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xiv blazing up in the bright flame that destroys the man and illuminates the mysteries of his spirit.

Human errors are not so characteristic of the art of the word and image; more characteristic is its longing to raise man above the external conditions of existence, to free him from the fetters of the degrading actuality, to show him to himself not as the slave, but as the lord of circumstance, the free creator of life, and in this sense literature is ever revolutionary.

By the mighty effort of genius rising about all circumstances of actuality, saturated with the spirit of humanity, kindling its hatred from the excess of passionate love, fine literature, prose and poetry, is our great vindication, and not our condemnation. It knows that there are no guilty—although everything is in man, everything is from man. The cruel contradictions of life that arouse the enmity and hatred of nations, classes, individuals, are to literature only an inveterate error, and she believes that the ennobled will of men can and must destroy all errors, all that which, arresting the free development of the spirit, delivers man into the power of animal instincts.

When you look closely into the mighty stream of creative energy embodied in the word and image, you feel and believe that the great purpose of this stream is to wash away for ever all the differences between races, nations, classes, and, by freeing men from the hard burden of the struggle with each other, to direct all their forces to the struggle with the mysterious forces of nature. And it seems that then the art of the word and image is and will be the religion of all mankind—a religion that absorbs everything that is written in the sacred writings of ancient India, in the Zend-Avesta, in the Gospels and Koran.

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