The implementation of the gospel plot in Leonid Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot. Literature lesson_The Abyss of the Human Soul_based on Andreev's story "Judas Iscariot" The Abyss of the Human Soul Judas Iscariot Andreev
A few words about Leonid Andreev
Once in the Russian National Library I happened to get acquainted with the first issue of the magazine “Satyricon”, which was published, as you know, in 1908. The reason was to study the work of Arkady Averchenko or, more likely, to collect materials for writing a novel in which one of the chapters takes place in St. Petersburg in 1908. On the last page of "Satyricon" a cartoon portrait of Leonid Andreev was placed. The following was written:
“Rejoice that you are holding an issue of Satyricon in your hands.” Rejoice that such a person is your contemporary... He once looked into the Abyss, and horror froze forever in his eyes. And from then on he laughed only with a blood-chilling Red laugh.”
The cheerful magazine ironized the darkly prophetic image of Leonid Andreev, referring to his stories “The Abyss” and “Red Laughter”. Leonid Andreev was very popular in those years: his elegant style, expressiveness of presentation, and bold subject matter attracted the reading public to him.
Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev was born on August 9 (21 n.s.) 1871 in the city of Orel. His father was a land surveyor and tax collector, his mother was from the family of a bankrupt Polish landowner. At the age of six he learned to read “and read extremely a lot, everything that came to hand”. At the age of 11 he entered the Oryol gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1891. In May 1897, after graduating from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, he was planning to become a sworn attorney, but unexpectedly received an offer from a lawyer he knew to take the place of a court reporter in the Moskovsky Vestnik newspaper. Having received recognition as a talented reporter, two months later he moved to the Courier newspaper. Thus began the birth of the writer Andreev: he wrote numerous reports, feuilletons, and essays.
Literary debut - the story “In Cold and Gold” (zvezda, 1892, No. 16). At the beginning of the century, Andreev became friends with A.M. Gorky and together with him joined the circle of writers united around the publishing house “Znanie”. In 1901, the St. Petersburg publishing house “Znanie”, headed by Gorky, published “Stories” by L. Andreev. The following were also published in the literary collections “Knowledge”: the story “The Life of Vasily of Fiveysky” (1904); story “Red Laughter” (1905); dramas “To the Stars” (1906) and “Sava” (1906); story “Judas Iscariot and Others” (1907). In “Rosehip” (an almanac of modernist orientation): drama “Human Life” (1907); story "Darkness" (1907); "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" (1908); pamphlet “My Notes” (1908); drama "Black Masks" (1908); the plays “Anfisa” (1909), “Ekaterina Ivanovna” (1913) and “The One Who Receives Slaps” (1916); story “The Yoke of War. Confessions of a Little Man about Great Days" (1916). Andreev's last major work, written under the influence of the world war and revolution, is “Notes of Satan” (published in 1921).
I. Repin. Portrait of L. Andreev
Andreev did not accept the October Revolution. At that time he lived with his family at a dacha in Finland and in December 1917, after Finland gained independence, he found himself in exile. The writer died on September 12, 1919 in the village of Neivola in Finland, and was reburied in Leningrad in 1956.
More details biography of Leonid Andreev can be read , or , or .
L. Andreev and L. Tolstoy; L. Andreev and M. Gorky
With L.N. Tolstoy and his wife Leonid Andreev do not have mutual understanding found. "He's scary, but I'm not scared" - So Lev Tolstoy spoke about Leonid Andreev in a conversation with a visitor. Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya in a “Letter to the Editor” of Novoye Vremya accused Andreev of “ loves to enjoy the baseness of the phenomena of vicious human life" And, contrasting Andreev’s works with her husband’s works, she called for “ to help those unfortunates come to their senses, whose wings they, Messrs. Andreevs, are knocking down, given to everyone for a high flight to the understanding of spiritual light, beauty, goodness and... God" There were other critical reviews of Andreev’s work; they made fun of his gloominess, as in the micro-pamphlet from Satyricon cited above, while he himself wrote: “Who knows me among the critics? No one, it seems. Loves? Nobody either."
Interesting statement M. Gorky , very close acquaintance with L. Andreev:
« To Andreev, man seemed spiritually poor; woven from the irreconcilable contradictions of instinct and intellect, he is forever deprived of the opportunity to achieve any internal harmony. All his deeds are “vanity of vanities,” corruption and self-deception. And most importantly, he is a slave to death and all his life
The story of Leonid Andreev is also "gospel of Judas" since the Traitor is the main character there and performs the same function as in the heretical treatise, but the interaction between Judas and Jesus occurs more subtly:
Jesus does not ask Judas to betray Him, but by His behavior forces him to do so;
Jesus does not inform Judas about the meaning of his atoning sacrifice, and therefore condemns him to the torments of his conscience, i.e., to put it in the language of the special services, he “uses in the dark” the unfortunate Judas. Andreev’s “shifters” are not limited to this:
Judas not only overshadows many of the heroes of the gospel narrative, since they turn out to be clearly stupider and more primitive than him, but also replaces them with himself. Let's take a closer look at St. Andrew's “gospel inside out.”
Illustration by A. Zykina.
The appearance of Judas in the text of the story does not bode well: “Jesus Christ was warned many times that Judas of Kerioth was a man of very bad reputation and should be avoided. Some of the disciples who were in Judea knew him well themselves, others heard a lot about him from people, and there was no one who could say a good word about him. And if the good ones reproached him, saying that Judas was selfish, cunning, inclined to pretense and lies, then the bad ones, who were asked about Judas, reviled him with the most cruel words... And there was no doubt for some of the disciples that his desire to get closer to Jesus had some kind of secret intention hidden, there was an evil and insidious calculation. But Jesus did not listen to their advice, their prophetic voice did not touch his ears. With that spirit of bright contradiction that irresistibly attracted him to the outcast and unloved, he decisively accepted Judas and included him in the circle of the chosen ones.».
The author at the beginning of the story tells us about some oversight of Jesus, excessive gullibility, improvidence, for which he had to pay later and that his disciples were more experienced and far-sighted. Come on, is he really God after this, to whom the future is open?
There are three options:
either he is not God, but a beautiful-hearted, inexperienced person;
either He is God, and specially brought closer to Him the person who would betray Him;
or he is a person who does not know the future, but for some reason it was necessary for him to be betrayed, and Judas had a corresponding reputation.
The discrepancy with the Gospel is obvious: Judas was an apostle of the twelve, he, like the other apostles, preached and healed; was the treasurer of the apostles, however, a lover of money, and the Apostle John directly calls him a thief:
« He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief. He had a cash drawer with him and wore what was put there"(John 12:6).
IN it is explained that
« Judas not only carried the donated money, but also carried it away, i.e. secretly took a significant part of them for himself. The verb here (?????????), translated in Russian by the expression “carried”, is more correctly translated “carried away”. Why was Judas entrusted with a box of money by Christ? It is very likely that with this manifestation of trust Christ wanted to influence Judas, to inspire in him love and devotion to Himself. But such trust did not have favorable consequences for Judas: he was already too attached to money and therefore abused the trust of Christ».
Judas was not deprived of free will in the Gospel, and Christ knew in advance about his betrayal and warned of the consequences: “ However, the Son of Man comes, as it is written about Him; but woe to that man through whom the Son of Man is betrayed: it was better if that person would never have been born "(Matthew 26, 24). This was said at the Last Supper, after Judas visited the high priest and received thirty pieces of silver for betrayal. At the same Last Supper, Christ said that the traitor was one of the apostles sitting with Him, and the Gospel of John says that Christ secretly pointed him to Judas (John 13: 23-26).
Earlier, even before entering Jerusalem, addressing the apostles, “ Jesus answered them: Have I not chosen you twelve? but one of you is the devil. He spoke this about Judas Simon Iscariot, for he wanted to betray Him, being one of the twelve "(John 6, 70-71). IN “Explanatory Bible” by A.P. Lopukhina The following interpretation of these words is given: “ So that the apostles do not fall into excessive arrogance about their position as constant followers of Christ, the Lord points out that among them there is one person whose attitude is close to the devil. Just as the devil is in a constantly hostile mood towards God, so Judas hates Christ, as destroying all his hopes for the foundation of the earthly Messianic Kingdom, in which Judas could take a prominent place. This one wanted to betray Him. More precisely: “this one was going, so to speak, to betray Christ, although he himself was not yet clearly aware of this intention of his.” ».
Further, according to the plot of the story, St. Andrew's Jesus constantly keeps Judas at a distance, forcing him to envy other disciples who are objectively stupider than Judas, but enjoy the favor of the teacher, and when Judas is ready to leave Christ or the disciples are ready to expel him, Jesus brings him closer to himself and does not let him go. There are many examples that can be given, let us highlight a few.
The scene when Judas is accepted as an apostle looks like this:
Judas came to Jesus and the apostles, telling something that was obviously false. “John, without looking at the teacher, quietly asked Peter Simonov, his friend:
- Aren't you tired of this lie? I can't stand her any longer and I'll leave here.
Peter looked at Jesus, met his gaze and quickly stood up.
- Wait! - he told his friend. He looked at Jesus again, quickly, like a stone torn from a mountain, moved towards Judas Iscariot and loudly said to him with broad and clear friendliness:
“Here you are with us, Judas.”.
