“The psychology of betrayal” is the main theme of L. Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot”. Images and motives of the New Testament, ideal and reality, hero and crowd, true and hypocritical love - these are the main motives of this story. Andreev uses the Gospel story about the betrayal of Jesus Christ by his disciple Judas Iscariot, interpreting it in his own way. If the focus of the Holy Scripture is the image of Christ, then Andreev turns his attention to the disciple who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver into the hands of the Jewish authorities and thereby became the culprit of the suffering on the cross and the death of his Teacher. The writer is trying to find a justification for the actions of Judas, to understand his psychology, the internal contradictions that prompted him to commit a moral crime, to prove that in the betrayal of Judas there is more nobility and love for Christ than in the faithful disciples.
According to Andreev, by betraying and taking on the name of the traitor, “Judas saves the cause of Christ. True love turns out to be betrayal; the love of the other apostles for Christ - through betrayal and lies.” After the execution of Christ, when “horror and dreams came true,” “he walks leisurely: now the whole earth belongs to him, and he steps firmly, like a ruler, like a king, like one who is infinitely and joyfully alone in this world.”
Judas appears in the work differently than in the gospel narrative - sincerely loving Christ and suffering from the fact that he does not find understanding of his feelings. The change in the traditional interpretation of the image of Judas in the story is complemented by new details: Judas was married, abandoned his wife, who wanders in search of food. The episode of the apostles' stone-throwing competition is fictional. Judas' opponents are other disciples of the Savior, especially the apostles John and Peter. The traitor sees how Christ shows great love towards them, which, according to Judas, who did not believe in their sincerity, is undeserved. In addition, Andreev portrays the apostles Peter, John, and Thomas as being in the grip of pride - they are worried about who will be first in the Kingdom of Heaven. Having committed his crime, Judas commits suicide, because he cannot bear his act and the execution of his beloved Teacher.
As the Church teaches, sincere repentance allows one to receive forgiveness of sin, but Iscariot’s suicide, which is the most terrible and unforgivable sin, forever closed the doors of heaven to him. In the image of Christ and Judas, Andreev confronts two life philosophies. Christ dies, and Judas seems to be able to triumph, but this victory turns into tragedy for him. Why? From Andreev’s point of view, the tragedy of Judas is that he understands life and human nature deeper than Jesus. Judas is in love with the idea of goodness, which he himself debunked. The act of betrayal is a sinister experiment, philosophical and psychological. By betraying Jesus, Judas hopes that in the suffering of Christ the ideas of goodness and love will be more clearly revealed to people. A. Blok wrote that in the story there is “the soul of the author, a living wound.”
Bulgakov in “The Master and Margarita” does not describe all of Yeshua’s disciples. He deviates from tradition and depicts only one person on the pages of the novel - Matthew Levi. However, Yeshua himself does not consider Matthew Levi to be his student and even expresses doubts about the correctness of his records. Interesting in this context is the conclusion of B. M. Gasparov that the “evangelist disciple,” just like Judas, becomes a traitor to Yeshua, “he also ... betrays his teacher by being unable to tell the truth about him.” Bulgakov and Judas is not at all a disciple of Yeshua; he is little known in the city - almost a shadow, an inconspicuous personality. After all, even Pilate, a man endowed with unlimited power and having access to any information, calls the “dirty traitor” old, at a time when Judas is young and handsome.
In Andreev’s work, the relationship between the Traitor and other disciples of Christ is shown ambiguously. Just as in the Gospel text, Andreev has twelve of them. But in the story “Judas Iscariot” itself, Andreev introduces the reader to only five students, whose images play a certain, rather important role in the work. The apostles in Andreev’s text are completely different: each has their own character, their own vision of the world, their own special attitude towards Jesus. But they all have one thing in common - love for their teacher and... betrayal.
To reveal the essence of betrayal, the author, along with Judas, introduces such heroes as Peter, John, Matthew and Thomas, each of them being a unique image-symbol. Each of the disciples emphasizes the most striking feature: Peter the Stone embodies physical strength, he is somewhat rude and “uncouth,” John is gentle and beautiful, Thomas is straightforward and limited. Judas competes with each of them in strength, devotion and love for Jesus. But the main quality of Judas, which is repeatedly emphasized in the work, is his mind, cunning and resourceful, capable of deceiving even himself. Everyone thinks Judas is smart.
The author repeatedly emphasizes the animal nature in Judas. Peter compares Judas to an octopus: “I once saw an octopus in Tire, caught by the fishermen there, and I was so afraid that I wanted to run away. And they laughed at me, a fisherman from Tiberias, and gave me something to eat, and I asked for more, because it was very tasty... Judas is like an octopus - only with one half.” The author draws a parallel between the Traitor and the mollusk, his dexterity and mobility. In addition, octopuses have a strange habit of eating themselves; they also have such a “means” for salvation from enemies as tearing off their own limbs. The author, calling Judas a clam, symbolically sets the theme of suicide, self-betrayal.
