The Rehearsals E-Book

Vladimir Sharov

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015). 'The clarity and directness of Sharov's prose - wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready - are disconcerting, almost hallucinatory. His writing is at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take. How did I get here? is a question his reader will likely ask gain and again.' Rachel Polonsky, New York Review of Books

Leseprobe

Reviews for Before & During

‘One of the most fascinating books in post-Soviet literature… even twenty years after its publication and translated into English, Sharov’s Before & During reads as if it were completed yesterday.’

Mark Lipovetsky, The Russian Review

‘If Russian history is indeed a commentary to the Bible, then Before and During is an audacious attempt to shine a mystical light on (Russian history), an unusual take on the 20th century’s apocalypse that leaves the reader to look for their own explications.’

Anna Aslanyan, The Independent

‘A Menippean satire in which historical reality, in all its irreversible awfulness, is for a moment scrambled, eroticized… and illuminated by hilarious monologues of the dead.’

Caryl Emerson, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Translation should not strive for perfection, but for excellence. Perfection is impossible, whereas excellence is only nearly impossible. And excellence is what Oliver Ready achieves in his rendering of Before and During by Vladimir Sharov. He captures the clear voice and confused mentality of the narrator who is able to love both Christ and Lenin, who prays for the sinner Ivan the Terrible and who tries to unravel the legacy of the Bolsheviks.’

Jury of the 2015 Read Russia Prize

The Author

A historian of late-medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (born 1952) turned to fiction in the early 1980s. One of Russia’s most distinguished living writers, he is the author of eight novels. The Rehearsals, which was written in the mid to late 1980s, is the second of his books to be published by Dedalus, following Before and During in 2014. He is the recipient of several awards, most recently the Russian Booker Prize in 2014.

Disputing the characterisation of his fiction as ‘alternative history’, Sharov has said: ‘God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, inventions and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd.’

He lives in Moscow.

The Translator

Oliver Ready teaches Russian at Oxford and is a Research Fellow of St Antony’s College. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin, 2014) and from contemporary fiction, works by Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov for Dedalus. In 2015, he received the Read Russia Prize for Sharov’s Before and During, and in 2005 the Rossica Translation Prize for Buida’s short-story cycle, The Prussian Bride. His book, Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013, was published in 2017.

Translator’s Foreword

More than thirty years after he abandoned historical research for literature – and occasional poems about nature for wildly imaginative prose about people and peoples – Vladimir Sharov is now finally established in Russia as one of the essential novelists of his time. The flurry of awards that have come his way in recent years has forced his name out of the pocket of ‘highbrow’, ‘provocative’ literature to which he had been consigned for too long. As so often, these honours express overdue acknowledgement within the literary fraternity of an author’s fundamental originality and influence, and Sharov has certainly left lasting traces on the work of younger contemporaries, from Dmitry Bykov and Mikhail Shishkin to Evgeny Vodolazkin, the literary phenomenon of the past five years. This belated recognition may also be due to the irony that the theme of Russian messianism, which is explored so persistently by Sharov in the key of tragedy, finds its unironic echoes in dominant strains of Russian ideology today. Indeed, Sharov’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s are arguably more ‘relevant’ in 2017 than when they were first written.

It is through these earlier works that Anglophone readers can now begin to acquaint themselves with Sharov’s oeuvre. As the author himself has said, all his novels ‘supplement’ the ones that came before – just as they supplement the established historical record, and just as, within those same novels, children supplement, and mourn, the prematurely aborted or frustrated lives of their parents, relatives and ancestors. Much of Sharov’s extended family perished in Soviet prison camps, and the young Sharov heard the stories of Gulag returnees at first hand in his parents’ flat (his father Aleksandr, born Sher Izrailevich Nyurenberg, was also a writer, whose books for children are still widely read). As Alexander Etkind, among others, has recognised, Sharov’s novels are an ongoing work of bereavement – and attempted understanding.1

Before and During, the first of Sharov’s novels to be published in English (Dedalus, 2014), is one of several candidates for the title of ‘last novel of the Soviet era’ (it was completed just as the August putsch of 1991 got underway). Grandiose in conception and canvas, it transmutes the well-worn parallel between the French and Russian revolutionary eras into a fantasy whose extravagant plot belies its seriousness. In Madame de Staël’s second life, she becomes the lover of Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903), a philosopher passionately opposed to both social inequality and reproduction, which can serve only to extend the path of sin. In her third (and last) life, she becomes Stalin’s mother – and lover. In all de Staël’s encounters, the forces of vitality, creativity and fertility are pitted in a losing battle against the forces of death, asceticism and dogmatism, against the Revolution that arrived too late and too old. These are all mere stories, of course, mere fables or parables, but they are parables passed on to the reader by a kind-hearted journalist in a dementia ward in late-Soviet Moscow who is desperate, somehow, to redeem the past.

Directly before that novel, Sharov wrote an apparently quieter, yet no less disturbing work, The Rehearsals, which takes us further back in his ‘search for the seeds of history’, as Rachel Polonsky has put it, back to pre-Petrine Rus and to archaic, still resonant dichotomies: Christians and Jews, Russians and outsiders, Old Believers and the officially Orthodox. Of all Sharov’s eight novels, it is the one most often referred to in Russia as a modern classic.

The Rehearsals is an uncompromisingly dark fantasy that develops, as if organically, from the people and ideals that have shaped Russian history, and equally from the Russian land itself, from the plains and bogs traversed by Sharov’s itinerant characters. Most of Sharov’s other novels, including Before and During, take the Russian Revolution as their centre of gravity. By contrast, the main story of The Rehearsals, when it eventually gets underway after a series of seemingly unconnected digressions, begins in the mid-seventeenth century, in the years leading up to the Schism within Russian Orthodoxy whose consequences for Russian history up to the Revolution and on to the present have, in Sharov’s view, been drastically understated.

