Before and During by Vladimir Sharov

Author:Vladimir Sharov [Sharov, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Communism, Religion, Russian Literature, Fantasy, Contemporary, Christianity, Mental Illness, Historical
ISBN: 9781907650710
Publisher: Dedalus Limited
Published: 2015-03-29T23:00:00+00:00

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‘Counting from the day of their first acquaintance, de Staël lived with Fyodorov for five and a half years, from 1849 to 1854. During this time she bore him three sons: on each occasion, no sooner did her waist begin to thicken than she left her estate for St Petersburg, gave birth there, suckled the child herself for the first month, then gave him into the care of the wet-nurse, the same Danish woman as before, after which she travelled back to Pine Ravine.

‘Fyodorov’s three sons were all strapping, handsome boys, blue-eyed and fair-haired, just the kind she liked, but the Lord had not fertilized their hearts, brains, bodies, and they remained as they were born, witless babes. She often wondered why Fyodorov should have such children by her. She knew of other people, too, who had been born already closed and complete, incapable of development – though not always as children – or when a man’s development had ceased too early. She thought that the fate of these people might help her understand the kind of future that awaited Fyodorov’s sons as well.

‘Adam was created a grown man, therefore the Lord did not desire his development and immediately created him perfect, in so far as any man may be perfect. The first man, in other words, was not the first child; in fact childhood was not created by God at all, and man’s path from childbirth to the state envisaged by God was visited on him as a punishment. But the soul of Adam was the soul of a child, undoubtedly, and this, perhaps, is the root of God’s incomprehension of man, of the distance that separated them for so long. Red-haired Esau, the elder brother of Jacob, the favoured son of Isaac, the very same man who, by any human law, ought to have obtained the birthright, was deprived of it by God; the Lord tricked blind Isaac by having him bless Jacob, his second son, instead of Esau, because Esau’s soul and mind were complete and his knowledge of God could advance no further.

‘So the Lord acknowledged that man’s path to God, his path from evil to good, is a boon and that man must walk it himself from beginning to end. God’s knowledge of man, it would seem, was incomplete, and Christ, by taking on the sins of the world, Christ, with Whom, as it were, the life of the human race began afresh – until then God had been retreating further and further from man – now made the first step towards him, and this step was not His preaching, not His miracles or resurrection, not even Golgotha, but the conception of Christ by Mary His Mother.

‘It was hardly likely, de Staël would say to herself, that the soul and brain of Fyodorov’s sons remained forever dormant because Fyodorov, conceiving them, had been lulled by opium and they, as it were, inherited his sleep. No, God must have simply been afraid that the sons of the man who rose up against Him might repeat his path.

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