In a portrait of Sergey Bulgakov and the Pavel Florensky, named "Philosophers", Nesterov has written the friends, outstanding representatives of religious-philosophical thought. It has selected a genre of a pair portrait to show two opposite characters in uniform search of true. The portrait is created during this period when both philosophers as a result of long conversations and reflexions have come nearer, at last, to a generality of understanding of uniform true.

Nesterov admired the world of ideas and feelings of father Pavel Florensky, its well-known book "Pillar and the true statement".

Pavel Florensky was a multifaceted thinker and scientist, one of the most accomplished twentieth-century representatives of a rich tradition of Russian philosopher-poets. Compared by some to Leonardo da Vinci because of his versatile and inventive mind, Florensky is closer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his striving to define the basic morphological principles and primary phenomena that undergird organic and spiritual life. He elaborated his approach as a theory of symbolism that is closely related to the Symbolist literary movement but cannot be completely identified with it: spiritual creativity reveals the immanent structures of life, which are rooted in the transcendent and which counteract the entropy that prevails in the physical cosmos. Poetry was a minor facet of his creative personality; of his verse, only about fifty poems and two longer poetic works have been published. Although Florensky's verse garnered him much less recognition than his theological, aesthetical, and scientific writings, it presents an integral image of this profound thinker.

Pavel Florensky saw creation is seen as "one living being praying to its creator and Father".

“God is precisely the Highest Beauty, through communion with whom everything becomes beautiful...beauty is Beauty and is understood as Life, as Creativity, as reality. Everything is beautiful in a person when he is turned toward God and everything is ugly when he is turned away from God” (Quoted in Bychkov, V. The Aesthetic face of Being: Theology of Pavel Florensky, tr. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993).

During his study at the seminary Sergey Bulgakov became interested in Marxism and took part in the Legal Marxism movement. Studying Marxism, Bulgakov eventually became convinced of the impotence of this theory. Under the influence of works of Russian religious thinkers (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, etc.), in the course of his meetings and arguments with Leo Tolstoy he found his religious beliefs again. He wrote a book about his evolution (Sergey Bulgakov, From Marxism to Idealism, 1903).