Alexander Vasillevich Vadkovsky was born in 1846. He attended the Kazan Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1870. After graduation he remained at the academy as a lecturer, inspector, and working as editor of the academy’s journal the “Orthodox Interlocutor” (Pravoslavny Sobesdnik). The sudden death of his wife and two children suddenly changed the course of his life as in 1883 he was tonsured a monk with the name Anthony. As a scholar, and now a monastic, Fr. Anthony contributed greatly to the revival of “learned monasticism” that had characterized the hierarchy of the Church before the reforms of the 1860s.