Search

Czeslaw Milosz’s putative ‘Manichaeism’ has long been something of a commonplace in the scholarship, with a great many critics, both Polish and otherwise, delineating and discussing various dualistic threads in Milosz’s poetry and prose. More recently, in 2011, Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk published the first book-length study on the subject, focusing in particular on ‘Gnostic’ echoes and correspondences in Milosz’s early poetry.1 Much of the critical work has proposed — to put it simply — that Milosz’s sense of the cruelty inherent in nature and in human history led him to a crisis of confidence in mainstream Christian ideas of a worldly harmony forged by a loving god. Partly for this reason, Milosz gave rein in some of his writings to speculative visions of an evil demiurge-creator responsible for a degenerate material world, drawing on unorthodox religious traditions he had first encountered in his school textbook on Church history. As he puts the key theological problem in a late poetic fragment, ‘Przyzwoity czlowiek nie moze wierzyc, ze dobry Bog chcial takiego świata’ (‘A decent person cannot believe that a good God could have wanted such a world’).2

This paper examines Vasilii Rozanov's focus on the Creation of the Earth by God, and the opposition he posits between the Creation and the Apocalypse as presented in the Christian Bible. It argues that Rozanov uses the Creation to demonstrate the sanctity of the material world, a stance which enables him to counter the general Christian tendency towards contemptus mundi, and more specifically the eschatological aspect of Russian culture. It also examines Rozanov's peculiar relationship with Jesus Christ as a created being, and argues that Rozanov presents an opposition between the creative activity of God, and the anti-creative work of Christ.