If the Schism does still register in the general global consciousness, then it is mainly thanks to the dissenters – to the Old Believers, still with us today, and in particular to the extraordinary memoir written in a dugout in the Arctic Circle by their most charismatic leader, the exiled Archpriest Avvakum.2 In Rehearsals, by contrast, the main historical character is the Patriarch Nikon, who became the bête noire of both Avvakum and the clerical establishment, which deposed and exiled Nikon while approving many of his reforms to the sacred books and to modes of worship: the sign of the cross should be made with three fingers rather than two; believers should process around the church against the direction of the sun. Nikon’s reforms were aimed at bringing worship in line with the Greek Orthodox Church and thereby increasing the Russian Church’s international influence, but many saw them as a catastrophic rupture of national tradition and, as 1666 approached, a sign of imminent apocalypse. Crucially for The Rehearsals, this conflict was a personal drama that only then unfolded into national catastrophe. Nikon and Avvakum were born in the same part of Russia, they had been friends in their youth, and they had belonged to the same reforming movement as ‘Zealots of Piety’. Still more important to the novel than their relationship, however, is that between Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei, the two ‘great sovereigns’ of the country – equal rulers, for a time, of their respective domains.

Much of this context emerges coherently from the novel itself, though readers wishing for a fuller picture may turn to the scholars, or indeed to the primary sources which, at certain moments, Sharov follows very closely, treating them almost as a common cultural patrimony.3 They may also visit the Monastery of New Jerusalem outside Moscow around which both the novel itself and the circumstances of its writing pivot. What we cannot do, alas, is physically transport ourselves into the vanished world of the book’s composition, the garrulous and bibulous world of unofficial late-Soviet culture, with its friendships and squabbles, public absurdities and private griefs, and eclectic intellectual and spiritual quests. An essay Sharov wrote just two years ago does, however, give a tantalising glimpse into the atmosphere, personal and social, from which The Rehearsals emerged – and is included here as an afterword.

Though decades old and deeply rooted in the Russian classics, Before and During and The Rehearsals are likely to strike many readers as utterly singular. Sharov’s compositional method and, more intangibly, mood have no obvious analogue in world literature. The great theorist Yury Lotman ended his last essay, dictated shortly before his death in 1993, by accurately diagnosing the crisis of post-Soviet Russian literature: ‘should it preserve its age-old national tradition (namely: ‘the transformation of life’) or turn into mere entertainment?’4 Sharov has chosen neither ‘mere’ entertainment nor the transformative didacticism of his beloved Leo Tolstoy. Rather, he asks the reader to share with him, and his narrator, in his labour of understanding, to join him down rabbit-holes that eventually prove to be a highway to the past – and to the Siberian prisons that haunt his fiction. In return for this effort, he offers the fundamental experience many readers seek: the sensation of gradually being drawn into something without immediately grasping how or why, of being charmed by ordinary words conferred on ordinary lives in extraordinary situations.

St Antony’s College, 2017

Notes

1 In his valuable book Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, which includes a discussion of The Rehearsals (pp. 229-32), Etkind assimilates Sharov to a genre of recent Russian writing that he labels ‘magical historicism’.

2Archpriest Avvakum, the Life Written by Himself, trans. Kenneth N. Brostrom (Ann Arbor, 1979).

3 See, for example, Nickolas Lupinin, Religious Revolt in the XVIIth Century: The Schism of the Russian Church (The Kingston Press, 1984). For shorter accounts, see the relevant pages in James H. Billington’s classic work of cultural history, The Icon and the Axe (Vintage, 1970) and Nadieszda Kizenko’s article in A Companion to Russian History, ed. Abbott Gleason (Blackwell, 2009). For an account of Nikon’s life by his own confidant, see From Peasant to Patriarch: Account of the Birth, Upbringing, and Life of His Holiness Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Written by His Cleric Ioann Shusherin, translated and edited by Kevin M. Kain and Katia Levintova (Lexington Books, 2007).

4 Jurij Lotman, ‘The Truth as Lie’, in Gøgøl: Exploring Absence, ed. Sven Spieker (Slavica, 1999), pp. 35-53.

Note on the Text and Acknowledgements

This translation is based on the authoritative and most recent edition of the novel (Repetitsii) as published by Arsis Books in Moscow in 2009. Some minor inconsistencies or errors have been amended in consultation with the author, and other small changes made. The Biblical translation used is the New King James Version. Footnotes have been kept to a minimum.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Vladimir Sharov and to his wife, Olga Dunaevskaya, for patient and illuminating replies to several hundred questions about the novel, and to the author for accompanying me on a visit to New Jerusalem Monastery. The explanations and memories supplied in the course of these precious exchanges have improved the translation greatly. My thanks are also due to Evgeny Reznichenko and the Institute for Translation in Moscow for supporting the translation, and for organising lively biennial conferences among fellow translators from Russian. A workshop convened by Andrei Rogatchevski in the appropriately atmospheric setting of Tromsø in mid-December, 2016, offered further opportunities for dialogue. For sharing their thoughts and interest I also thank Philip Bullock, Lijana Dejak, Boris Dralyuk, Ilya Kalinin, Ania Ready and Michael Rozenman. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge a debt to Paul Lequesne, whose translation into French appeared in 1998 (Actes Sud). I borrow from him the idea of setting the first paragraph of the novel as a separate page, and am envious that only his title, Les Répetitions, can fully capture the novel’s twinned themes of rehearsal in art and recurrence in history.