St. Andrew's Jesus is silent. He does not stop Judas, who is clearly sinning; on the contrary, he accepts him as he is, into the number of his disciples; Moreover, he does not verbally call on Judas: Peter guesses his desire and formalizes it in word and deed. This is not how things happened in the Gospel: apostleship was always preceded by a clear calling by the Lord, often by repentance of the one called, and always by a radical change in life immediately after the calling. This is what happened to the fisherman Peter: “ Simon Peter fell at the knees of Jesus and said: Depart from me, Lord! because I am a sinful man... And Jesus said to Simon: Do not be afraid; from now on you will catch people "(Luke 5, 8, 10). So it was with the publican Matthew: “ Passing from there, Jesus saw a man named Matthew sitting at the toll booth, and he said to him, “Follow Me.” And he stood up and followed Him"(Matthew 9:9).
Leonardo da Vinci. Last Supper
But Judas does not abandon his way of life after his calling: he also lies and makes faces, but for some reason St. Andrew’s Jesus does not speak out against it.
« Judas lied constantly, but they got used to it, because they did not see bad deeds behind the lie, and it gave special interest to Judas’ conversation and his stories and made life look like a funny and sometimes scary fairy tale. He readily admitted that sometimes he himself lies, but he assured with an oath that others lie even more, and if there is anyone deceived in the world, it is he, Judas." Let me remind you that the Gospel Christ spoke quite definitely about lies. He characterizes the devil this way: “ When he tells a lie, he speaks his own way, for he is a liar and the father of lies. "(John 8:44). But for some reason St. Andrew’s Jesus allows Judas to lie - except for the case when Judas lies to save himself.
To protect the teacher from the angry crowd, Judas flatters her and calls Jesus a simple deceiver and a tramp, diverts attention to himself and allows the teacher to leave, saving the life of Jesus, but he is angry. This was not the case in the Gospel, of course, but they actually wanted to kill Christ more than once for preaching, and this was always resolved successfully solely thanks to Christ himself, for example, with the admonition:
« I have shown you many good works from My Father; For which of them do you want to stone Me?"(John 10:32) or simply a supernatural departure:« Hearing this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with rage, stood up, drove Him out of the city and took Him to the top of the mountain on which their city was built in order to overthrow Him; but He passed through the midst of them and departed"(Luke 4, 28-30).
St. Andrew's Jesus is weak, cannot cope with the crowd on his own, and at the same time condemns the man who made great efforts to save him from death; The Lord, as we remember, “welcomes intentions,” i.e. White lies are not a sin.
In the same way, St. Andrew's Jesus refuses to help Peter defeat Judas in throwing stones, and then pointedly does not notice that Judas defeated Peter; and he is angry with Judas, who proved the ingratitude of the people in the village where Jesus preached earlier, but for some reason allows Judas to steal from the cash drawer... He behaves very contradictory, as if tempering Judas for betrayal; he inflates Judas’s pride and love of money and at the same time hurts his pride. And all this in silence.
“And before, for some reason, it was the case that Judas never spoke directly to Jesus, and he never directly addressed him, but he often looked at him with gentle eyes, smiled at some of his jokes, and if he did not see him for a long time, he asked : where is Judas? And now he looked at him, as if not seeing him, although as before, and even more persistently than before, he looked for him with his eyes every time he began to speak to his disciples or to the people, but either he sat with his back to him and threw words over his head. his own towards Judas, or pretended not to notice him at all. And no matter what he said, even if it was one thing today and something completely different tomorrow, even if it was the same thing that Judas was thinking, it seemed, however, that he was always speaking against Judas. And for everyone he was a tender and beautiful flower, fragrant with the rose of Lebanon, but for Judas he left only sharp thorns - as if Judas had no heart, as if he had no eyes and nose and no better than everyone else, he understood the beauty of tender and immaculate petals."
Naturally, Judas eventually grumbled:
« Why is he not with Judas, but with those who do not love him? John brought him a lizard - I would have brought him a poisonous snake. Peter threw stones - I would have turned a mountain for him! But what is a poisonous snake? Now her tooth has been pulled out, and she is wearing a necklace around her neck. But what is a mountain that can be torn down with your hands and trampled underfoot? I would give him Judas, brave, beautiful Judas! And now he will perish, and Judas will perish with him." Thus, according to Andreev, Judas did not betray Jesus, but took revenge on him for his inattention, for his lack of love, for his subtle mockery of the proud Judas. What kind of love of money there is!.. This is the revenge of a loving, but offended and rejected person, revenge out of jealousy. And St. Andrew’s Jesus acts as a completely conscious provocateur.
Judas is ready until the last moment to save Jesus from the inevitable: “ With one hand betraying Jesus, with the other hand Judas diligently sought to thwart his own plans" And even after the Last Supper he tries to find a way not to betray the teacher, he directly turns to Jesus:
“Do you know where I’m going, Lord? I am coming to deliver you into the hands of your enemies.
And there was a long silence, the silence of the evening and sharp, black shadows.
-Are you silent, Lord? Are you ordering me to go?
And again silence.
- Let me stay. But you can't? Or don't you dare? Or don't you want to?
And again silence, huge, like the eyes of eternity.
- But you know that I love you. You know everything. Why are you looking at Judas like that? The mystery of your beautiful eyes is great, but is mine less so? Order me to stay!.. But you are silent, are you still silent? Lord, Lord, why, in anguish and torment, have I been looking for you all my life, looking for you and finding you! Set me free. Take away the heaviness, it is heavier than mountains and lead. Can't you hear how the chest of Judas of Kerioth is cracking under her?
And the last silence, bottomless, like the last glance of eternity.
- I'm coming."
And who is betraying whom here? This is the “gospel inside out,” in which Jesus betrays Judas, and Judas begs Jesus just as Christ in the present Gospel begs His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane to carry the cup of suffering past him. In the present Gospel, Christ prays to His Father for his disciples, and St. Andrew’s Jesus condemns the disciple to betrayal and suffering.
Icon “Prayer for the Cup” by Caravaggio. Kiss of Judas
Even in the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, Jesus is not so cruel:
Video fragment 2. "National Geographic. Gospel of Judas"
In general, Andreev’s Judas often replaces the disciples, Christ, and even God the Father. Let's look at these cases briefly.
We have already said about the prayer for the cup: here Judas replaces the suffering Christ, and St. Andrew’s Jesus acts as Sabaoth in the Gnostic understanding, i.e. like a cruel demiurge.
Well, it is Judas who contextually appears as Andreev’s loving “God’s father”: it is not without reason that, observing the suffering of Jesus, he repeats: “Oh, it hurts, it hurts a lot, my son, my son, my son. It hurts, it hurts a lot."
Another replacement of Christ by Judas: Judas asks Peter who he thinks Jesus is. " Peter whispered fearfully and joyfully: “I think that he is the son of the living God.” And in the Gospel it is written like this: “ Simon Peter answered Him: Lord! who should we go to? You have the words of eternal life: and we have believed and known that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God"(John 6, 68-69). The twist is that Peter’s gospel remark is addressed to Christ, not Judas.
Appearing to the apostles after the death of Jesus, St. Andrew’s Judas again creates an inverted situation and replaces the risen Christ with himself. "Jesus' disciples sat in sad silence and listened to what was happening outside the house. There was also a danger that the revenge of Jesus’ enemies would not be limited to him alone, and everyone was waiting for the guards to invade... At that moment, Judas Iscariot entered, loudly slamming the door».
And the Gospel describes the following: “ On the same first day of the week in the evening, when the doors of the house where His disciples were meeting were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and said to them: Peace be with you! "(John 20:19).
Here the quiet and joyful appearance of the risen Christ is replaced by the noisy appearance of Judas, denouncing His disciples.
The denunciation of Judas is permeated by the following refrain: “Where was your love? ... Who loves... Who loves!.. Who loves! Compare with the Gospel: “When they were dining, Jesus said to Simon Peter: Simon the Jonah! Do you love Me more than they? Peter says to Him: Yes, Lord! You know I love you. Jesus says to him: Feed my lambs. Another time he says to him: Simon the Jonah! do you love me? Peter says to Him: Yes, Lord! You know I love you. Jesus says to him: Feed My sheep. He says to him for the third time: Simon the Jonah! do you love me? Peter was saddened that he asked him for the third time: Do you love Me? and said to Him: Lord! You know everything; You know I love you. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep."(John 21:15-17).
Thus, after His resurrection, Christ restored the apostolic dignity to Peter, who had denied Him three times. In L. Andreev we see an inverted situation: Judas three times denounces the apostles for their dislike for Christ.
Same scene: “Judas fell silent, raising his hand, and suddenly noticed the remains of a meal on the table. And with strange amazement, curiosity, as if he saw food for the first time in his life, he looked at it and slowly asked: “What is this? Did you eat? Perhaps you slept the same way? Let's compare: " When they still did not believe for joy and were amazed, He said to them: Do you have any food here? They gave Him some of the baked fish and honeycomb. And he took it and ate before them"(Luke 24:41-43). Once again, Judas exactly the opposite repeats the actions of the risen Christ.
« I'm going to him! - said Judas, extending his imperious hand upward. “Who is following Iscariot to Jesus?” Let's compare: " Then Jesus said to them plainly: Lazarus is dead; and I rejoice for you that I was not there, so that you might believe; but let's go to him. Then Thomas, otherwise called the Twin, said to the disciples: come and we will die with him"(John 11, 14-16). To the courageous statement of Thomas, who, like the other apostles, could not confirm it with deeds on the night when Judas betrayed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, L. Andreev contrasts the same statement of Judas, and Judas fulfills his promise, showing greater courage than the other apostles.