The disciples of Jesus compare Judas to a scorpion: “He constantly quarrels with us,” they said, spitting, “he thinks of something of his own and gets into the house quietly, like a scorpion, and comes out of it with noise.” “There is a legend that this animal being surrounded by a ring of burning coals, he inflicts a fatal blow on himself with a sting to avoid a painful death.” The comparison with a scorpion once again emphasizes the hero's tendency to self-destruction.
However, Judas also calls the rest of the disciples cowardly dogs who run away as soon as a person bends down to pick up a stone.
Judas and the rest of the disciples are united by another common feature - they are all, to varying degrees, characterized by the presence of a dark, unspiritual beginning, in contrast to Jesus. But only Judas does not hide his duality, his so-called “ugliness,” his dark sides. This makes him stand out from other students. Peter and John do not have their own opinion. They do what they are told. Everyone except Judas cares what they think of them.
However, with Andreev the opposite also occurs: if a person betrays another, he thereby betrays himself. Judas, having committed betrayal, accuses the other disciples of betrayal. He, the only one of the apostles, cannot come to terms with the death of his beloved teacher. Judas reproaches the disciples for the fact that they can eat and sleep, they can continue their old life without Him, without their Jesus.
Surprisingly, Judas himself betrayed so that everyone would know that Jesus was innocent. Why is he so persistently trying to slander his beloved Teacher? Judas does this deliberately: perhaps, deep down in his soul, he hopes for a miracle - the salvation of Jesus - he wants to be deceived. Or perhaps he betrays in order to open the eyes of the other disciples to himself and force them to change - after all, he persistently offers them ways to save Jesus.
The result was not what Iscariot wanted it to be. Jesus dies in public. Students, having renounced their teacher, become apostles and bring the light of new teaching throughout the world. Judas the traitor betrays and deceives, ultimately, himself.
Thus, the relationship between Judas and other disciples of Christ not only reveals many qualities of his personality, but also largely explains the reasons for his betrayal.
104673 Golubeva A
- educational: comprehending the idea of a work through revealing the images of the characters, their and the author’s worldview; observation of the language of a work of art as a means of characterizing the characters and realizing the writer’s plan; consolidation of the distinctive features of expressionism as a literary movement; improving skills in philological text analysis;
- developing: development of logical thinking (the ability to analyze actions, draw conclusions, explain, prove one’s point of view); development of monologue speech of students; development of students’ creative abilities for self-learning (group tasks of a creative nature);
- educational: developing a sense of responsibility, empathy and mutual assistance in group work; education of moral values and a critical attitude towards evil in working on the text; aesthetic perception of the lesson (board design).
Equipment: portrait of L. Andreev, written works of students, illustrations to the text of the work.
Lesson epigraph:
Go alone and heal the blind,
To find out in a difficult hour of doubt
Pupils' malicious mockery
And the indifference of the crowd.
A. Akhmatova. 1915
During the classes.
I. Announcing the topic of the lesson.
Exchange of impressions among students regarding the comparison of the Gospel text with the story of L. Andreev.
Students note differences in content:
common in the language of the works:
Statement of the educational task:
Why does the writer do this? What idea does he want to convey to us? We will try to answer these questions in our lesson.
II. Analysis of the story “Judas Iscariot”.
L. Andreev was not the first to address the topic of Judas’ betrayal. So, for example, there is Judas - the hero and great martyr of M. Voloshin, and in the “biography” of Judas, which appeared in the Middle Ages, he is “a complete villain in everything.” In the story by H.L. Borges’s “Three Versions of the Betrayal of Judas” proved, and quite ingeniously, that Judas is Jesus Christ. There are many other reconstructions of the image of Judas and the motives for his betrayal, but their number and diversity only confirms the fact that Judas has long ceased to be only a character in the Holy Scriptures, turning into an eternal image of world artistic culture. What kind of Judas does L. Andreev have? Let's turn to the story .
Acquaintance with Judas begins even before his appearance on the pages of the work.
- How and what do we learn about him?
We learn about Judas from stories about him among the people: he is “a man of very bad reputation,” “self-seeking,” “he steals skillfully,” therefore “one must beware of him.”
That is, the peaceful life of the city and the Christian community was disrupted by frightening rumors. So from the first lines in the work the motif of anxiety begins to sound.
- How does nature react to the appearance of Judas? Read out.
- What feelings does the description of nature evoke? (Anxiety again.) How does the author convey this feeling?(Lexical repetitions - “heavy”, “hard”; antithesis: white - red; alliteration: hissing, hardness [t]).
