“Do you believe in God?” asked the student, abruptly.
“Yes,” I said. “I use the word God and mean something by it.”
“You are old-fashioned.” He laughed. “We don’t believe in God, we students; we are all atheists. You’re coming to Moscow, you’ll see. We don’t believe in anything except Man. We have given too much time to God already; it’s high time we turned our attention to Man. Is it possible you have not yet heard that God is dead? Why, where have you been?”
“I see you have been reading Nietzsche,” I remarked with a smile.
He looked at me with annoyance. “The English also read Nietzsche?”
I assented.
“Well,” he went on, “we’ve got God on the stage, you’ll see. We don’t call him God, but it’s God all the same. We call him the old man in grey. We had to do that so as to smuggle him past the censor. The censor, you know, has just stopped Oscar Wilde’s Salome, not because it’s indecent, but because it deals with a biblical subject. I think we’ve got a better censor than yours, however; he has licensed Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession, and it’s perfectly easy to manage him.”
“What did the deacon mean when he said the Ikon speaks?”
“Oh, that is his way of looking at it. The huge figure in grey, which you will see, is really meant for God. God gives the play for the benefit of mankind. God speaks the opening words. He shows the life of one man and says it is a typical life, and that is man’s life upon this earth, that and neither more nor less. During all the five acts God stands in a dark corner like an Ikon; he is visible to the audience as a God, but the actors on the stage behave, for the most part, as if it were only a sacred picture. God holds a candle, and as the play gets older the candle gradually burns lower and lower until, when Man dies, it finally expires. To Man on the stage this candle is only visible as the little lamp burning before the Ikon. He makes plans, he succeeds, he fails, he prays or curses, he is trivial or serious, and all the while the candle representing his life burns lower and nothing can stop the wasting of the wax.”
At this point Miss Yamschin came and called us all back to dinner. So we all trooped back to the room where the log fire gleamed. Three or four paraffin lamps were now lit, and a pleasant light was diffused through their green shades. An uncle of Nicholas’s had arrived, a station-master from a village ten versts away on a by-line. He waited impatiently while the deacon explained who I was, and then transfixed me with this question: