The Russian eldership of the nineteenth century was a revival, not a survival, and it can be traced to a specific chain of transmission. Paisius Velichkovsky, who died in 1794, was a Ukrainian monk who went to Mount Athos and then to Moldavia, gathered a community, and set it to translating the Greek ascetic fathers into Church Slavonic. The collection he worked from was the Philokalia, assembled by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth and printed in Venice in 1782; his Slavonic version, the Dobrotolubiye, appeared in Moscow in 1793 and carried the texts and the practice of continuous prayer into the Russian monasteries.
The practice took root most visibly at the hermitage of Optina, south of Moscow, where a succession of elders received visitors through the nineteenth century. Irina Paert's study describes what that meant socially: the monastery became a destination not only for peasants but for the educated, and Gogol, Dostoevsky, Solovyov and Tolstoy all went there. The figure of the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov is drawn from that world, and the novel did as much as anything to fix the image of the starets in the imagination of readers who would never meet one.
The most widely known Russian elder, Seraphim of Sarov, who died in 1833, stands slightly outside the Optina line. He spent long periods as a hermit before receiving visitors, and was glorified in 1903 in a canonisation the imperial family pressed for, which is itself part of the history: eldership and state interest met, and the meeting was not comfortable.