By Feodor Dostoevsky
(Translation by H.P. Blavatsky)
[Dedicated by the Translator to those sceptics who
clamour so loudly, both in print and private letters—“Show
us the wonder-working ‘Brothers,’ let
them come out publicly—and we will believe
in them!”]
[The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky’s
celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazof, the last
publication from the pen of the great Russian novelist,
who died a few months ago, just as the concluding
chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning
to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest
among Russian writers. His characters are invariably
typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian
society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the
highest degree. The following extract is a cutting
satire on modern theology generally and the Roman
Catholic religion in particular. The idea is
that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the
period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested
as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of
the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a rank materialist
and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to throw
this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes
to Alyosha—the youngest of the brothers,
a young Christian mystic brought up by a “saint”
in a monastery—as follows: (—Ed.
Theosophist, Nov., 1881)]
“Quite impossible, as you see, to start without
an introduction,” laughed Ivan. “Well,
then, I mean to place the event described in the poem
in the sixteenth century, an age—as you
must have been told at school—when it was
the great fashion among poets to make the denizens
and powers of higher worlds descend on earth and mix
freely with mortals... In France all the notaries’
clerks, and the monks in the cloisters as well, used
to give grand performances, dramatic plays in which
long scenes were enacted by the Madonna, the angels,
the saints, Christ, and even by God Himself.
In those days, everything was very artless and primitive.
An instance of it may be found in Victor Hugo’s
drama, Notre Dame de Paris, where, at the Municipal
Hall, a play called Le Bon Jugement de la Tres-sainte
et Graceuse Vierge Marie, is enacted in honour of
Louis XI, in which the Virgin appears personally to
pronounce her ‘good judgment.’ In
Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances
of nearly the same character, chosen especially from
the Old Testament, were also in great favour.
Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with
mystical writings, ’verses’—the
heroes of which were always selected from the ranks
of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering
to the devotional purposes of the age. The recluses
of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks,
passed their time in translating, copying, and even
producing original compositions upon such subjects,
and that, remember, during the Tarter period!...
