SAINTS, MYSTICS AND VILLAINS OF PETERSBURG

"To me and the dirt is good, because this is me".

Such sentence only one person - Vasily Vasilevich Rozanov could write.

Zinaida Gippius called Rozanov "a contemplative wanderer" and this probably best of all characterizes the writer, so much unlike all the others. He was exactly a spiritual wanderer, in every possible way trying not to bind his thought with literature biases and moreover - with political directions.

The Divine spark never died away in his soul, and Rozanov, being deeply religious person, named Christianity as a "religion of deads", and Christians - "people of a moonlight". He wished to "add" Christian asceticism with erotic deities from the East that caused the natural protest not only among churchmen, but also all Russian intelligency.

But Rozanov was closer to Old testament than New one, the Precept, with its bible patriarchs, corpulent herds and magnificent wives. And he tried to unite them in one doctrine as if forgetting about impossibility of it.

"The church said " no ", - he will write down later in "The Fallen leaves ". - I have cocked a snook at it. Here my literature".

In these words - the "key" to a solution of Rozanov "secret" which belongs not only to the literature, but also to general approached to a life with measures of religiousness and he often suffered that its religiousness does not coincide with the orthodox.

Source: A.Kolodin "Contemplative wanderer"