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    The Grand Inquisitor
    The Grand Inquisitor
    The Grand Inquisitor
    Ebook55 pages44 minutes

    The Grand Inquisitor

    By H. P. (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1948
    The Grand Inquisitor

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    • 5/5
      Fantastic edition of the terrible parable. The Inquisitor's words vibrate on the page - one can almost smell the brimstone.

    Book preview

    The Grand Inquisitor - H. P. (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grand Inquisitor, by Feodor Dostoevsky

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Grand Inquisitor

    Author: Feodor Dostoevsky

    Translator: H. P. Blavatsky

    Posting Date: June 28, 2010 [EBook #8578]

    Release Date: July, 2005

    First Posted: July 25, 2003

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRAND INQUISITOR ***

    Produced by Jake Jaqua.  HTML version by Al Haines.

    THE GRAND INQUISITOR

    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 Gracièuse 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!... In this connection, I am reminded of a poem compiled in a convent—a translation from the Greek, of course—called, 'The Travels of the Mother of God among the Damned,' with fitting illustrations and a boldness of conception inferior nowise to that of Dante. The 'Mother of God' visits hell, in company with the archangel Michael as her cicerone to guide her

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