Where there is love, there is God too

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Illustration to the story
Where there is love, there is God too .
Illustrator: Michael Sevier (1916)

Where there is love, there is God ( Russian Где любовь, там и Бог , Gde ljubow, tam i Bog) is a story by Lev Tolstoy that was written in 1885. In the first edition of the St. Petersburg book publisher Posrednik , the author is missing. In 1886 the text appeared in Tolstoy's 4th Russian Reader of the anthology Rasskasy is «Novoi asbuki» - also in Saint Petersburg.

History of origin

Tolstoy took the scaffolding of his story from Father Martin , a publication by the Protestant pastor Ruben Saillens (1855–1942) from 1881 in Toulouse . Since Tolstoy's source was a translation from French into Russian without a statement of the author, he was surprised by Saillens' plagiarism allegation and could only apologize in writing.

content

The shoemaker Martin Awdejitsch is pursued by the accident. When his wife dies, she leaves him with their son - the little Kapiton. Martin wants to raise the boy alone. Kapiton dies of a febrile illness. The desperate Martin avoids the church from now on. On the advice of an aged pilgrim, he finds consolation in the gospel . Martin reads Luke in Chapter 6, sets the bookmark, then goes to bed and dreams of how God himself comes to him.

How will it be when God himself comes to me in the Russian winter? puzzles Martin. He cannot imagine it at all and looks out the window the next morning, as instructed in the dream. Indeed - one after the other, the lonely shoemaker receives three visits in a row. First Martin asks the house servant Stepanytsch, a frail old man who is barely able to cope with his work, sweeping the snow, to the shoemaker's workshop to warm up and have tea. Stepanytsch leaves and Martin asks a young soldier's wife, dressed in summer, with her toddler to step out of the cold into the warmth of the workshop and to swaddle her child in it. He also gives her some of his clothes and feeds her. In the end he pays an old farmhand for an apple and gives the fruit to a small apple thief in her entourage.

After his work, Martin wants to continue reading at the point with the bookmark in the Gospel, but the book opens at a point with the Gospel of Matthew . Five figures appear one after the other in a dark corner of his dwelling and soon vanish into thin air - Stepanytsch, the servant, the soldier's wife with her child, and the old fruit seller with the little thief. Tolstoy concludes: And Martin "realized that his dream had not betrayed him, that" God himself had come to him.

German-language editions

  • Where there is love, there is God too. German by Arthur Luther . P. 51–65 in: Gisela Drohla (Ed.): Leo N. Tolstoj. All the stories. Fifth volume. Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1961 (2nd edition of the edition in eight volumes 1982)
  • Leo Tolstoy: Where there is love, there is God. Stories. Translation into German Arthur Luther. Pp. 5-29. Brunnen Verlag, Gießen 2007 (6th edition 2016, edition used), ISBN 978-3-7655-1956-7

Web links

Commons : Where there is love, there is God  - a collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian Посредник (издательство), translated: Mediator
  2. ↑ Russian remarks , 3rd paragraph
  3. ↑ Russian Рассказы из "Новой азбуки", in German stories from the New Alphabet
  4. ↑ Vol. 10 of the 22-volume Tolstoy edition, Moscow 1982
  5. ↑ Source: it: Dove c'è amore c'è Dio # Genesi dell'opera
  6. ^ NT , Gospel of Luke: ( Luke 6 : 29-38  EU )
  7. ^ NT, Gospel of Matthew ( Matthew 25 : 35-40  EU )
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 29, 4th Zvu