Contents

Title

Reviews for Before & During

The Author

Translator’s Foreword

Note on the Text and Acknowledgements

Author’s Afterword (2015)

Copyright

Peter the Apostle told the Jews: ‘Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before, whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began’ (Acts 3). The Church interprets these words to mean one thing only: the conversion of all Jews to Christ must precede the Second Coming of the Saviour and the victory of the righteous.

In 1939 Isaiah Trifonovich Kobylin ceased to be a Jew, and the Jewish nation, of which he was the last, ended with him. For two thousand years Kobylin’s ‘stiff-necked’ people, as the Lord had called them, did not want to repent and turn to the true faith, for two thousand years, indulging the impious, they obstructed the Second Coming of the Saviour for whom all believers were praying and waiting, and now, when the life of Jews on earth had ended, the time was at hand. Time for Him to appear in His glory.

I learnt the story of the Jews’ extinction from Kobylin himself in Tomsk in 1965, but I’ll begin seven years earlier and on a different topic. In 1958 I began my studies at the University of Kuibyshev (Samara), in the Faculty of History and Literature. That same autumn I got to know a man who was trying to understand God. His name was Sergei Nikolayevich Ilyin. We met every evening all winter and spring, taking strolls in the little park by Freedom Street. He preached to me, then disappeared from my life when he saw that I had understood his teachings. Ilyin was seven years older than me, and at the time of our acquaintance he was working as a guide at the Alexander Radishchev House Museum.1

I myself was baptised when I was three months old, with my parents’ tacit consent, though ostensibly without their knowledge. The ceremony was carried out by my nanny in the church of her native village, Trinity, six miles south of Kuibyshev on the banks of the Volga. She was dismissed soon after: she turned out to have a rather unpleasant skin condition – probably psoriasis – and my religious education went no further.

Ilyin was half-Russian, half-Jewish. His mother, who hailed from an old rabbinic family, was a baptised Jew, while his paternal ancestors were no less illustrious: they were merchants who helped found the famous Old Believer settlements on the Irgiz River. The nation to which a promise had been made and the Son of Man had been sent, but which had not accepted Him and had not followed Him, was combined in Ilyin with the nation to which nothing had been granted or promised, but which had believed in Christ and would be saved. Their bloods had not mixed well, and Ilyin’s face was asymmetrical. He was fond of saying that in medieval times he would have been burned at the stake as a succubus or incubus who had been branded with the devil’s seal. Now, casting my mind back to Ilyin, I realise with some astonishment that during our strolls I always walked to his left, and it is only his left, Jewish side – dark and sad – that I remember clearly.

There was a particular rhythm to Ilyin’s speech and even to his train of thought. Just as, during a tour of the museum, he would single out the crucial, stress-bearing words, deeds and objects in Radishchev’s life and skim over everything in between, merely sketching the general outline of events with his rapid stride, so too with Christ: as he tried to elucidate what it was that had come with Him into the world, that had been proclaimed by Him to the Jews and other nations, Ilyin consciously avoided dividing the temple of his understanding into side chapels and altars, and merely laid the cornerstones of his faith; he built the frame but not the walls or the roof, keeping everything as it might be in the desert – open to the four winds.

That November, the trees on the path were bare and heavy, like pillars, and our progress between them seemed less like a stroll than a set itinerary; we had a topic, a purpose, and a pace to match. As he selected the stone he needed, found a spot for it and placed it, Ilyin would slow right down, almost emphatically dragging his feet, but once he had completed this part of the task he would effortlessly make up for lost time, as if with a single brushstroke. The evenly planted trees set off the unevenness of his own progress, but he took no notice: for him the trees were just a scale by which to visualise the size and proportions of his own construction.

He would say to me: ‘Seryozha, put your trust in God, love Him, remember Him; do not hide from Him, tell Him everything, let neither joy nor grief bring you shame; believe, ask, pray. He is there for you; His face is turned towards you. He will understand and He will help.’ Prayers reach God, Ilyin would say; prayers work and prayers matter, not least to Him; they are a connection between Him and us, a connection that binds us together and makes us His – God’s – creatures, without which we would be nothing to Him and He to us, and we would know nothing about Him and would not believe in Him.

In the Bible, Ilyin would say, God creates and God rests, He suffers and grieves, feels sadness and remorse, He walks, sees, speaks, looks, hears, remembers, smells, He loves and envies, rejoices and rages, punishes and forgives; He has eyes and ears and strong hands in which He holds the sceptre and the enemy-slaying sword. These human things are said about God in the Torah not because there were no other words to choose from, or because human beings were in their infancy and would have understood nothing without them; no, God really is like that and really does feel all these things, for our rage and joy, our remorse and sadness, our attitude towards the true and the false are also created in the image and likeness of His rage and joy, His sorrow and love.

Ilyin would say: nobody knows and nobody can know the Lord in his entirety, but we can and must understand the part of Him that is turned towards us, the human part. The Lord wants us to understand Him, wants more from us than faith, good deeds, repentance, and observance of the Law. He needs us human beings to understand Him, to be children, yes, but children who can reason. Were this not the case, He would not be able to teach or explain anything at all, and we would be complete strangers to one another.

Christ, Ilyin would say, is not only the true God and the Son of God – He is the Godman, and His two natures, divine and human, cannot be separated and cannot be fused. They make a whole precisely because they both come from the Lord and are both created in His image and likeness, resembling each other so much that they are inseparable in Christ. Christ the Godman, moreover, is a metaphor for the relationship between God and human beings, for what that relationship will look like when people repent and follow the path of righteousness; then, not only will we be granted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and not only will we receive Holy Communion – the blood and flesh of Christ – several times a year, but we shall all be united forever in Christ, and in Him and with Him we shall be united with the Lord.

Ilyin would say: the Lord could not do evil, and in fact there was no evil in the world before man. There was knowledge of evil, but not evil itself. The world was like an alphabet, which had been given to us for our good, but which could be turned to evil. The Lord made man, and man was the first to be given the opportunity and the freedom to do both good and evil. The Lord believed that man, knowing what evil was and knowing that he could do it, would himself choose good and do good, so the world which the Lord had brought into being was good.

Heaven was the time of man’s childhood. Playing, he gave names to the animals and the fish, the birds and the trees, to everything that the Lord filled His world with and that would live with mankind. Heaven was where man came to know good and evil, and came to know them too soon, while he was still a child and his soul was still raw. His first act of evil was to break the Lord’s interdiction, then run and hide; this was merely the sin of a foolish child and yet, having once appeared in the world, evil began to beget evil, it multiplied and grew, and man, whose soul was ill-trained to distinguish good from evil, merely helped it along in his ignorance. We fight evil and think that since it is against us and since we are fighting it we must be good, but that’s not true. The other man also thinks that he is good and that by fighting us he is fighting evil, and in this fight two evils come together and a new one comes into being. We do not understand, or we forget, that good is something entirely different, that good is what everyone will see, from wherever they happen to be looking.

Evil, Ilyin would say, is a retreat from God, a wall between Him and us: we can see the Lord neither over it nor through it, and we remain all alone in a world where there is no God, where there is only us, and then, bewitched by the fact that we are alone for the very first time, that there is no one above us and we are free to do evil, we do it again and again. The wall between us and the Lord grows higher and higher, our faith weakens, and around us there is nothing but evil, the evil in which we are drowning and choking, but even then He will hear us, even then He will save us, if there is just one person amongst us who will repent and turn to Him.

Ilyin would say: many claim that the Jews of the Old Testament do not act as God’s chosen people ought to act. They kill the innocent, they renounce and betray the Lord, and it’s hard to understand what’s so special about them. These same people say that the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes are not divinely inspired and that it is far from clear how and why they entered the canon. They fail to understand that the books of the Old Testament are a conversation between God and human beings, the most important of all the conversations that man will ever hold; everything they contain – the treacheries, the betrayals, the renunciations – actually took place. This is the path man walked, the story of his return to God, and there is nothing more important than that story or a single one of its parts, each of which is a part of the path towards knowledge of the Lord: good or bad, every step of this path must be preserved in its entirety and must be accurately and fully conveyed, whoever it was that walked it.

Ilyin would say: the life that Christ the Son of God lived on earth was a time without precedent – for God, for man, and for everything there has ever been between God and man. All the previous times known to us when God dwelt on earth, including the seven days of creation, are as nothing compared to the thirty-three years that Christ spent in the world. To be closer to man, the Son of God even accepted the human flow of time. The experience which both God and man drew from thirty-three years of the most intimate contact – and I am speaking not just of those who followed Him, but above all of God and Man within Christ Himself: that is where it all began, and it was only after He spent almost thirty years getting to know man within a single body, as if inside Himself, where there can be no separation, no view from the outside, that He went off to preach to the chosen people – well, this experience was the foundation of the next two thousand years of human history. Without it we will understand nothing either about the events of the New Testament or about what followed.

Ilyin would say: from the moment the Jews appeared on earth, the basis of everything that tied them to God throughout the ages was faith, daily prayer and sacrifice. There was also something else: the fact that He had chosen them, that their fate and history had meant more to Him than those of any other people; after all, at the very beginning of their existence the Lord Himself had come down into the world, spoken to them and exhorted them, even if later this happened more rarely. When the Jews multiplied, they remained bound to God, as before, through prayer and sacrifice, but He also gave Moses a Law for his people, and this nation even built a kind of dwelling place for the Lord – the Temple. When the nation sinned and forgot God, which happened often enough, the Lord sent prophets to exhort the people in their faith and righteousness, to lead them, as if they were blind, onto the path of truth. So it continued for more than a thousand years, and it seemed that a lack of faith was the one and only cause of every woe, but on the cusp of the era, when Rome already controlled the entire Mediterranean and even Judea, a great deal changed. Never before had there been so few idolaters in the country, and never before had the rituals been performed so irreproachably in the Temple; hundreds upon hundreds of the most learned Levites continued to analyse and apply the laws given to Moses, and there was only one thing driving them: the fear of committing sin before the Lord. These interpreters and teachers of the Law were more respected than anyone else within the nation, because the guiding aim of all the Jews was the avoidance of sin. At that time the majority of those living in the Promised Land was prepared to accept exile and death if it was the only way of keeping the Temple pure. And during the Jewish War, just a few decades later, the Sicarii, Zealots, Pharisees and many Sadducees would indeed go into exile and perish, losing their land but remaining faithful to God. This loyalty would endure through two thousand years of persecution and execution, and only those who stayed faithful would be Jews, while the others would not; they would spread, scatter and dissolve among other nations, and no memory, no trace would remain of them.

Ilyin would say: even so, the Jews, for all the devotion they showed Him, are still guilty before God; even in God’s Promised Land, evil multiplied year after year, filling His Land to bursting, and neither the Lord nor their faith could contain it. The Lord saw and knew all this, saw that His people were devoted to Him – exactly how devoted is, of course, not for me to say, but more so than ever – and that they were ready for what lay ahead. But His world was greater than the Promised Land, and it was not only Jews who lived in it.

So the Jewish nation was scattered over many different lands, it settled and mixed with many different peoples, who learned from the Jews about the Almighty, the one whom, in the time of Noah, they had once worshipped themselves but had managed to forget long ago, living ever since like foolish children who knew no sin. Another story of good and evil. Learning about God once more, they learned that they had, as it were, become strangers to Him, and also that they were not children and had not been children for a very long time, and they immediately felt so much sin upon them, felt so worthless and so lonely, that they were sure they could never be saved. The Jews had no desire to help them, and they only had themselves to blame. So when news of God reached the nations, they were further away from Him than ever and no longer cared how much evil was upon them. They, too, were His children, however prodigal and sinful, but they had moved away from Him and had not yet taken a single step back towards Him, nor did they wish to, because they thought they were strangers to Him and He would not accept them. And anyway, the path towards Him was so hard that there was no point beginning. So then the Lord came to them Himself, and came, as they learned, through His people.

Ilyin would say: the Lord decided to live the life of an ordinary man, to live it far away from the Temple, in a place, Galilee, where there were more pagans than anywhere else and where faith was weaker, to live a full life – childhood, youth, maturity – and live it piously and honestly, in full observance of the Law. When that life was over, He would know what to do next. We should emphasise, by the way, that the Law is not questioned by the Son of God here or anywhere else, even in part. He says: ‘Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do’ (Matthew 23). ‘Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfil. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven…’ (Matthew 5). And perhaps most importantly, both for us and for an understanding of the entire fate of the Jews, just think how loyal they were to the Covenant if, despite all the thousands of miracles worked by Christ, they judged whether He was truly the Messiah solely by His devotion to the Law. Ilyin would say: was Christ a real person? I don’t think so. Yes, He was conceived by a mortal woman, who carried

Him in her womb and gave birth to Him, but His conception was, and had to be, immaculate, and Christ was free of original sin, the burden which we have borne, bear and will continue to bear until the end of time. All the same, the Lord, having assumed the image of Christ and having united in Him with human nature, found Himself closer to man than He had ever been, and His experience of life on earth, among ordinary people, His experience of sharing human, mortal and, for Him, infinitely deficient nature was the most important event in human history since Abraham went out from Ur of the Chaldeans.

Ilyin would say: Christ is different from man. He is pure and without sin, feels that He is right and has every right, knows that both this world and that world are His, that He can always leave the earth to which He has descended, that He will leave it and will ascend. And there is something else: the world has been created by Him and can be changed, remade, reformed by His will; in other words, He, Christ, is its master, and try as the Lord might to relinquish His omniscience and omnipotence, Christ will not manage to absorb man’s view of the world entirely until the very last hours and minutes of His life, just before He is led to Golgotha, and then on the cross itself.

Ilyin would say: uniting with man in Christ, the Lord wants to recall and renew His own knowledge that such a union with the human race is possible, that it is organic, essential, inevitable. It is, as I have already said, a prefiguration of what awaits us all. The Lord’s expectations become reality: the Son of God and the Virgin Mary is born on earth, but in some peculiar way, even before the infant Christ begins to walk, His birth ceases to be a secret and changes the world. Everything changes: the structure of life, the commensurability and correlation of its parts, the very edifice of life, and even notions of right and wrong; yes, right is still right, and sin is still sin, but in the gap between them something has been disturbed, displaced, distorted. Many people lose their way, confused by the lodestar that guides the Wise Men to Christ, and the aim these people have always set themselves, knowing that their own strength is limited, suddenly disintegrates and can no longer be true, at least not while Jesus Christ still walks the earth. I am reluctant to say this, but it would seem that when Christ appeared on earth, only one path remained to the righteous in the country where He lived, in Israel: the revolutionary, lightning path walked by the Son of God and His disciples.

Ilyin would say: the Wise Men and the shepherds, who lived beneath the stars, were the first to notice this disturbance in the natural order of life and to see how powerful it was: God had come down into a world where man was meant to look after himself, and it had proved too cramped for Him. This disturbance of the normal way of doing things, this overwhelming advent of God on earth (remember that nothing similar had ever happened before, or has ever happened since) inevitably altered the fate of His chosen people – the Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem was just the beginning.

On earth, the Son of God took the road which the Jews had been walking for two thousand years. Retracing their flight from hunger, He flees to Egypt and hides there, escaping persecution, and when people in Palestine have forgotten all about Him, He goes back and lives there, unobtrusively and unnoticed, for almost three decades. He is waiting for His time to come to pave the path for His nation, the path which the nation should walk and will walk, just as Christ Himself did, in its entirety, from Nazareth to Golgotha. And so, the first part of the life of Jesus Christ is the life of a man of His people; it ends when He turns thirty and a second life begins – the life of a prophet and Messiah who foretells the destiny of the Jews. Even so, He does not begin it right away.

Ilyin would say: John the Baptist, just like the Wise Men, knew who Jesus was, knew He was the Son of God, and could not fail to know this, which is why he said to Him: ‘I need to be baptised by You, and are You coming to me?’ But at that point nothing had been decided yet and another forty days separated the lives of Jesus the man and Jesus the Messiah: His baptism by John, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the long fast in the desert, during which the devil tempted Christ three times, tempted the man in Christ, and only when the man had resisted and endured did Christ become the Lord’s Anointed. One can feel, in the conversation between Christ and John the Baptist, a certain tentativeness on Christ’s part. Perhaps this was because the time of His mission had not yet come, perhaps because His trial had not yet ended, but it seems – though nothing is actually said about this – that initially the Son of God was only meant to be incarnated as a man; after all, it was the fault of man and no one else that the world had become as it was.