By the way, Andreev’s apostles are shown as fools, cowards and hypocrites, and against their background Judas looks more than advantageous; he outshines them with his sharp paradoxical mind and sensitive love for Jesus. Yes, this is no wonder: Thomas is stupid and cowardly, John is arrogant and hypocritical, Peter is a complete ass. Judas characterizes him this way:
« Is there anyone stronger than Peter? When he shouts, all the donkeys in Jerusalem think that their Messiah has come, and they also start shouting." Andreev completely agrees with his favorite hero, as can be seen from this passage: “A rooster crowed, resentfully and loudly, as if during the day, a donkey, who had woken up somewhere, crowed and reluctantly, intermittently, fell silent.”
The motif of a cock crowing in the night is associated with Peter’s denial of Christ, and the braying donkey obviously correlates with Peter weeping bitterly after his denial: “ And Peter remembered the word that Jesus had spoken to him: Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times; and started crying"(Mark 14:72).
Judas even replaces Mary Magdalene. According to Andreev’s version, it was Judas who bought the ointment with which Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus’ feet, while in the Gospel the situation is completely opposite. Let's compare: " Mary, taking a pound of pure precious ointment of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the world. Then one of His disciples, Judas Simon Iscariot, who wanted to betray Him, said: Why not sell this ointment for three hundred denarii and give it to the poor?"(John 12:3-5).
Sebastian Ritchie. Mary Magdalene washes Christ's feet
And in the light of what has been said above, the outburst of Judas does not look at all strange, who, to the public question of Peter and John about which of them will sit next to Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven, answered: “I! I will be near Jesus!”
One can, of course, talk about the inconsistency of the image of Judas, which was reflected in his behavior, and in his speeches, and even in his appearance, but the main intrigue of the story is not this, but the fact that St. Andrew’s silent Jesus, without uttering a word , was able to force this smart, contradictory and paradoxical man to become a great Traitor.
« And everyone - good and evil - will equally curse his shameful memory, and among all nations, which were and are, he will remain alone in his cruel fate - Judas of Kariot, Traitor" The Gnostics, with their theory of a “gentleman’s agreement” between Christ and Judas, never dreamed of this.
A domestic film adaptation of Andreev's story "Judas Iscariot" - "Judas, the Man from Kariot" - should soon be released. I wonder what emphasis the director made. For now, you can only watch the trailer for the film.
Video fragment 3. Trailer “Judas, the Man from Kariot”
M. Gorky recalled this statement by L. Andreev:
“Someone proved to me that Dostoevsky secretly hated Christ. I also don’t like Christ and Christianity, optimism is a disgusting, completely false invention... I think that Judas was not a Jew - a Greek, a Hellenic. He, brother, is an intelligent and daring man, Judas... You know, if Judas had been convinced that Jehovah himself was in the face of Christ before him, he would still have betrayed Him. Killing God, humiliating Him with a shameful death, this, brother, is not a trifle!”
It seems that this statement most accurately defines the author’s position of Leonid Andreev.
Hello! The other day I re-read “Judas Iscariot” by Leonid Andreev. Tell me, how do you feel about this book? And another question that arose while reading: Leonid Andreev evaluates Judas somewhat positively, feels sorry for him and somewhat justifies him. Why did he predestinate Judas to betrayal? Where is his freedom? Why, from among many, was one chosen to commit this shameful act? Is there some kind of injustice to a person? (Tashkent)
Volkonsky Timofey, 28 years old
Answered by Shupenko O.V., site administrator
I apologize for the interruption in communication that is unacceptable for the Internet - the reason is banal: I am in the hospital. But I don’t want to remove the question, since the work of L. Andreev is beloved and problematic. First of all, the author of Iscariot is not an Orthodox writer, he is an artist-philosopher of the Silver Age, creating his own decision and understanding of ideological and biblical truths. He has a different task and a different vision, respectively, of Judas Iscariot.
The hero of Leonid Andreev is physically and spiritually in love with Jesus, but he is sure that Jesus does not fully understand his brilliant transcendence, his power over man and the world, and it is his, Judas Iscariot’s mission to reveal this transcendence, to show everyone who he is. Christ. He constantly calls him son, is constantly in a state of mental and psychological over-tension, in anticipation that the “bomb” will now “explode” and not even fragments will remain of the old world. He takes on the role of a martyr in the name of Christ, in the name of his revelation to everyone - and loses, is defeated by Jesus himself. The Lord with His forgiveness, His mercy and super-love for the most pitiful and weak. Judas did not expect this. He does not understand how the king and master rejects power and humbly accepts human sinfulness. And then Iscariot realizes with mortal horror that he committed betrayal, villainy, and not heroism or martyrdom in the name of a great idea.
I love this hero, because he is the focus of our peculiarity - to see a universal event in our own way, give it our own, individually human meaning and be firmly convinced that his false understanding is the truth. He is the embodiment of the great human deception - to consider himself above the super-event, since he, as he is sure, can explain and push it. This is a great deception that accompanies man throughout the history of the earth, both then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, and today, and in the future.
Judas Iscariot lives in each of us: we consider ourselves the chosen ones of fate and betray, not understanding the tragic irreparability of betrayal, justifying it precisely with a great goal. Judas is sincere to the point of frenzy and does not understand what is happening before the frenzy. He is a man, and therefore it is a pity for him. He painfully pursues his mission, loving Christ like no one else. And he betrays him, because he could not understand the true purpose of Christ. He does not believe anyone, not one of the apostles, not a single woman, for he understands that only he and Christ have a special connection, an age-old connection. The word betrayal will come up later. Fatal mistake? It's terrible that I didn't understand?
Why does Judas betray Christ, according to Andreev? Because he sincerely believes that he is helping to highlight his stay on earth through betrayal, because he believes that Christ will “scatter everyone and everything” and everyone will see that there is no one better or higher than him, for people believe only in power and strength. There is no one more free than Judas in Andreev’s story, because, as he believes, only he stands on a par with the Teacher, only he loves the Teacher so much that he helps him to identify himself among everyone. He does not believe in the torment and execution of Jesus on the cross, and still expects that he'll gasp and everyone will understand...
Write about Andreev briefly and straightforwardly. But let’s return to your question - why exactly Judas, already biblical, committed this act. Those closest to him always betray, especially his disciples. This is the law of the movement of the soul and, obviously, a universal law. Lord and Lucifer, Jesus and Judas. But Light is not straightforward, and, therefore, Darkness is not unambiguous. Otherwise everything would be extremely clear and simple.
The biblical Judas was also in despair and fury, but was unable to repent. He threw away the money, hung himself over the abyss, but was unable to repent before the Lord. He was so free to choose that this freedom became for him akin to an abyss without a bottom. His confrontation with Christ is so consistent and purposeful that it could inspire Andreev, an explorer of the dark abysses of the human soul. But Judas will always be pitied, since forgiveness and the Kingdom of Heaven will never await him, and the loving gaze of Christ will never stop on him. He understood this - and hanged himself. In general, the suicide of Judas is the topic of a multi-volume philosophical or theological work.
Judas Iscariot Andreeva is not a fighter with Jesus, he wants to help him manifest himself before people, show his greatness. He believes that only he is his main assistant and student. Leonid Andreev's story is brilliant, because he looked into the most complex biblical topic and, with his talent, highlighted some important part of it.
BackTopic: “The abysses” of the human soul as the main object of depiction in the work of L. Andreev. Reinterpretation of gospel stories in the writer’s philosophical prose.
Goals and objectives:
Educational: understand the essence and sources of inconsistency in L. Andreev’s portrayal of Judas and explain the author’s attitude towards the characters; assess this betrayal from the point of view of Orthodoxy; consolidating knowledge and understanding of a literary text, improving the creation of syncwine.
Developmental: development of monologue speech, communication skills; creating conditions for developing the ability to see and name a problem, and propose ways to solve it. Develop the ability to analyze text and words, relying on details, creative associative thinking using the example of different types of arts.
Educational: to awaken interest in art, to cultivate a person’s moral and spiritual values: a serious attitude towards the situation of choice, a sense of responsibility for one’s decision, actions; cultivate kindness and sensitivity.
Lesson type:
Equipment: multimedia presentation, video recordings, printouts (the original source of the Gospel), cards with questions for groups, reminders for compiling a syncwine, stones, hearts.
Name of modern educational technologies used in UVP Stages of the lesson at which technologies are used
Information and communication technology Preparatory part:
classroom organization, functional and psychological preparation for the upcoming work.
Creating a positive emotional mood.
Group technology
Problematic technology
Information technology
Person-centered technology
Collaboration Technology
Main part
1. Compiling a syncwine
2.Working with the text of the story.
3. Discussing issues and expressing your point of view on the problems of the story
4 Reading a passage from the story by heart
5.Working with the text of the Gospel.
6. Expressive reading of an excerpt from a story
Health saving technology
Final part
Using assessment options, creating a situation of success.
Health-saving technology.
Reflection
Ensuring restoration processes. Psychological attitude towards upcoming educational activities.
Summing up and homework assignment. Homework
Behavior is a mirror in which everyone
shows his face. J.W. Goethe
1. This is one of the plots of the Eternal Book - the Bible about the betrayal of the Son of Man by Judas." At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Russian writer Leonid Andreev turned to the same topic, creating the story "Judas Iscariot", which you read at home and the content of which you will have to understand in class.- Why is this biblical story so attractive that it has not ceased to excite people’s consciousness for many centuries? You know well that according to Christian ideas, “Christ is the embodiment of truth, goodness and beauty,” and the one who betrayed him, “Judas, is the personification of lies, meanness and deceit.” Trailer based on the story by L. Andreev
And now, in order for these concepts to become closer to us, I propose to compose a syncwine for the words Good (group 1), Evil (group 2).
Good evil
1. fair, eternal
2. helps, supports, guides
3. without goodness life is meaningless
4. justice 1. terrible, destructive
2. destroys, injures, destroys
3. destroys everything on earth
4. sin
Reminder for compiling a syncwine
Portraits of Jesus and Judas.
The struggle between good and evil is the most difficult moral problem of humanity. Rooted in the distant past, L. Andreev also asks this question. Moreover, we will not find the answer in the story. Let's return to associations of good... And to associations of evil... (key word betrayal)
–The psychology of betrayal... What is it? How, why, why do they become traitors?
Today we are talking about the main traitor in the history of mankind - Judas Iscariot.
Formulate the lesson problem. tasks: (“The problem of betrayal? Goals: 1. Did Judas sincerely love Christ?
2. Why does he commit betrayal? 3. How does the person who committed the betrayal feel?)
I.A
A word about L.N. Andreev. So, what kind of person was Leonid Andreev? (Portrait of L. Andreev)
"Andreev lived on Kamennoostrovsky, in a terribly gloomy house: A huge room - corner, with a lantern, and the windows of this lantern are located in the direction of the islands and Finland. You approach the window - and the lanterns of Kamennoostrovsky run away in a chain into the wet distance. Leonid Andreev, who lived in the writer Leonida Nikolaevich, was endlessly lonely, not recognized and always facing the hole of the black window.
Presentation made by 11th grade students
(Elements used: Portrait of L. Andreev, lanterns of Kamennoostrovsky, black window failure.)
The history of the creation of the story.
- Let's remember the history of Russia. With what events did the first Russian revolution of 1905–1907 begin?
(Since Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905, when, on the initiative of the priest Gapon, St. Petersburg workers went to the Winter Palace with a petition to Nicholas 2, and this peaceful mass procession was shot by the tsarist troops. A year later it turned out that Gapon was exposed by the Social Revolutionaries as an agent of the secret secret police and hanged by them in Ozerki, a dacha suburb of St. Petersburg).
Working with a text document based on Andreev's story. - Look at these portraits. This is Judas through the eyes of different artists. (date, authors)
Where do you think St. Andrew's Judas is? Justify your opinion with text. (a description of Judas’s appearance is read out, his duality is noted)
- Why does Andreev give Judas such an appearance? What does this mean? (duality of face - duality of nature)
- How does the duality of Judas’s nature manifest itself? Give examples from the text. (brief recap of episodes)
“Short red hair did not hide the strange and unusual shape of his skull: as if cut from the back of the head with a double blow of a sword and put back together again, it was clearly divided into four parts, inspired distrust, even alarm: behind such a skull there cannot be silence and harmony, behind such a skull there is always the sound of bloody and merciless battles can be heard. Judas’s face was also double: one side of it, with a black, sharply looking eye, was alive, mobile, willingly gathering into numerous crooked wrinkles. On the other there were no wrinkles, and it was deathly smooth, flat and frozen; and although it was equal in size to the first, it seemed huge from the wide open blind eye. Covered with a whitish turbidity, not closing either day or night, it equally met both light and darkness; but was it because there was a lively and cunning comrade next to him that one could not believe in his complete blindness?”
First, let us note the unusualness of the selected details of the portrait. Andreev describes the skull of Judas, the very shape of which inspires “mistrust and anxiety”
Secondly, let us pay attention to the duality in the appearance of Judas, emphasized several times by the writer
Group assignment:
1 – find synonyms that characterize the image of Judas.
2 – find antonyms that characterize the appearance of Judas.
synonyms: “strange and unusual”, “distrust, even anxiety”, “silence and harmony”, “bloody and merciless” -
and antonyms: “chopped... and put together again”, “living - deathly - smooth”, “moving - frozen”, “neither night nor day”, “both light and darkness”.
Do scary people have scary looks? (i.e. if a person is bad, this is reflected in his appearance)
Every human deed has two faces..... One of them is in plain sight - it is false, the other is hidden - it is the real one.M. Bitter
Presentation (portrait of Judas the two-faced statement by M. Gorky
So, Judas is an incomprehensible, ambiguous, mysterious nature.
1. Judas' attitude towards Jesus? Justify your point of view with text 1. Jesus to Judas. 2. Judas’ attitude towards people. 3. Attitude of Judas to the apostles. The attitude of the apostles towards Judas.
Children make conclusions in groups.
Yes. Andreevsky Judas loves Christ. So why?! Why does he betray?! re-enactment (2 people) against the background of the presentation.
“Yes, we betray you with the kiss of love. With the kiss of love we hand you over to reproach, to torture, to death! With the voice of love we call the executioners out of the dark holes and put up a cross - and high above the crown of the earth we raise love crucified with love on the cross”…….
Work in groups.
Questions on handouts. Students quote from the text of the story. (Andreev’s story is on the table)
Presentation slide No. Kiss of Judas
Judas' betrayal leads to Jesus' crucifixion.
discussion video
So why does he betray? (What different goals. In the first case he betrays for the sake of Jesus, and in the second - for himself.
- How does Judas feel after the crucifixion of Jesus?
St. Andrew's Judas acquires grandiose proportions and becomes equal to Christ. Considered as a participant in the re-creation of the world, its transformation. So, it's done! What was spoken through the prophets was fulfilled. So maybe that's how it was? Maybe L. Andreev is right? (teacher leads to conclusion)
Andreev's interpretation.
Yes, because there is not the slightest confirmation of this St. Andrew’s fantasy in the Bible! Although there are no direct denials
Let's go to the source
3. Gospel Analysis
The Gospel... It doesn't explain anything. It fascinates with its understatement. Despite its brevity and external impartiality, it has been attracting attention for 2 thousand years. Let's go back to the source.
(on the children’s tables are printouts of passages from two Gospels: Matthew 26:14-25,45-50; Luke 22:3-6, 47-48) The texts of the Gospels are read)
- How does Judas appear in the Gospel?
-What do we learn about him?
(there is no psychological characterization in the Gospel, only facts)
How much Andreev had to think about. There is not a single fictional character in his story, but he had to speak for each one himself.
But it is still possible to understand what an Orthodox Christian relies on in his assessment of the betrayal of Judas. Let's compare 2 more passages and the Gospels (read Matthew 26:24 and Luke 23:34)
- Having compared these episodes, think about why the Orthodox, without any justification, consider Judas a traitor? (Jesus justifies his executioners! But he does not forgive betrayal. For the crucifying Jews “do not know what they are doing,” but the smart Judas knows exactly what he is doing. Which means he is free in his CHOICE).
- They say that in order to understand a person, you need to try to put yourself in his place. Now you will hear and see the last aria of Judas before his suicide, it is in English, but there are things that are understandable without words. Imagine yourself in the place of Judas and try to jot down those few lines that you would like to throw in the face of the crowd, the apostles, perhaps Christ himself, or even the whole world at this last moment.
Fragment of video recording of the film version of the rock opera directed by Norman Jewison with Karl, Anderson in the role of Judas:
Reflection.
- So I read the last paragraph of Leonid Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot”, where the word “traitor” itself is written three times by the author with a capital letter.
- So who is Judas: a traitor or a victim, whose fate is as predetermined as the fate of Jesus himself; is he the winner or loser of the battle with evil or is he evil itself?
- And what about the well-known biblical commandments: “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged”?
- Make your choice: if your heart today was touched by the story of betrayal in Andreev’s interpretation and compassion settled in it, then try to reach Iscariot’s heart by opening yours towards him. If resentment and hatred still live in your heart, then throw your stone at Judas Iscariot. Hearts and stones. 2 dishes.
The student reads the last paragraph aloud.
To the melody of the Christian bard Tremaskin
Application.
Group 2 assignment
1. Judas’ attitude towards people (What does Judas say about people?)
Judas' attitude towards the apostles. (What does Judas say and think about the apostles?)
Judas' attitude towards Jesus. (How does one feel about Jesus: loves, cares, protects, fears, accuses, hates?)
2. If Judas loves Christ. So why?! Why does he betray?!
Group task1
People's attitude towards Judas. (What do people say about him?)
The attitude of the apostles towards Judas. (How do they treat him at the beginning of the story, at the end?)
Jesus' attitude towards Judas. (How does Jesus treat him: at the beginning of the story, at the end?)
Literature
Grade 11
Lesson #5
The abysses of the human soul as the main object of the image (review of the works of L. N. Andreev)
List of issues considered on the topic
1. Chronicle of life and creativity;
2. Ideological and artistic originality of L. Andreev’s stories;
3. Reflections on the meaning of human existence;
4. Psychological Theater L. Andreev;
5. The genre of the writer’s realistic-everyday story.
Thesaurus
An atheist is a person who completely denies the existence of God and does not accept faith.
A cataclysm is a sharp change in the nature and conditions of organic life on a vast expanse of the earth’s surface under the influence of destructive atmospheric and volcanic processes.
Neorealism is a movement in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century: the so-called “traditional prose”, focused on the traditions of the classics (a return to the realistic aesthetics of the 19th century) and addressed to the historical, social, moral, philosophical and aesthetic problems of our time.
A feuilleton is a newspaper article on a topical topic that uses literary and artistic presentation techniques, especially satire.
Bibliography
Main literature:
1. Lebedev Yu. V. Literature for grade 11: in 2 parts. M.: Education, 2016. Part 1. pp. 226–244
Additional literature:
1. Chalmaev V.A., Zinin S.A. Russian literature of the twentieth century: Textbook for grade 11: In 2 hours - 5th ed. M.: Russian Word - RS, 2008.
Open electronic resources:
1. Andreev L.N. Judas Iscariot. // http://leonidandreev.ru: Website dedicated to the work of Leonid Andreev.
URL: http://leonidandreev.ru/povesti/iuda.htm (access date: 18082018).
Theoretical material for self-study
Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev was born on August 21, 1871 in Orel in the family of a land surveyor and the daughter of a Polish landowner. He reads a lot as a child. His favorite writers are Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy. Later he became interested in German philosophers, in particular, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer.
In 1891, Leonid entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. To pay for his studies, the student, in particular, has to earn extra money by giving private lessons and painting portraits to order. In 1892, his first story entitled “In Cold and Gold” was published in the magazine “Star”. In this autobiographical work, the author paints a picture of the life of a poor, hungry student.
The writer receives a law degree from Moscow University. In St. Petersburg he is expelled for debts.
Leonid Andreev's active literary activity began in 1897. At this time, the future writer serves as an assistant to a sworn attorney. He is published in the newspapers “Courier” and “Moskovsky Vestnik” under the pseudonym “James Lynch”. Real success came to him in 1901 with the story “Once Upon a Time” in the magazine “Life”.
The themes of Andreev’s works often cause indignation among literary critics. Among others, there is skepticism and disbelief in the human mind, which attracted attention in the stories “The Wall” and “The Abyss.” Both of these works are united by a feeling of pitch darkness and the meaninglessness of existence.
Another important topic is man’s relationship to God. For the first time it clearly sounds in the 1903 story “The Life of Vasily Fiveysky”. The idea originates from Maxim Gorky and his story about a priest who comes to deny religion. As a result, Andreev’s concept of personality is clearly manifested in the work: a person is insignificant in the face of the Universe, life is devoid of higher meaning, and the surrounding reality is gloomy and unfair. Vasily of Fiveysky is defeated, but at the same time his convictions remain undefeated.
What is important for a writer is not the facts, not the “imaginary reliability of details,” but the image of the soul or “a piece of a person’s psychobiography.” In his works we will not meet characters; Andreev has only one idea as a special method of “conditional realism”.
The story “The Life of Vasily of Fiveysky” is a unique story of mental cataclysms, complex paths of the hero’s quest and a chain of cruel tests of his faith. His son will drown, the house will burn, his wife will die from burns - the priest, “grinding his teeth,” loudly repeats: “I believe.” Throughout the entire work, the author studies the transformation of Vasily’s inner world. In the end, the hero turns to God with the words: “So why did I believe? So why did you give me love for people and pity? So why did you keep me captive, in slavery, in chains all my life? Not a free thought! No feelings! Not a breath! Everything is by you, everything is for you. You alone! Well, show up - I’m waiting!” ... “He once sought the truth, and now he was choking on it, this merciless truth of suffering, and in the painful consciousness of powerlessness he wanted to run to the ends of the world, to die, so as not to see, not to hear, not to know. He called human grief to him - and grief came. Like an altar, his soul burned, and he wanted to embrace everyone who approached him in a brotherly embrace and say: “Poor friend, let’s fight together and cry and search. For there is no help for man from anywhere.”
This story is highly appreciated by Alexander Blok: “In him - in Leonid Andreev - they find something in common with Edgar Allan Poe. This is true to a certain extent, but the huge difference is that in Andreev’s stories there is nothing “extraordinary”, “strange”, “fantastic”, “mysterious”. All simple everyday incidents.”
Since 1905, Andreev has appeared both as a prose writer and as a playwright. The writer enthusiastically welcomes the first Russian revolution: he participates in public life, works for the Bolshevik newspaper Borba, and collaborates with the modernist almanac of the publishing house Rosehip.
During this period, theater occupied a large place in the writer’s work. He writes a number of dramatic works, including the play “Tsar Hunger”. In it, Andreev denounces a “well-fed” society that is not ready for change and is not sensitive to the suffering of others.
In 1907, the story “Judas Iscariot” was published. The main theme can be indicated by the quote: “... He who loves does not ask what to do! He goes and does everything. He cries, he bites, he strangles the enemy and breaks his bones! Who loves! When your son drowns, do you go to the city and ask passersby: “What should I do? My son is drowning!” - and don’t throw yourself into the water and drown next to your son. Who loves!".
According to Christian ideas, Christ is the embodiment of truth, goodness and beauty, and Judas, who betrayed him, is the personification of lies, meanness and deceit. According to the writer’s contemporaries, this image was mysterious to Andreev all his life. “The psychology of betrayal” is the main theme of the story. The ideological conflict in the story is of an anti-God character: Jesus’ actions are guided by love for people, Judas does not love people. This is where two worldviews collide. The author brings the language of the work as close as possible to the biblical one, but violates the plot: the disciples of Christ are people without their own opinions, and Judas, although two-faced, has individuality.
In the context of the story, the death of Judas is as symbolic as the crucifixion of Jesus. The cross is the convergence of Good and Evil. Deceived by people, Judas voluntarily leaves this world following his teacher.
In the story “Judas Iscariot” Leonid Andreev poses eternal questions: what rules people? Good or evil? True or false? Is it possible to live righteously in an unrighteous world? But there are no clear answers to these questions. Alexander Blok says that in this work “the author’s soul is a living wound.”
Examples and analysis of solutions to training module tasks
1. Selecting an element from the drop-down list (in the text).
Andreev - ____________, believed in thoughts. In his short story “Thoughts,” Andreev tells the story of a crime where the hero feigns madness, but then can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality.
Drop-down list:
Dreamer.
Hint: L.N. Andreev said that he does not believe in God.
Correct answer: atheist.
Leonid Andreev did not believe in the Kingdom of God; he wrote: “The Kingdom of man must be on earth. Hence, calls to God are hostile to us.” Andreev considered himself an atheist (although his views are quite contradictory, and artistic truth sometimes contradicts his anti-religious statements, nevertheless, in the task we are guided by direct quotes from the author).
2. Rebus matching.
Match the names of the writers with their statements.
1. “A man of rare originality, rare talent and quite courageous in his search for truth.”
2. “You write that the dignity of your works is sincerity. I recognize not only this, but also that their goal is good: the desire to promote the good of people” (From a letter to L. Andreev).
3. “Behind it (the story “Judas Iscariot”) is the author’s soul - a living wound. I think that her suffering is solemn and victorious.”
L. Tolstoy;
M. Gorky.
Correct answer:
M. Gorky - “He was what he wanted and knew how to be, a man of rare originality, rare talent and quite courageous in his search for truth.”
A. Blok - “Behind it (the story “Judas Iscariot”) is the author’s soul - a living wound. I think that her suffering is solemn and victorious.”
L. Tolstoy - “You write that the dignity of your works is sincerity. I recognize not only this, but also that their goal is good: the desire to promote the good of people” (From a letter to L. Andreev).
Maxim Gorky met Andreev in 1900, and it was he who in 1905 helped Andreev overcome depression (after the death of his wife in childbirth). He knew Andreev like no one else.
Leo Tolstoy corresponded with Andreev.
Alexander Blok recalled: “Did I love Leonid Nikolaevich? - Don't know. Was I an ardent admirer of his talent? – No, I cannot say this without reservations. Despite all this, I feel that I have one long and important memory of the deceased; long - because we were “acquaintances” or “strangers” for ten years; important because it is connected with the sources that nourished his life and my life.”
The Gospel story of the betrayal of Jesus Christ by Judas Iscariot could have interested Leonid Andreev as a writer because it could be “literaryized,” that is, brought into line with the principles of depicting and evaluating a person in his own work, while relying on the traditions of Russian literature of the 19th century (Leskov , Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) in the processing of works of educational literature.
Just like his predecessors, Andreev saw in the situations of didactic literature a significant tragic potential, which two geniuses - Dostoevsky and Tolstoy - so impressively revealed in their work. Andreev significantly complicated and deepened the personality of Judas, making him an ideological opponent of Jesus, and his story acquired all the signs of the genre of spiritual drama, examples of which were known to the reader from Dostoevsky’s novels of the 1860-1870s and the works of the late Tolstoy.
The author of the story follows the plot of the gospel story selectively, while preserving its key situations, the names of its characters - in a word, creates the illusion of its retelling, but in fact offers the reader his own version of this story, creates a completely original work with an existential characteristic characteristic of this writer (a person in world) problems.
In Andreev’s story, the ideological beliefs of the characters are polar (faith - disbelief) - in accordance with its genre specificity; at the same time, the intimate, personal element (likes and dislikes) plays a decisive role in their relationship, significantly enhancing the tragic pathos of the work.
Both main characters of the story, Jesus and Judas, and especially the latter, are clearly hyperbolized in the spirit of expressionism professed by Andreev, which presupposes the gigantism of the heroes, their extraordinary spiritual and physical abilities, the intensification of tragedy in human relationships, ecstatic writing, that is, increased expressiveness of style and deliberate convention images and situations.
