A Garden in Winter
In the year 1829 I spent the winter at the Ploshchanskaya Hermitage.[1] There, in the garden, to this day stands a solitary wooden cell in which I lived with my companion. In calm weather, on bright sunny days, I would go out to the porch, sit on the bench, and gaze upon the spacious garden. Its nakedness was covered with a snowy shroud; all around—stillness, a kind of dead and majestic repose. This sight began to please me: my pensive gaze was involuntarily drawn and fixed upon it, as though searching out some mystery within.
One day I sat gazing intently at the garden. Suddenly a veil fell from the eyes of my soul; before them there opened the book of nature. This is the book given to the first-created Adam to read—a book containing within itself the words of the Spirit, like the Divine Scripture. What teaching did I read in the garden? — The teaching of the resurrection of the dead: a powerful teaching, a teaching presented through an action similar to the resurrection. If we were not accustomed to seeing nature revive in spring, it would seem to us entirely miraculous, incredible. We do not marvel through familiarity; beholding a miracle, we as it were no longer see it! I look at the bare branches of the trees, and they speak to me persuasively in their mysterious tongue: “We will come alive, we will be covered with leaves, we will breathe fragrance, we will be adorned with flowers and fruits—shall not then the dry bones of men come alive in the spring of their resurrection?”
They will come alive, they will be clothed with flesh; in a new form they will enter into a new life and a new world. As trees that could not withstand the ferocity of the frost and have lost their vital sap are cut down at the coming of spring and carried out of the garden for firewood—so also sinners, who have lost their life—that is, God—will be gathered on the last day of this age, at the dawn of the coming eternal day, and cast into the unquenchable fire.
If one could find a man who knew nothing of the changes wrought by the turning of the seasons; if one were to bring this stranger into a garden resting majestically in the deathlike sleep of winter, to show him the bare trees and tell him of the luxury in which they will be clothed in spring—he would look at you instead of answering, and smile: so utterly fantastic a fable would your words seem to him! So too the resurrection of the dead seems incredible to the sages who wander in the darkness of earthly wisdom, who do not know that God is almighty, that His manifold wisdom may be contemplated but not comprehended by the mind of creatures. To God all things are possible: there are no miracles for Him. Frail is the thought of man: what we are not accustomed to seeing seems to us an impossible thing, an incredible miracle. The works of God, upon which we gaze constantly and now with indifference—these are wondrous works, great miracles, incomprehensible.
And year after year nature repeats before the eyes of all humanity this teaching of the resurrection of the dead, depicting it through a symbolic, mysterious action!
1843. Sergiev Hermitage.