The recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks, pa**ed their time in translating, copying, and even producing original compositions upon such subjects, and that, remember, during the Tarter period!. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with mystical writings, 'verses'-the heroes of which were always selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. An instance of it may be found in Victor Hugo's drama, Notre Dame de Paris, where, at the Municipal Hall, a play called Le Bon Jugement de la Tres-sainte et Gracièuse Vierge Marie, is enacted in honour of Louis XI, in which the Virgin appears personally to pronounce her 'good judgment.' In Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character, chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great favour. In those days, everything was very artless and primitive.

In France all the notaries' clerks, and the monks in the cloisters as well, used to give grand performances, dramatic plays in which long scenes were enacted by the Madonna, the angels, the saints, Christ, and even by God Himself.

'Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age-as you must have been told at school-when it was the great fashion among poets to make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on earth and mix freely with mortals. 'Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,' laughed Ivan. Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Grand Inquisitor (Full Text) lyrics

Dostoevsky the grand inquisitor