The paper deals with the image of the character-righteous traditional for Russian patriarchal culture. Type of righteous embodied in various artistic samples of Russian literature manifested in the form of the «wise old man» and presented in the literary works of Siberian writer M. A. Tarkovsky. On the example of representative literary works is determined by the type of righteousness characters close to the primordial hagiographic and folk traditions (a preceptor, a martyr, a keeper, a holly fool).