Ilyin would say: the fact that the Lord sent another, greater prophet while John the Baptist was still alive, that He sent His own Son, should not be taken as proof of John’s inadequacy (as was assumed in the disputes between John’s disciples and Christ’s); no, the appearance of Jesus Christ and His teachings signified something else: they signified that before He, the Son of God and the Saviour, had come between God and humanity, man had lacked the ability and the strength to overcome sin. This in itself was a kind of exoneration of man – something exceptionally important and unexpected for God – and Christ, by choosing for His disciples people who were living the same ordinary life in the world as He, reinforced this verdict.

Ilyin would say: Jesus spent three years walking and preaching in Israel, and what has remained from these years is not only what He told His disciples and what has come down to us through Scripture – that part of His teaching has enjoyed the most straightforward, natural fate – but also what He told the Jews who did not follow Him, who rejected Him, and what He Himself understood during that time. Christ’s arguments with the Pharisees were crucial for the Jewish nation, as they were for Christ and for God. The entire subsequent history of the Christian world, as well as the Jews, is wrapped up in them.

What conclusions can be drawn from these arguments? First: linear development, formal logic and the primacy of the merely external lead faith to a legalistic dead end. But this, too, is clear: the Pharisees live for God alone; He is their every thought and desire, and all their rigour derives from their devotion to the faith of their fathers. I have already said that Christ never questions the truth or rectitude of the Law given to Moses; the Law bears no blame for the failure of God and the nation to understand each other. Jesus even amplifies the significance of the Law and takes it further, albeit in a different, more human direction from that taken by the Pharisees. And this is easy to explain: He has the right to interpret it – He is God – while they have the right only to take the law to its logical conclusions. Even so, what matters most here is not Christ’s interpretation of the Law, and it is not the fate of the faithful and the righteous that most occupies Him, for it is not to them that He has been sent: ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick’ (Matthew 9). Far more important is a different knowledge gained by Christ on earth: that only miracles can help mankind. The Lord does not console the crippled and the sick; He has no words for them. Nor does he exhort them to accept their lot: He heals them – and that is the whole point. The fate of the crippled, the maimed, the possessed is so awful that words without salvation are nothing. The sheer number and variety of miracles performed by Christ on earth show how essential, how salutary miracles are; there is no getting by without them. Miracles are worked by the Lord in the conviction that the world is terrible and He, Christ, has been sent to save it.

Ilyin would say: all the disputes between Christ and the Pharisees come together in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, where one path to God competes with another: a landowner hires some labourers for a denarius (eternal salvation); when midday passes, he hires some more; and an hour before the end of the working day he hires a third group. He pays them all the same wage (one denarius), and when those who have worked since the morning object, he says to one of their number: ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go your way. I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? Or is your eye evil because I am good? So the last will be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few chosen’ (Matthew 20). (Here we see that miracles and goodness are greater than justice, greater than long, slow, heavy labour – greater than anything.)

Ilyin would say: good is at the core of everything that Jesus Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, does on earth. Having lived for so many years among men, having seen so much evil, He, ceasing to be a man and becoming the Messiah, becoming God once more, cannot help doing good, as much good as he possibly can, good for the weakest and the maimed, and for sinners too. Essentially, He violates the way of doing things that He himself established: not the slow path of man’s repentance and reform, not the slow path of salvation from sin, with eternal bliss as its reward, but simply mountains and mountains of good, whole sackfuls of good, and the unhappier, the weaker and the more sinful you are, the more goodness and mercy you deserve. To bring more good into the world, He sends His disciples off in all directions, telling them: ‘Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons,’ and then: ‘Freely you have received, freely give’ (Matthew 10), lest they pause to ask themselves whether or not to do good, whether or not the man beseeching them is deserving of mercy.

Ilyin would say: Christ is the great joy of the God who is able to do good and can finally do it, who no longer has to wait for man to be reformed and to observe all the endless woes and sorrow of human life, who loves man as His child, for what is man if not His child, His continuation made in His image and likeness, and in His suffering too? God no longer has the strength to watch man’s misery, to see evil spawning evil, more and more of it each day. Is this really how God’s world should be? And does He not remember how and when evil first entered the world? It entered when man was a child, when he could scarcely answer for his actions, and anyway, can the evil done by that child really be compared to what followed? So the Son of God, filled with love and the desire to forgive, the desire for evil to end and equality to reign – why should some have everything, even righteousness, while others have nothing? Don’t all people stem from a single root, from Adam? – gives to those who have nothing, to those who have least (the poor, the sick, the maimed, the dead) the miracle of forgiveness and deliverance.

But in that case, Ilyin would say, the purpose for which God created man, to whom it is given to do good and evil and who, God believes, will reject evil one day and freely choose good, thereby proving the truth and goodness of God’s world, will remain unfulfilled, and all that came after the birth of man, all that evil, will have been pointless, merely evil spawning evil. And the deeds of the righteous will also have been pointless, and God is all on His own, and above all good is no better than evil, for men have not chosen it. Either they didn’t want it, or they ran out of time. So Christ stops.

Ilyin would say: miracles are the work of God, and it is only in the love and pity that inhere equally in man and in God that we can even guess at His humanity; but the closer to the end, to Golgotha and death, the more we see the man. Golgotha, in fact, will divide them. The fate of one, as He knows all too well, is to die; the fate of the other, as He also knows, is to be resurrected. I am not dividing them – they are one – but still, God cannot die; He can suffer, but not die. A world without God is unthinkable, and for Him that instant does not exist. The closer to Golgotha, the more human Christ becomes.

