’. And the closing chapter, ‘The Last Judgment’, logically concludes F.'s study of such popular confession of faith.
Noting the issue of the pre-Christian and Christian components of the ‘popular faith’, F. declares that the ‘popular faith’, which arose under the influence of various religious traditions, is an integral phenomenon.