Andreev’s Jesus Christ is spirituality embodied, but this artistic embodiment itself, as happens with ideal heroes, lacks external specifics. We hardly see Jesus, we don’t hear his speeches; his mental states are episodically presented: Jesus can be complacent, welcoming Judas, laugh at his jokes and the jokes of Peter, be angry, sad, grieving; Moreover, these episodes mainly reflect the dynamics of his relationship with Judas.
Jesus Christ, a passive figure, is a supporting hero in the story - compared to Judas, the real protagonist, an active “character”.
It is he, in the vicissitudes of his relationship with Jesus, from the very beginning to the end of the story that is in the center of attention of the narrator, which gave the writer the basis to name the work after him. The artistic character of Judas is significantly more complex than the character of Jesus Christ.
Judas appears before the reader as a complex riddle, as, indeed, for the disciples of Jesus, and in many ways for their teacher himself. All of him is “encrypted” in a certain way, starting with his appearance; it is even more difficult to understand the motives of his relationship with Jesus. And although the main intrigue of the story is clearly described by the author: Judas, who loves Jesus, betrays him into the hands of his enemies, the allegorical style of this work makes it much more difficult to understand the subtle nuances of the relationship between the characters.
The allegorical language of the story is the main problem of its interpretation. Judas is presented by the narrator - on the basis of a kind of plebiscite - as a person rejected by all people, as an outcast: “and there was no one who could say a good word about him.”
However, it seems that Judas himself does not particularly favor the human race and does not particularly suffer from his rejection. Judas evokes fear, shock, and disgust even among Jesus’ disciples “as something unprecedentedly ugly, deceitful and disgusting,” who do not approve of their teacher’s act of bringing Judas closer to them. But for Jesus there are no outcasts: “with that spirit of bright contradiction that irresistibly attracted him to the outcasts and unloved, he decisively accepted Judas and included him in the circle of the elect” (ibid.). But Jesus was guided not by reason, but by faith, making his decision, inaccessible to the understanding of his disciples, by faith in the spiritual essence of man.
“The disciples were worried and grumbled restrainedly,” and they had no doubt that “in his desire to get closer to Jesus there was hidden some secret intention, there was an evil and insidious calculation. What else can you expect from a person who “staggers senselessly among the people... lies, makes faces, vigilantly looks out for something with his thief’s eye... curious, crafty and evil, like a one-eyed demon”?
Naive but meticulous Thomas “carefully examined Christ and Judas, who were sitting next to each other, and this strange proximity of divine beauty and monstrous ugliness ... oppressed his mind like an unsolvable riddle.” The best of the best and the worst of the worst... What do they have in common? At least they are able to sit peacefully next to each other: they are both of the human race.
Judas’s appearance testified that he was organically alien to the angelic principle: “short red hair did not hide the strange and unusual shape of his skull:
as if cut from the back of the head with a double blow of a sword and put back together again, it was clearly divided into four parts and inspired distrust, even anxiety: behind such a skull there can be no silence and harmony, behind such a skull one can always hear the noise of bloody and merciless battles.”
If Jesus is the embodiment of spiritual and moral perfection, a model of meekness and inner peace, then Judas, apparently, is internally split; one can assume that by vocation he is a restless rebel, always looking for something, always lonely. But isn’t Jesus himself alone in this world?
What is hidden behind the strange face of Judas? “The face of Judas was also double: one side of it, with a black, sharply looking eye, was alive, mobile, willingly gathering into numerous crooked wrinkles. On the other there were no wrinkles, and it was deathly smooth, flat and frozen; and although it was equal in size
the first, but it seemed huge from the wide open blind eye. Covered with a whitish turbidity, not closing either at night or during the day, it equally met both light and darkness; but was it because there was a living and cunning comrade next to him that one could not believe in his complete blindness.”
The disciples of Jesus soon became accustomed to the external ugliness of Judas. The expression on Judas’s face was confusing, reminiscent of a mask of an actor: either a comedian or a tragedian. Judas could be a cheerful, sociable, good storyteller, although he somewhat shocked listeners with his skeptical judgments about a person, however, he was also ready to present himself in the most unfavorable light. “Judas lied constantly, but they got used to it, because they did not see bad deeds behind the lies, and it gave special interest to Judas’ conversation and his stories and made life look like a funny and sometimes scary fairy tale.” This is how a lie, in this case an artistic fiction, a game, is rehabilitated.
As an artist by nature, Judas is unique among Jesus' disciples. However, Judas not only amused his listeners with fiction: “According to Judas’ stories, it seemed as if he knew all the people, and every person he knew had committed some bad act or even a crime in his life.”
What is this - a lie or the truth? What about Jesus' disciples? What about Jesus himself? But Judas avoided such questions, sowing confusion in the souls of his listeners: was he joking or was he speaking seriously? “And while one side of his face was writhing in clownish grimaces, the other was swaying seriously and sternly, and his never-closing eye looked wide.”
It was this, either blind, dead, or all-seeing eye of Judas that instilled anxiety in the souls of Jesus’ disciples: “while his living and cunning eye moved, Judas seemed simple and kind, but when both eyes stopped motionless and the skin gathered into strange lumps and folds on his convex forehead - there was a painful guess about some very special thoughts, tossing and turning under this skull.
Completely alien, completely special, having no language at all, they surrounded the pondering Iscariot with a dull silence of mystery, and I wanted him to quickly begin to speak, move and even lie. For the lie itself, spoken in human language, seemed like truth and light in front of this hopelessly deaf and unresponsive silence.”
Lies are being rehabilitated again, because communication - the way of human existence - is by no means alien to lies. Weak man. Jesus’ disciples understand this kind of Judas; he is almost one of them. The tragic mask of Judas exuded cold indifference to man; This is how fate looks at a person.
Meanwhile, Judas clearly sought to communicate, actively infiltrating the community of Jesus’ disciples, winning the sympathy of their teacher. There were reasons for this: over time it would turn out that he had no equal among Jesus’ disciples in intelligence, in physical strength and willpower, and in the ability for metamorphosis. And that is not all. Just look at his desire to “someday take the earth, raise it and, perhaps, throw it away,” Judas’s cherished desire, similar to mischief.
So Judas revealed one of his secrets in the presence of Thomas, however, with the full understanding that he obviously would not understand the allegory.
Jesus entrusted Judas with the cash drawer and household chores, thereby indicating his place among the disciples, and Judas coped with his responsibilities excellently. But did Judas come to Jesus to become one of his disciples?
The author clearly distances Judas, who was independent in his judgments and actions, from the disciples of Jesus, whose principle of behavior is conformism. Judas treats Jesus’ disciples with irony, who live with an eye on the teacher’s assessment of their words and actions. And Jesus himself, inspired by faith in the spiritual resurrection of man, does he know a real, earthly man, the way Judas knows him - at least in himself, a fidget with a quarrelsome character, ugly in appearance, a liar, a skeptic, a provocateur, an actor, for whom as as if nothing is sacred, for whom life is a game. What is this strange and even somewhat scary man trying to achieve?
Unexpectedly, demonstratively, in the presence of Christ and his disciples, obscenely arguing about a place next to Jesus in paradise, listing their merits before the teacher, Judas reveals another of his secrets, declaring “solemnly and sternly,” looking straight into the eyes of Jesus: “I! I will be near Jesus." This is no longer a game.
This statement of Judas seemed to the disciples of Jesus to be a daring trick. Jesus “slowly lowered his gaze” (ibid.), like a man considering what he had said. Judas asked Jesus a riddle. After all, we are talking about the highest reward for a person, which must be earned. How does Judas, who behaves as if he consciously and clearly opposes Jesus, expect to deserve it?
It turns out that Judas is as much an ideologist as Jesus. And Judas’s relationship with Jesus begins to take shape as a kind of dialogue, always in absentia. This dialogue will be resolved by a tragic event, the cause of which everyone, including Jesus, will see in the betrayal of Judas. However, betrayal also has its motives. It was the “psychology of betrayal” that interested Leonid Andreev primarily, according to his own testimony, in the story he created.
The plot of the story “Judas Iscariot” is based on “the story of the human soul,” of course, Judas Iscariot. The author of the work shrouds his hero in secrets by all means available to him.
This is the aesthetic attitude of the avant-garde writer, who entrusts the reader with the difficult task of unraveling these mysteries. But the hero himself is in many ways a mystery to himself.
But the main thing - the purpose of his coming to Jesus - he knows firmly, although he can entrust this secret only to Jesus himself, and even then in a critical situation for both of them - unlike his disciples, who constantly and importunately, in competition with each other, assure teachers in their love for him.
Judas declares his love for Jesus intimately, without witnesses and even without the hope of being heard: “But you know that I love you. “You know everything,” the voice of Judas sounds in the evening silence on the eve of the terrible night. - Lord, Lord, was it then that in “anguish and torment I searched for You all my life, I searched and found you!”
Did Judas's acquisition of the meaning of existence with fatal inevitability lead him to the need to hand Jesus over to his enemies? How could this happen?
Judas understands his role near Jesus differently than Jesus the teacher himself. There is no doubt that the word of Jesus is the holy truth about the essence of man. But is the word capable
to change his carnal nature, which makes itself felt constantly, in the eternal struggle with the spiritual principle, crushingly reminding itself of the fear of death?
Judas himself experiences this fear in a village in which its inhabitants, angry at the denunciations of Jesus, were ready to throw stones at the accuser himself and his confused disciples. This was Judas’s fear not for himself, but for Jesus (“overwhelmed by an insane fear for Jesus, as if already seeing drops of blood on his white shirt, Judas furiously and blindly rushed at the crowd, threatened, shouted, begged and lied, and thus gave time and opportunity Jesus and his disciples must go."