Ilyin would say: in Jerusalem and on Golgotha Christ is already a man, but a man who still has the knowledge of God. He knows that Judas will betray Him, knows that Peter will deny Him three times, knows that He will be crucified, but he continues along the path sketched out for Him long before, and not by Him, and He is not free to turn off it. He says to the Lord, beseeching Him: ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will’; and then: ‘O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done’ (Matthew 26). But the cup does not pass away from Him. He will be crucified on the cross, and such is the solitude of man in this world, so forgotten and abandoned is he by God, that even Christ, who was closer to the Lord than anyone has ever been, who was united with Him inseparably and lived with Him inseparably from His conception onwards, even Christ will cry: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which means, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ (Mark 15).

Ilyin would say: the main thing that divided Christ and the Jews was the case of Barabbas. Judas was Christ’s disciple, he followed Him, walked the entire path with Him and, like His other disciples, would have left the Jewish faith. Judas listened to Him, stood side by side with Him, did good deeds through His power, rejected the path of the Jews completely and, having betrayed Christ, did not return to it; he was paid – nothing more. He wanted to return and give the money back to the Temple, but it was not accepted, which meant that he too would never be accepted, and Judas, left quite alone, as alone as any man can be, hanged himself. Christ’s opposite is not Judas but Barrabas; it is because of him that the people say, ‘Christ’s blood be on us and on our children,’ him they choose to save when the choice arises.

Matthew describes Barabbas as a criminal who made a rebellion in the city, but all four Evangelists set him apart from the villains punished together with Christ, for whom, in any case, the people make no appeal. Barabbas, it would seem, was among those who tried to incite an uprising against Rome. I am not interested here in the choice other nations would have made in such cases; that isn’t the point. Christ and the Jews were separated by a matter of mercy – and that is astonishing. Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that the opposition Christ-Barabbas is a simplified one, that Barabbas is declared a criminal and a murderer, and put the question as follows: who should have been saved – God, who in three days would be raised to life, or man? Here, saving one meant condemning the other, and in this situation the Jews, I think, were right. The weakest had to be saved, the one who could not defend himself and who did not have God the Father to protect him. If the question is who to save, man or God, the answer is always man. To defend Christ, the Jews would have had to kill a man. That was the price.

I studied at Kuibyshev University for almost three years, and just four months or so before our move to Tomsk, where my father had been offered the position of chief regional radiologist, I was suddenly registered on a special course, ‘Gogol and Comparative Literary Criticism’. The dean’s office had given neither me nor my five fellow students any choice in the matter (there hadn’t been a single volunteer) and I managed to attend precisely half the course before our departure – five lectures all told. These were delivered by a decrepit octogenarian philosophy professor from Kiev known to the entire university as ‘The Idealist’. Professor Kuchmy more than lived up to his sobriquet.

Vladimir Ivanovich Kuchmy managed to make a name for himself even before the Revolution; then, after Soviet power had been definitively established in Ukraine, he made an honest attempt to adjust to the new regime and even wrote a two-volume work called, if I’m not mistaken, The History of Philosophy in the Light of Historical Materialism. But he must have adjusted too slowly or too freely (his study was subjected to vicious, even humiliating criticism), or perhaps he simply stuck out like a sore thumb in pre-war Ukraine – one way or the other, he was imprisoned in 1940, charged with spreading idealistic philosophy and, at one and the same time, with being a Ukrainian nationalist. Kuchmy spent fifteen years in the camps, but when he was released in ’55 Ukraine had not forgotten his supposed nationalism and refused to take him back. Moscow, after brief deliberation, offered him a part-time position in Kuibyshev, not in the philosophy faculty, needless to say, but in the sleepy faculty of Russian literature. We were his final audience: he retired that same year.

Ostensibly, Kuchmy’s special course was devoted, as I have said, to Gogol, but he only got on to him at the end of his third lecture. In fact, it wasn’t really Gogol that interested him but a fanciful blend of literary criticism, sociology and gibberish. In a cool, methodical manner, he explained to us why the people who had lived on this earth, entire tribes and nations, were essentially not people at all, or at any rate no more than phantoms and mirages wandering over deserted spaces, as he put it himself. Starting from this premise, he expanded at great length on the senselessness and aimlessness of earthly existence and on the resemblance between humans and plants: equality in life, equality in death, and both leave only one thing behind – a seed. The lives of those who leave nothing behind, he would say, are an illusion. Seriously: where are those lives? We think they suffered, but that’s only by analogy with ourselves, with our own suffering. Those who were once here left long ago, and now it’s no longer even possible to say why they were born, why they lived, and whether they even existed at all.

After posing this question, Kuchmy said nothing for a long time before telling us, in the same cool and methodical way, that he had gone too far, that he had a habit of going too far and that this had cost him dearly in the past; his duty now was to renounce his own words. He had been warned more than once by the department of pedagogical methodology that by calling human beings phantoms and mirages, whether or not those people were still alive, he was distorting the truth and undervaluing the achievements of other disciplines, notably archaeology, which had definitively established that every human being leaves at least something behind. Even if that something is only bones, Kuchmy would still be wrong, because neither mirages nor phantoms have any bones. He agreed with this critique and assured us that he would permit himself no further comments of this kind, but he had also told the department, and was telling us now, that he had a tendency to fly off the handle during scholarly argument, that he was a passionate person in general and that this flaw, alas, had to be taken into account. In the dispute between him and archaeology, he would tell us, there could be only one winner: encampments and interments are the work of human hands, and this has been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Archaeology is indeed the queen of the sciences: it literally resurrects the dead. Give it a bit more time and we’ll know the deceased as well as we know ourselves, if not better. Only recently, he continued, three miles from the city, archaeologists had discovered in rapid succession two of our countrymen’s – or perhaps even ancestors’ – encampments, and now we know that one of the encampments represents Linear Pottery Culture and the other Comb Ceramic Culture, which, by the way, fits neatly with Comrade Lenin’s famous statement about the presence of two cultures within the frame of a single national culture.

He evidently felt that with these peculiar comments he had paid Caesar his due, because he went on to declare that the most accurate term for all these people who had once walked the earth would be ‘unfinished product’ – only halfway towards what might properly be called homo vivus. As Kuchmy would have it, all that has survived of the past, whether ancient or very recent, are matted heaps of human prototypes – a result of the imperfections both of human nature itself and of the means of reproduction. Humans, he would say, are blurred around the edges, amorphous, plastic, waxlike. As a consequence of time and their own weight, they quickly lose their shape, tangle and curdle, turning into a homogeneous, well-scrambled mass, which historians like to call a ‘people’ or ‘nation’. Not a single personality or human being has come down to us from the past, and not a single feature has survived even of those whose names we know from inscriptions on the earliest monuments.

Our current method of producing children, Kuchmy would say, is the oldest and the most primitive on earth, founded as it is on the copulation of two sexes. The possibility of autonomous, independent reproduction is virtually excluded. Accordingly, a child is, at best, the fruit of a compromise; more often, he or she is the result of the crude, mechanical mixing of two individuals. There is nothing organic about this process, and no continuity. Any given child is a metis, a mongrel, with all the deficiencies inherent in the different breeds from which it derives. It is precisely this endless mixing of all with all – and what else, when you get down to it, is history about? – that we have to thank for the senselessness and talentlessness of the human race…

‘But I cherish the hope,’ the professor went on, ‘that the time will come when lust, which dissolves human beings in their likenesses and leaves nothing behind, which dissolves what little there is in us that deserves the name personality (and nothing expresses the hatred we have for our own personality, our difference from other people, better than the ecstasy we experience in those moments), becomes a mere vestige of the past and gradually dies out.’

Apropos of this, he recalled his fellow Ukrainian, Trofim Lysenko, and declared that the philosophical basis of Lysenko’s view of nature had been widely undervalued.2 A person who, like all living creatures, is produced by the vulgar mixing together of two sets of inherited characteristics, each of which is itself a mixture and so on to the beginning of life, is capable in the rarest of circumstances, with a particular combination of education and self-development, of becoming a personality, removing all superfluity from his genes and turning into a relatively harmonious being. But just imagine if someone comes along and tells him that his children will begin from scratch, that he is unable, biologically, to pass on anything that he has accumulated?

‘Or to put it another way,’ Kuchmy continued, ‘are we really supposed to accept that the children of two convinced Marxists can be born as devoid of political and ideological substance as the children of any other parents? And is it really possible to claim that consciousness is matter in its highest form if it surrenders so readily to matter, time and again, on this most crucial question?’

Kuchmy’s second lecture was devoted partly to a deeply peculiar branch of literary scholarship, and partly to the character and physiological idiosyncrasies of various authors. Writers, Kuchmy believed, represent that distinct and as yet very meagre offshoot of the human race that has propagated itself through the loftiest, perhaps even perfect method. If Kuchmy, as I have said, considered real people to be unfinished products, a mere collection of attributes, then writers produce people who are complete and therefore authentic and true. Some writers reproduce by parthenogenesis, others are herma-phroditic, but both give birth to higher beings whose lives last for entire generations, or even millennia, and never actually cease; at worst they merely fade. Here he quoted Lermontov – ‘Not for me the cold sleep of the grave… / Give me instead eternal rest, / Life’s strength a-slumber in my heart, / A gentle heaving in my chest’ – and some medieval mystic who claimed that manuscripts don’t burn, just the paper, while the letters themselves fly back to God. There was only one role that Kuchmy conceded to normal human beings: the role of catalyst. It’s not ordinary people we know, remember, imitate and emulate, but characters in books – like Pushkin’s Tatyana – and the past we remember is theirs.

‘Actually,’Kuchmy said, ‘most of these literary ruminations do not belong to me, but to an investigator by the name of Chelnokov. I must give Chelnokov his due: in all the eighty years of my life I have never come across a more profound or subtle mind, and I am grateful to fate, despite all the hardships, for bringing us together. When I was arrested in 1940, the two investigators who were initially given my case demanded that I confess that I was working towards the separation of Ukraine from Russia and that I was the head of a clandestine armed group whose raison d’être was bombing and sabotage (and whose list of members was duly presented to me). I considered myself innocent and put my signature to nothing bar an old failing – my allegiance to the camp of idealist philosophers. This was hardly enough, of course, for a show trial. So I was put on the so-called ‘conveyor belt’. For nearly a month I was interrogated and beaten, beaten and interrogated, and I had long been ready to sign whatever was put in front of me, anything to put an end to this hell, were it not for the terror I felt at the thought of slandering people who, in most cases, I’d never met. Then it all came to an abrupt end, and I was given a breather. A whole week passed before my next interrogation. By this time my case had been passed to another investigator – Chelnokov. He apologised for the behaviour of his colleagues, assured me they would be properly punished, and continued as follows: