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Ivan Turgenev — poem “Prayer”

Russian Poetry

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Russian Literature – Russian Poetry – Children’s books – Ivan Turgenev  – Poems – Obsolete Russian Words and their meaning
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Prayer

No matter what a man may pray for he is praying for a miracle.—Every prayer amounts to the following: “Great God, cause that two and two may not make four.”

Only such a prayer is a genuine prayer from a person to a person. To pray to the Universal Spirit, to the Supreme Being of Kant, of Hegel—to a purified, amorphous God, is impossible and unthinkable.

But can even a personal, living God with a form cause that two and two shall not make four?

Every believer is bound to reply, “He can,” and is bound to convince himself of this.

But what if his reason revolts against such an absurdity?

In that case Shakspeare will come to his assistance: “There are many things in the world, friend Horatio….” and so forth.

And if people retort in the name of truth,—all he has to do is to repeat the famous question: “What is truth?”

And therefore, let us drink and be merry—and pray.

July, 1881.

Pushkin's farewell to the sea. 1877 painted by Repin

Translated from the Russian by Isabel F. Hapgood


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Russian Literature – Russian Poetry – Children’s books – Ivan Turgenev  – Poems – Obsolete Russian Words and their meaning

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