It was a spiritual act of overcoming the fear of death, a true expression of man's love for man. Be that as it may, it is not the word of truth of Jesus, but the lie of Judas, who presented the religious teacher to the angry crowd as an ordinary deceiver, his acting talent, capable of bewitching a person and making him forget about anger (“he rushed madly in front of the crowd and charmed them with some strange power "(ibid.), saved Jesus and his disciples from death.
It was a lie for salvation, for the salvation of Jesus Christ. “But you lied!” - the principled Thomas reproaches the unprincipled Judas, alien to any dogmas, especially when it comes to the life and death of Jesus.
“And what is a lie, my smart Thomas? Wouldn’t the death of Jesus be a bigger lie?” - Judas asks a tricky question. Jesus, in principle, rejects all lies, no matter what motives the liar may have to justify himself. This is the ideal truth that you cannot argue with.
But Judas needs Jesus alive, because he himself is the holy truth, and for her sake Judas is ready to sacrifice his own life. So what is the truth and what is a lie? Judas decided this question for himself irrevocably: the truth is Jesus Christ himself, man, like God perfect in his spiritual hypostasis, a gift from heaven to humanity. A lie is his departure from life. And therefore Jesus must be protected in every possible way, because there will be no other like him.
Death awaits the righteous at every step, because people do not need the truth about their imperfections. They need deception, or rather, eternal self-deception, as if man is an exclusively carnal being. It is easier to live with this lie, because everything is forgiven to the carnal man. Judas tells Thomas about this: “I gave them what they asked for (that is, a lie), and they returned what I needed” (the living Jesus Christ).
What awaits Jesus Christ in this sinful earthly world if Judas is not next to him? Jesus needs Judas. Otherwise, he will perish, and Judas will perish with him,” Iscariot is convinced.
For what will the world become without a deity? But does Jesus himself need Judas, who believes in the possibility of spiritual enlightenment of humanity?
People do not particularly believe words, and therefore are unstable in their beliefs. In one of the villages, its residents warmly welcomed Jesus and his disciples, “surrounded them with attention and love and became believers,” but as soon as Jesus left this village, one of the women reported the loss of a kid goat, and although the kid was soon found, the residents why - they decided that “Jesus is a deceiver and maybe even a thief.” This conclusion immediately calmed passions.
“Judas is right, Lord. These were evil and stupid people, and the seed of your words fell on the stone,” the naive truth-lover Thomas confirms the rightness of Judas, who “told bad things about its inhabitants and foreshadowed trouble.”
Be that as it may, “from that day on, Jesus’ attitude towards him changed somehow strangely. And before, for some reason, it was the case that Judas never spoke directly to Jesus, and he never directly addressed him, but he often looked at him with gentle eyes, smiled at some of his jokes, and if he did not see him for a long time, he asked: where is Judas? And now he looked at him, as if not seeing him, although as before, and even more stubbornly than before, he looked for him with his eyes every time he began to speak to his disciples or to the people, but either sat down with his back to him and threw his words against Judas, or pretended not to notice him at all. And no matter what he said, even if it’s one thing today and something completely different tomorrow, even if it’s even the same thing that Judas thinks, it seemed, however, that he was always speaking against Judas.” In a different guise - not as a disciple, but as an ideological opponent - Judas revealed himself to Jesus.
The unkind attitude of Jesus Christ towards him offended and puzzled Judas. Why is Jesus so upset when his disciples, that is, all people, turn out to be petty, stupid and gullible? Isn't that what they are in essence? And how will his future relationship with Jesus develop now? Will he really lose the meaning of his existence forever if Jesus finally turns away from him? The time has come for Judas
comprehend the situation.
Having fallen behind Jesus and his disciples, Judas headed into a rocky ravine in search of solitude. This ravine was strange, as Judas saw it: “this wild desert ravine looked like an overturned, severed skull, and every stone in it was like a frozen thought, and there were many of them, and they all thought - hard, boundless, stubbornly.” .
In his many hours of immobility, Judas himself became one of these “thinking” stones: “... his eyes stopped motionless on something, both motionless, both covered with a whitish strange turbidity, both as if blind and terribly sighted.” Judas is a stone - one of the metamorphoses of his multifaceted personality, meaning “stone” Potentially, the power of his will.
Inhuman willpower - like the deathly flat side of Judas's face; willpower that will stop at nothing; she is deaf to man. No, Peter is not a stone, but he, Judas, because it is not for nothing that he comes from a rocky area.
The motif of the “petrification” of Judas is plot-forming. Judas initially experiences a similar kind of awe before Jesus, as do all his disciples. But gradually Judas discovers in himself the qualities that define human dignity. And above all, the willpower to follow one’s path, to which a person is destined by the very order of things. This is the meaning of the metaphor: Judas is a stone.
We find the development of the “petrification” motif in the scene of the competition between Judas and Peter in throwing stones into the abyss. For all disciples, including Jesus Christ himself, this is entertainment. And Judas himself enters into the competition in order to entertain Jesus, tired from a long and difficult journey, and to earn his sympathy.
However, one cannot help but see in this scene its allegorical meaning: “heavy, he struck briefly and bluntly and thought for a moment; then he hesitantly made the first leap - and with each touch to the ground, taking from it speed and strength, he became light, ferocious, all-crushing. He no longer jumped, but flew with bared teeth, and the air, whistling, passed his blunt, round carcass.
Here is the edge, - with a smooth last movement the stone soared upward and calmly, in heavy thoughtfulness, flew roundly down to the bottom of an invisible abyss. This description is not only about the stone, but also about the “history of the soul” of Judas, about the growing strength of his will, his aspiration for a daring act, for a reckless desire to fly into the unknown - into the symbolic abyss, into the kingdom of freedom. And even in the stone thrown by Judas, he seems to see his likeness: having found a suitable stone, Judas “tenderly dug into it with his long fingers, swayed with it and, turning pale, sent it into the abyss.”
And if, when throwing a stone, Peter “leaned back and watched it fall,” then Judas “leaned forward, arched and extended his long moving arms, as if he himself wanted to fly away after the stone.”
The motif of Judas’ “petrification” reaches its climax in the scene of Jesus’ teaching in the house of Lazarus. Judas is offended that everyone so quickly forgot about his victory over Peter in throwing stones, and Jesus, apparently, did not attach any importance to it.
The disciples of Jesus had other moods, they worshiped other values: “images of the path traveled: the sun, and the stone, and the grass, and Christ reclining in the tent, quietly floated in their heads, evoking soft thoughtfulness, giving rise to vague but sweet dreams about what something eternally moving under the sun. The tired body rested sweetly, and it was all thinking about something mysteriously beautiful and big - and no one remembered Judas.” And there was no place in this beautiful, poetic world for Judas with his worthless virtues. He remained a stranger among Jesus' disciples.
So they surrounded their teacher, and each of them wanted to somehow be involved with him, even if only by a light, imperceptible touch of his clothes. And only Judas stood aside. “Iscariot stopped at the threshold and, contemptuously passing by the gaze of those gathered, concentrated all his fire on Jesus. And as he looked, everything around him faded, became covered in darkness and silence, and only Jesus brightened with his raised hand.”
Light in a dark and silent world - that is what Jesus is to Judas. But something seems to disturb Judas, peering at Jesus Christ: “but then he seemed to rise into the air, as if he had melted and became as if he all consisted of a lake-like fog, permeated with the light of the setting moon; and his soft speech sounded somewhere far, far away and tender.”
Jesus appears to Judas as what he is - a spirit, a bright, ethereal being with a charming, unearthly melody of words and at the same time a ghost floating in the air, ready to disappear, dissolve in the deep, silent darkness of man's earthly existence.
Judas, constantly concerned about the fate of Jesus in this world, imagines that he himself is somehow involved in Jesus differently than his disciples, who are concerned about being closer to Jesus. Judas looks into himself, as if he believes in himself to find the answer to this question: “and, peering into the wavering ghost, listening to the tender melody of distant and ghostly words, Judas took his entire soul into his iron fingers and in its immense darkness, silently, began build something huge.
Slowly in the deep darkness, he raised some mountain-like masses and smoothly laid one on top of the other; and raised it again, and put it on again; and something grew in the darkness, expanded silently, pushed the boundaries.
Here he felt his head like a dome, and in the impenetrable darkness a huge thing continued to grow, and someone was silently working: raising huge masses like mountains, putting one on top of the other and lifting again... And somewhere distant and ghostly words sounded tenderly.”
With full exertion of his will and all his spiritual strength, Judas builds in his imagination some kind of grandiose world, recognizing himself as its ruler, but the world, alas, is silent and gloomy. But Judas has little power over the world; he needs power over Jesus, so that the world does not remain forever in darkness and silence. It was a bold desire. But this was also the key to solving the problem of Judas' relationship with Jesus.
Jesus seemed to sense a threat coming from Judas: he interrupted his speech, fixing his gaze on Judas. Judas stood, “blocking the door, huge and black...”. Did the insightful Jesus see a jailer in Judas if he hurriedly left the house “and walked past Judas through the open and now free door,” assessing the real capabilities of his opponent, his power over himself?
Why doesn't Judas directly address Jesus, unlike his other disciples? Is it not for the reason that in the artistic world of the story Jesus and Judas are separated by some order of things independent of them, an irresistible logic of circumstances, a semblance of fate, as in a tragedy? For the time being, Judas has to come to terms with the fact that Jesus “was for everyone a tender and beautiful flower, a fragrant rose of Lebanon, but for Judas he left only sharp thorns.”
