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# In the Life of Andrew the Fool for Christ, known in Slavonic since the eleventh century
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-izvestnom-na-slavianskom-iazyke-s-xi-v/
- Published: 2023-04-04T15:31:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:36:49.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Books, Observations, Society

In the Life of Andrew the Fool for Christ, known in Slavonic since the 11th century and set in Byzantium in the 10th, we find these words: "In the last days the Lord God shall raise up a tsar from poverty.. he shall raise up the churches of the saints and rebuild the ruined altar, and there shall be no more litigation, neither wronger nor wronged.. let them cease from fornication, and his boyars who work iniquity he shall punish and deliver unto death..".

The prophecy chimes with the popular utopia of the tale of Uncle Filat, in which the peasants' happiness dawned and the peasants' kingdom was being born.

It turns out that the utopian vision of the world's destiny by no means abolishes the customary scheme of the world order: there is still a tsar, and the rich, and the poor, only everyone swaps places. The tsar comes from the paupers, the rich from the destitute, and the poor, naturally, from the rich. The idea of a new life is confined within the bounds of the old. Injustice is not removed, merely redirected, as though by way of retribution, the other way round. The tsar remains, and the other phenomena of an unjust existence with him. No new order is sought by anyone; people simply want a more comfortable, more honest position for themselves, whereas a new order would demand, first of all, a new consciousness, which alone can bring it forth.

The same was true of Olesha's "Three Fat Men", of the manifesto of Yemelyan Pugachev, and of the propaganda materials of Russian revolutionary Populism. And, it seems, of the Communists