Desnitsky, whom the publication introduces as a Doctor of Philology, professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences and leading research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Bible Translation, had prepared three lectures for the Lemanika project. The first is devoted to the question of what the Bible is — myth or history; he declined to reveal his answer in advance. The second — to how biblical texts are refracted in Russian culture, including in the works of writers he calls evangelists.
Tolstoy and His Christ
According to Desnitsky, Tolstoy opposed the Orthodox Church, which he considered a ossified system where power and money mattered most. “Together with the church of his time, Tolstoy essentially rejected the entire Christian tradition as well, inventing his own Christ,” said the biblical scholar. He noted that Tolstoy largely drew on the tradition of critical retellings of the Gospel text that arose in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, and that he himself produced his own retelling of the Gospel.
Desnitsky said he respects Tolstoy but often disagrees with him, whereas he loves Pasternak and almost always agrees with him. He regards Bulgakov and Pasternak as people who wrote on Gospel themes, not as interpreters of Scripture. In his assessment, Yeshua in The Master and Margarita is not the Jesus of the Gospels but a critical reconstruction in the spirit of the Western tradition, which the Master found unexpectedly valuable.
Desnitsky recalled that Bulgakov's novel was written in Russia in the 1930s, when biblical stories were widely known but mass culture had turned away from them, and that the book was read in the 1960s — by people who for the most part did not know about Christianity from primary sources. He calls Pasternak a deeply believing man, but not a churchgoer. As the fourth writer in this series, he would choose Joseph Brodsky, who, he said, wrote more poems about the Nativity of Christ than on any other theme.
Why Not Dostoevsky
A discussion of Dostoevsky, according to Desnitsky, would be a separate large topic: he saw himself as a church man, and his text about the Grand Inquisitor is called by the biblical scholar one of the deepest and most prophetic Gospel texts in Russian literature. He did not intend to consider Dostoevsky in the lecture, partly because he would not want to talk about the “mysterious Russian soul,” of which Dostoevsky became an envoy in the West.
Pushkin for Teenagers
The third lecture is addressed to children. Desnitsky said that for some time he has been holding classes with teenagers aged 11–15 and sees this as work for the future; according to him, there is demand from families living outside Russia who want their children to retain knowledge of the Russian language and culture. The class was to involve slow reading of Pushkin's poems, possibly chosen by the audience; he considered it impossible to cover prose, including The Captain's Daughter, in a single lecture. Desnitsky compared Pushkin's place in children's reading to the unchanging monument to the poet in the center of Moscow.
Speaking about the flourishing of lecture halls, he linked it to the fact that people have become more or less fed and safe, and there are almost no opportunities for serious business development, whereas cultural activity is not forbidden. He attributed the same phenomenon to the growth of charity and the formation of civil society, which, he said, arises through discussion of things that were not discussed before.
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