“But here, too, it’s impossible to do without a preface, a literary preface, that is—pah!” Ivan laughed, “and what sort of writer am I! You see, my action takes place in the sixteenth century, and back then—by the way, you must have learned this in school—back then it was customary in poetic works to bring higher powers down to earth. I don’t need to mention Dante. In France, court clerks, as well as monks in the monasteries, gave whole performances in which they brought the Madonna, angels, saints, Christ, and God himself on stage. At the time it was all done quite artlessly. In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, in the Paris of Louis XI, to honor the birth of the French dauphin, an edifying performance is given free of charge for the people in the city hall, entitled Le bon jugement de la très sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie,[147]
in which she herself appears in person and pronounces her bon jugement. With us in Moscow, in pre-Petrine antiquity,[148] much the same kind of dramatic performances, especially from the Old Testament, were given from time to time; but, besides dramatic performances, there were many stories and ‘verses’ floating around the world in which saints, angels, and all the powers of heaven took part as needed. In our monasteries such poems were translated, recopied, even composed—and when?—under the Tartars. There is, for example, one little monastery poem (from the Greek, of course): The Mother of God Visits the Torments,[149]
with scenes of a boldness not inferior to Dante’s. The Mother of God visits hell and the Archangel Michael guides her through ‘the torments.’ She sees sinners and their sufferings. Among them, by the way, there is a most amusing class of sinners in a burning lake: some of them sink so far down into the lake that they can no longer come up again, and ‘these God forgets’—an expression of extraordinary depth and force. And so the Mother of God, shocked and weeping, falls before the throne of God and asks pardon for everyone in hell, everyone she has seen there, without distinction. Her conversation with God is immensely interesting. She pleads, she won’t go away, and when God points out to her the nail-pierced hands and feet of her Son and asks: ‘How can I forgive his tormentors?’ she bids all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels to fall down together with her and plead for the pardon of all without discrimination. In the end she extorts from God a cessation of torments every year, from Holy Friday to Pentecost, and the sinners in hell at once thank the Lord and cry out to him: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, who hast judged so.’ Well, my little poem would have been of the same kind if it had appeared back then. He comes onstage in it; actually, he says nothing in the poem, he just appears and passes on. Fifteen centuries have gone by since he gave the promise to come in his Kingdom, fifteen centuries since his prophet wrote: ‘Behold, I come quickly.’[150] ‘Of that day and that hour knoweth not even the Son, but only my heavenly Father,’[151] as he himself declared while still on earth. But mankind awaits him with the same faith and the same tender emotion. Oh, even with greater faith, for fifteen centuries have gone by since men ceased to receive pledges from heaven:
Believe what the heart tells you, For heaven offers no pledge.[152]
Only faith in what the heart tells you! True, there were also many miracles then. There were saints who performed miraculous healings; to some righteous men, according to their biographies, the Queen of Heaven herself came down. But the devil never rests, and there had already arisen in mankind some doubt as to the authenticity of these miracles. Just then, in the north, in Germany, a horrible new heresy appeared.[153] A great star, ‘like a lamp’ (that is, the Church), ‘fell upon the fountains of waters, and they were made bitter.’[154]These heretics began blasphemously denying miracles. But those who still believed became all the more ardent in their belief. The tears of mankind rose up to him as before, they waited for him, loved him, hoped in him, yearned to suffer and die for him as before ... And for so many centuries mankind had been pleading with faith and fire: ‘God our Lord, reveal thyself to us,’[155] for so many centuries they had been calling out to him, that he in his immeasurable compassion desired to descend to those who were pleading. He had descended even before then, he had visited some righteous men, martyrs, and holy hermits while they were still on earth, as is written in their ‘lives.’ Our own Tyutchev, who deeply believed in the truth of his words, proclaimed that:
Bent under the burden of the Cross, The King of Heaven in the form of a slave Walked the length and breadth of you, Blessing you, my native land.[156]