Jesus Christ loves his disciples and is coldly patient in his relationship with Judas, the only one of all who sincerely loves him. Where's the justice? And jealousy, the eternal companion of love, flares up in the heart of Judas. No, he did not come to Jesus to be his obedient disciple.
He would like to become his brother. Only, unlike Jesus, he does not have faith in the human race, which truly does not understand and does not appreciate Jesus Christ. But no matter how much Judas despises people, he believes that at a critical moment for Christ, people will wake up from spiritual slumber and glorify his holiness, his divinity, which are as obvious to everyone as the sun in the sky. And if the impossible happens - people turn away from Jesus, he, only he, Judas, will remain with Jesus when his disciples run away from him, when it is necessary to share unimaginable suffering with Jesus. “I will be near Jesus!”
Judas’s idea was fully matured; he had already agreed with Anna to hand over Jesus, and only now he realized how dear Jesus was to him, whom he was giving into the wrong hands. “And, going out to the place where they went to relieve themselves, he cried there for a long time, writhing, writhing, scratching his chest with his nails, biting his shoulders. He caressed the imaginary hair of Jesus, quietly whispered something tender and funny, and gritted his teeth.
Then he suddenly stopped crying, moaning and gnashing his teeth and began to think heavily, tilting his wet face to the side, looking like a man who was listening. And for so long he stood, heavy, determined and alien to everything, like fate itself.” So this is what was hidden behind the dual face of Judas!
The awareness of his power over Jesus humbles Judas' jealousy. Here he is present at the scene when “Jesus tenderly and gratefully kissed John and affectionately stroked the tall Peter on the shoulder. And without envy, with condescending contempt, Judas looked at these caresses. What do all these ... kisses and sighs mean compared to what he knows, Judas of Kariot, a red-haired, ugly Jew, born among the stones!
Isn’t Judas’ only way of meaningfully expressing his love to imagine himself as Jesus’ caring jailer? Watching how Jesus rejoiced, caressing a child whom Judas had found somewhere and secretly brought to Jesus as a kind of gift to please him, “Judas sternly walked aside, like a stern jailer who, in the spring, let a butterfly in to the prisoner and is now feigningly grumbling , complaining about the mess."
Judas is constantly looking for an opportunity to please Jesus with something - secretly from him, like a true lover. Only Judas doesn’t have enough love that Jesus doesn’t even know about.
He would like to become a brother to Jesus - in love and in suffering. But is Judas himself ready to hand Jesus over to his enemies in order to meet him face to face, which is what he so stubbornly strives for?
He passionately begs Jesus to make himself known, to enter into dialogue with him, to free him from his shameful role: “Free me. Take off the heaviness, it is heavier than mountains and lead. Can't you hear how the chest of Judas of Kerioth is cracking under her? And the last silence, bottomless, like the last glance of eternity.
“I’m going.” The world responds with silence. Go, man, wherever you want, and do what you know. Jesus Christ is simply the Son of Man.
Here Judas appeared before Jesus face to face on the fateful night. And this was their first dialogue. Judas “quickly moved towards Jesus, who was waiting for him in silence, and plunged his direct and sharp gaze, like a knife, into his calm, darkened eyes.
“Rejoice, Rabbi! “he said loudly, putting a strange and menacing meaning into the words of an ordinary greeting.” The hour of testing has come. Jesus will enter the world victorious! But then he saw the disciples of Jesus huddled in a herd, paralyzed by fear, his hope wavered, “and the mortal sorrow that Christ experienced before was kindled in his heart.
Stretching out into a hundred loudly ringing, sobbing strings, he quickly rushed to Jesus and tenderly kissed his cold cheek. So quietly, so tenderly, with such painful love and longing that if Jesus had been a flower on a thin stem, he would not have shaken it with this kiss and would not have dropped the pearly dew from the pure petals.”
It is finished – Judas put all his tender love for Jesus into his kiss. Is he really ready to subject Jesus to a terrible test for this kiss? But Jesus did not understand the meaning of this kiss. “Judas,” said Jesus, and with the lightning of his gaze he illuminated that monstrous pile of wary shadows that was the soul of Iscariot, “but he could not penetrate into its bottomless depths. - Judas! Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss? Yes, by kissing, but by kissing love: “Yes! We betray you with a kiss of love.
With the kiss of love we hand you over to desecration, to torture, to death! With the voice of love we call the executioners from the dark holes and put up a cross - high above the crown of the earth
we raise crucified love on the cross,” Judas pronounces an internal monologue. It's too late to explain things to Jesus now.
It so happened that Judas, tormented by unrequited love for Jesus, desired power over him. And wasn’t it the love of Jesus Christ for the human race that became the reason for the enmity of the powers that be towards him, hatred that knows no bounds? Isn't this the fate of love in this world? Be that as it may, the die is cast.
“So Judas stood, silent and cold as death, and the cry of his soul was answered by the screams and noise that arose around Jesus.” Judas will remain with this feeling of “a kind of double existence” - a painful fear for the life of Jesus and cold curiosity about the behavior of people whose spiritual blindness is inexplicable - until his death.
The suffering of Jesus will somehow strangely bring him closer to Judas, which the latter so stubbornly sought: “and among all this crowd there were only the two of them, inseparable until death, wildly connected by the commonality of suffering - the one who was given over to reproach and torment, and the one who betrayed him. From the same cup of suffering, like brothers, they both drank, the devotee and the traitor, and the fiery moisture equally scorched clean and unclean lips.”
Ever since Jesus found himself in the hands of the soldiers, senselessly beating him for no reason, Judas lives in anticipation of what is inevitably going to happen: people will understand the divinity of Jesus Christ. And then Jesus will be saved - forever and ever. Silence fell in the guardhouse where they beat Jesus.
"What is this? Why are they silent? What if they guessed it? Instantly, Judas’s head was filled with noise, screaming, and the roar of thousands of frenzied thoughts. Did they guess? Did they understand that this is the best person? - it's so simple, so clear. What's there now? They kneel in front of him and cry quietly, kissing his feet. So he comes out here, and they meekly crawl behind him - he comes out here, to Judas, he comes out victorious, a husband, the lord of truth, a god...
-Who is deceiving Judas? Who is right?
But no. Again screams and noise. They hit again. They didn’t understand, they didn’t guess, and they hit even harder, they hit even more painfully.” Here Jesus stands before the court of the crowd, the court that must resolve the dispute between Judas and Jesus. “And all the people shouted, screamed, howled in a thousand animal and human voices:
- Death to him! Crucify him!
And so, as if mocking themselves, as if in one moment wanting to experience all the infinity of fall, madness and shame, the same people shout, scream, demand in a thousand animal and human voices: “Release Barrabas to us!” Crucify him! Crucify!
Until Jesus' last breath, Judas hopes for a miracle. “What can keep from breaking the thin film that covers people’s eyes, so thin that it seems
not at all? What if they understand? Suddenly, with the entire menacing mass of men, women and children, they will move forward, silently, without shouting, they will wipe out the soldiers, cover them up to their ears in their blood, tear out the cursed cross from the ground and, with the hands of the survivors, raise the free Jesus high above the crown of the earth! Hosanna! Hosanna!". No, Jesus dies. Is this possible? Is Judas the winner? “Horror and dreams came true. Who will now snatch victory from the hands of Iscariot? Let all the nations that exist on earth flock to Golgotha and cry out with millions of their throats: “Hosanna, Hosanna!” - and seas of blood and tears will be shed at its foot - they will find only a shameful cross and a dead Jesus.”
The fulfilled prophecy elevates Judas to the level of pride that is inherent in the rulers of the world: “now the whole earth belongs to him, and he walks firmly, like a ruler, like a king, like one who is infinitely and joyfully alone in this world.” Now his posture is that of a ruler, “his face is stern, and his eyes do not dart in mad haste as before. So he stops and examines the new, small land with cold attention. She has become small, and he feels all of her under his feet.
Infinitely and joyfully alone, he proudly felt the powerlessness of all the forces acting in the world, and threw them all into the abyss.” The world has appeared in darkness and silence, and now Judas has the right to judge everyone and everything. He denounces the members of the Sanhedrin for their criminal blindness, and betrayed you, the wise, you, the strong, to a shameful death that will not end
forever" and the disciples of Jesus.
Now they look at it from above and below and laugh and shout: look at this land, Jesus was crucified on it! And they spit on her - like me! But without Jesus the world lost its light and meaning.
To be close to Jesus means to follow him from this desolate world. “Why are you alive when he is dead?” Judas asks Jesus’ disciples. Jesus is dead, and only the dead are not ashamed now. Judas is ready to continue to endure Jesus' dislike for him, even in heaven, even if Jesus sends him to hell. Judas is capable of destroying heaven in the name of love for Jesus in order to return to earth with him, embracing him brotherly, and thereby wash away the shameful name of the Traitor. This is what Judas believed, the one who truly loved Jesus and who, in the name of love, doomed him to torment and death.
But he entered the memory of people differently: “and everyone - good and evil - will equally curse his shameful memory; and among all nations, which were and are, he will remain alone in his cruel fate - Judas of Kariot, Traitor.”
People evaluate in their own way a person whose behavior disturbs their conscience. The story of one love and the betrayal committed in the name of it was told to us by Leonid Andreev in the story “Judas Iscariot”.
