Russian Culture and Christianity Theme Analysis

Oh, how one wants sometimes to go from such giftlessly high-flown, cheerless human wordiness into the seeming silence of nature, into the arduous soundlessness of long, persistent labor, into the wordlessness of deep sleep, of true music, and of a quiet, heartfelt touch grown mute from fullness of soul!

The bright, sunny interns’ room with its white painted walls was flooded with the cream-colored sunlight of golden autumn, which distinguishes the days following the Dormition, when the first morning frosts set in, and winter chickadees and magpies flit among the motley and bright colors of the thinning woods. On such days the sky rises to its utmost height and a dark blue, icy clarity breathes from the north through the transparent column of air between it and the earth. The visibility and audibility of everything in the world are enhanced. Distances transmit sounds in a frozen ringing, distinctly and separately. What is far away becomes clear, as if opening out a view through all of life for many years ahead. This rarefaction would be impossible to be bear if it were not so short-termed and did not come at the end of short autumn day on the threshold of early twilight.

At first the snow melted from inside, quietly and secretively. But when the Herculean labors were half done, it became impossible to conceal them any longer. The miracle came to light. Water ran from under the shifted shroud of snow and set up a clamor. Impassable forest thickets roused themselves. Everything in them awoke.

And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!

Or, again, take your red banner. What do you think? You think it’s a flag? And yet, see, it’s not a flag at all, it’s the plaguey-girl’s fetching raspberry kerchief—fetching, I say, and why is it fetching? To wave and wink at the young lads, to fetch young lads for the slaughter, for death, to inflict the plague on them. And you believed it was a flag—come to me, prolety and poorlety of all lands.

There outside is the spring evening. The air is all marked with sounds. The voices of children playing are scattered at various distances, as if to signify that the space is alive throughout. And this expanse is Russia, his incomparable one, renowned far and wide, famous mother, martyr, stubborn, muddle-headed, whimsical, adored, with her eternally majestic and disastrous escapades, which can never be foreseen! Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet to live in the world and love life! Oh, how one always longs to say thank you to life itself, to existence itself, to say it right in their faces!

And that is what Lara is. It is impossible to talk to them, but she is their representative, their expression, the gift of hearing and speech, given to the voiceless principles of existence.

After two or three easily poured-out stanzas and several similes that he was struck by himself, the work took possession of him, and he felt the approach of what is known as inspiration. The correlation of forces that control creative work is, as it were, stood on its head. The primacy no longer belongs to man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of external, audible sounds, but in terms of the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Then, like the rolling mass of a river’s current, which by its very movement polishes the stones of the bottom and turns the wheels of mills, flowing speech itself, by the force of its own laws, on its way, in passing, creates meter and rhyme and thousands of other forms and constructions, still more important, but as yet unrecognized, unconsidered, unnamed.

The kingdom of plants so easily offers itself as the nearest neighbor to the kingdom of death. Here, in the earth’s greenery, among the trees of the cemetery, amidst the sprouting flowers rising up from the beds, are perhaps concentrated the mysteries of transformation and the riddles of life that we puzzle over. Mary did not at first recognize Jesus coming from the tomb and took for the gardener walking in the cemetery.

To the aging friends at the window it seemed that this freedom of the soul had come, that precisely on that evening the future had settled down tangibly in the streets below, that they themselves had entered into that future and henceforth found themselves in it. A happy, tender, sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth, about the participants in this story who had lived till that evening and about their children, filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around. And it was as if the book in their hands knew it all and lent their feelings support and confirmation.