The story about the life of Saint Seraphim of Sarov1, the miracle-worker, was first printed by the Monastery of Sarov in 1893. It was then re-written by N. Puretzki and published by the printer I. D. Sytin in Moscow in 1903.

Saint Seraphim's Teaching was taken from the original edition of this book, which was reprinted in Moscow in 1991 by the Moscow Section of the National Trust for Preservation of Monuments.

The illustration used for the cover is the photo of one of the miraculous representations of Saint Seraphim in the Russian Orthodox Church in the name of Saint Mary of Magdala in The Hague. The icon was presented to the church by the last Russian tzar, Nicolas II, a martyr and a saint; the reason being that the church was originally the domestic chapel of Queen Anna Paulowna, who was a member of the royal Romanov house, and the wife of the Dutch king, Willem II. This icon has another particular characteristic: it is not a strictly formal representation of a saint, but one of the two portraits of Saint Seraphim. Saint Seraphim is one of the most venerated saints of Russia, and has greatly influenced the spiritual life, not only of the entire Russian clergy, but also the thousands of laymen and mystics who were drawn to Christian mysticism. Staretz Seraphim has formulated in his teaching in simple words the purpose and the ways of Christian ascetic life, in order to make them understandable to all those seeking God.