At this time, Judas appears: the end of the day - night, as if hiding from people. The timing of the hero’s appearance is also alarming.
- What does Judas look like? Read out.
- What can you tell about the hero from his physical description?
Contradictory appearance - contradictory behavior, two-faced. The hero's contradictions are presented through a poetic device - opposition, antithesis.
- What feeling does the description of appearance evoke?
- What is this artistic technique called by L. Andreev? (Expressive imagery.)
Judas has not yet committed anything, but the atmosphere of the story is increasingly tense.
- What is the name of the hero in the work? Who?
Students often call him Judas, and “ugly,” “punished dog,” “insect,” “monstrous fruit,” “stern jailer,” “old deceiver,” “gray stone,” “traitor” - this is what the author calls him. It is characteristic of L. Andreev that he often calls the hero not by name, but by metaphors, concepts that have a generalized meaning. Tell me why?(In the spirit of expressionism. This is how he expresses his feelings. What is the author's attitude towards Judas?(Negative.)
But we must not forget that the work is based on a biblical story. What does the name mean in the Bible? A talking biblical reference book will help us understand biblical concepts:
Student: In religion there is a cult of the name. There is even a religious direction - name-glorification, the name and essence of a person coincide. For example, Christ is both a name and a divine essence. Evil will never be in the name of something. That's why criminals usually have nicknames. A name is a value. Judas did not have a home, family, or children, because... “Judas is a bad person and God does not want offspring from Judas.” Often he is called offensively rather than by name.
- Why did Jesus bring such a terrible man closer to himself?
“The spirit of bright contradiction attracted him to the rejected and unloved.” Those. Jesus' actions are guided by love for people. ( A table is drawn up on the board ). How does Judas feel about Jesus?(Loves.) Why does Jesus' attitude towards him change? Read out. What event preceded this?(Judas was right when he said bad things about people. This was confirmed: a woman accused Jesus of stealing a kid, which she later found entangled in the bushes.)
- Does this fact mean that Judas understands people? What does he say about people? Read out.
We write it down in the table: he doesn’t like people, because... in them is the source of evil.
- What next event increased the rift between Judas and Jesus?
Saves Jesus' life.
- What does Judas expect for his action?
Praise, gratitude.
- What did you get?
Even greater anger of Jesus.
- Why?
- What is Christ's position?
- Tell the parable of the fig tree. Why does Jesus tell it to Judas?
The parable points to how God deals with sinners. He is not in a hurry to cut from the shoulder, but gives us a chance to improve, “desires the repentance of sinners.”
- But does Judas consider himself a sinner?
No. And he is not going to change his views. However, he understands that Jesus will never agree with him. It was then that Judas decided to take the last step: “And now he will perish, and Judas will perish with him.”
- What was he up to?
Betrayal.
- How does he behave after visiting Anna?
Ambiguous: he does not dissuade Jesus from traveling to Jerusalem and betrays him.
- How does he betray?
- Why does he kiss?
- Let us prove that his actions are motivated by love for Jesus.
He surrounded the teacher with tenderness and attention, warned of danger, brought 2 swords, and called on him to take care of Jesus.
- Why does Judas betray? Wants Jesus dead?
- What does he want?
Judas, like Raskolnikov, created a theory according to which all people are bad, and wants to test the theory in practice. He hopes to the last that people will intercede for Christ. ( Read the passages that confirm this.)
- How in this episode the author reveals the psychology of the hero
Repetition of events and lexical repetitions increase tension. The antithesis of Judas' expectations to what the people are doing is alarming. The painful feeling of anticipation is conveyed by ellipses. Again the duality of Judas: he expects the people to save Christ, and everything in him sings: “Hosanna!” - and rejoices when his theory is confirmed: “Hosanna!” Shouts of joy in exclamation marks, in the oxymoron “joyfully alone.”
- Judas proved the theory. Why did he hang himself?
I loved Christ and wanted to be with him.
- True love is sacrificial. What does Judas sacrifice?
Dooms himself to eternal shame.
- Why else did he hang himself?
I saw the inevitability of evil on earth, the lack of love, betrayal. (Reading the epigraph to the lesson.)
- What accusations does he throw at Anna and the students? Give examples.
- The psychologism of the last pages of the story reaches its highest intensity. How does the author convey this?
Judas's excitement is conveyed through punctuation (ellipses, exclamation marks, rhetorical questions); through actions - throwing pieces of silver into the faces of the high priest and judges; in antithesis: the excitement of Judas is contrasted with the indifference of Anna, the calmness of the disciples. Lexical repetitions make you indignant.
- How is Judas externally transformed?
“...his gaze was simple, and direct, and terrible in its naked truthfulness.” Duplicity disappears - there is nothing to hide. The author emphasizes his directness and truth with alliteration: [pr], [p].
- Do you agree with Jude's statements?
- Who is Judas: the winner or the vanquished?
He is the winner, because... his theory was confirmed. He is also defeated, because... his victory came at the cost of death.
- This is the contradiction of L. Andreev: evil is ugly, therefore his Judas is terrible, and the author is hostile to him, but agrees with his judgments.
The name Judas became a household name. Means “traitor”. The story ends with the word “traitor,” symbolizing the collapse of human relationships.
- Your attitude towards Judas.
There is something to respect for: he is smart, understands people, sincerely loves, is able to give his life. You feel sorry for him, but at the same time you despise him. He was two-faced, and feelings towards him were ambivalent.
- The image of Judas, created by L. Andreev, is the only one in world art with an equally unique extravagant interpretation of the plot. And very convincing. During his lifetime, L. Andreev called the Kingdom of Heaven “nonsense.” What do we learn about this in the book? Read it.
- The author boldly recasts two-thousand-year-old images to make the reader outraged by the revealed nonsense. The story reflected the contradictions of the era in which L. Andreev lived. He is concerned with eternal questions: what rules the world: good or evil, truth or lies, is it possible to live righteously in an unrighteous world. What do we think?
III. Students presenting their research work:
1. Rhythmic-intonation analysis of L. Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot”.
2. Space and time in the story.
3. The variety of colors and its meaning in the story.
During the presentations, the students compiled the following model of the presentation:
Rice. 2
4. Voicing the model of the work: reading the author’s poem written after reading the story “Judas Iscariot”:
Under the eternal sky - eternal earth
With good and evil, betrayal, sins.
People here are sinners. And their souls are in grief
Then in Hell they burn in impassive fire.
But still goodness, light, Paradise is strongest!
There the righteous sleep peacefully.
And everyone alive will forever remember that
Who was once betrayed and crucified.
Arefieva Diana.
IV. Homework: analysis of an excerpt from chapter 3 of the story.
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 Peter’s jokes, 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 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 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.
5 / 5. 3
“The psychology of betrayal” is the main theme of L. Andreev’s story “Judas Iscariot”. Images and motives of the New Testament, ideal and reality, hero and crowd, true and hypocritical love - these are the main motives of this story. Andreev uses the Gospel story about the betrayal of Jesus Christ by his disciple Judas Iscariot, interpreting it in his own way. If the focus of the Holy Scripture is the image of Christ, then Andreev turns his attention to the disciple who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver into the hands of the Jewish authorities and thereby became the culprit of the suffering on the cross and the death of his Teacher. The writer is trying to find a justification for the actions of Judas, to understand his psychology, the internal contradictions that prompted him to commit a moral crime, to prove that in the betrayal of Judas there is more nobility and love for Christ than in the faithful disciples.
According to Andreev, by betraying and taking on the name of the traitor, “Judas saves the cause of Christ. True love turns out to be betrayal; the love of the other apostles for Christ - through betrayal and lies.” After the execution of Christ, when “horror and dreams came true,” “he walks leisurely: now the whole earth belongs to him, and he steps firmly, like a ruler, like a king, like one who is infinitely and joyfully alone in this world.”
Judas appears in the work differently than in the gospel narrative - sincerely loving Christ and suffering from the fact that he does not find understanding of his feelings. The change in the traditional interpretation of the image of Judas in the story is complemented by new details: Judas was married, abandoned his wife, who wanders in search of food. The episode of the apostles' stone-throwing competition is fictional. Judas' opponents are other disciples of the Savior, especially the apostles John and Peter. The traitor sees how Christ shows great love towards them, which, according to Judas, who did not believe in their sincerity, is undeserved. In addition, Andreev portrays the apostles Peter, John, and Thomas as being in the grip of pride - they are worried about who will be first in the Kingdom of Heaven. Having committed his crime, Judas commits suicide, because he cannot bear his act and the execution of his beloved Teacher.
As the Church teaches, sincere repentance allows one to receive forgiveness of sin, but Iscariot’s suicide, which is the most terrible and unforgivable sin, forever closed the doors of heaven to him. In the image of Christ and Judas, Andreev confronts two life philosophies. Christ dies, and Judas seems to be able to triumph, but this victory turns into tragedy for him. Why? From Andreev’s point of view, the tragedy of Judas is that he understands life and human nature deeper than Jesus. Judas is in love with the idea of goodness, which he himself debunked. The act of betrayal is a sinister experiment, philosophical and psychological. By betraying Jesus, Judas hopes that in the suffering of Christ the ideas of goodness and love will be more clearly revealed to people. A. Blok wrote that in the story there is “the soul of the author, a living wound.”
