I'm strange, it's true, but I'm not crazy. The only difference between me and normal people is that I try not to go out of my mind. There's nothing good about it, though. I've so tenaciously resisted various forms of insanity that it's began to resemble persecution mania. You can't be against everyone at once: it was easy to be a dissident with respect to the Soviet regime when the whole world was behind you, yet being a dissident with respect to the whole world is a very foolish thing to do. I'm afraid that I've done precisely this. It's unlikely that the whole world is wrong and a single individual is right. The worst of it is that I've done it with your name on my lips. I've voiced thoughts that may come to be associated with your image. You may well become famous for having inspired a counter-revolutionary, or people may say that you made me go mad. If a liberal ever reads my letters, he'll most likely see you as a symbol of the opposition to progress and the resistance to civilisation; if a democrat reads them, he'll think that you've inspired me to make an apology of dictatorship; and if a politician reads them, he'll say that you've made me become an anarchist.

Yet this wouldn't be fair: I alone am responsible for my delusions.

Of course, you're to blame (and how!), yet for something completely different: not for my letters as such nor for the fact that I've written them or that they're addressed to you, but for the way you turned your head and for the light from the street lamp that fell on your face and for the fact that you've become an incarnation of all that is dear to me. Yet does incarnation have anything to do with consciousness? When the Hussar colonel wrote the word "Madam," did he mean anything other than "history," "faith" or "truth" ? words that in Russian are all feminine? Yet the fact that it is so doesn't change anything. These notions are indeed embodied in the word "Madam," and thus feeling ? at least for an instant ? becomes something larger than history, faith and truth. The question of whether one can be mistaken and whether such a generalisation can let one down is naive and out of place here. The answer is clear ahead of time. It's more important to ask something else: why must an abstraction be incarnated at all? Why does it need a body?

I don't know if you'll understand what I'm about to say, but these letters should have been sent not to you but to a different person, who's my constant interlocutor: my father. He's the one who taught me how to think, how to look at things without fear and how to express thoughts fully. There's nothing original in what I've written; at least, I don't deserve any of the credit. Everything that I've said repeats in one way or another the lessons that my father taught me about history, art, and so on. He (and not I) is the one you've got to thank for the coherence of my speech.

The only thing that I did was to incarnate an idea. This was my only goal. One may say that to incarnate ideas is a goal which befits a son. I don't mean the incarnation of thought in words or images but incarnation in the literal sense of the word, i.e., the inculcation of an idea in flesh, in a living human being. I didn't add anything of my own: my only function was to implement what had already existed as thought.

However, the idea that incarnation is not very important is false. The latter gives one the formidable right to appropriate an idea. The right of incarnation enabled the West to adopt Christianity from the East, just like it allowed communism to become a Russian phenomenon. No matter how ugly this incarnation may be, there's nothing one can do about it: life begins only when it's incarnated in an image.

I grew up in a house full of books, and I believed that the life of ideas that went on in books was the only reality and that everything else was ephemeral. I really believed this, yet something ? some trifle ? was lacking. I was told, for example, that Dante is the best poet or that Marx is a model and an ideal, and I shared these views, yet I hadn't seen Marx or Dante in person, and their ideas ? the ideas represented by people who died a long time ago ? suffered as a result. To put it differently, the ideas lacked something that would have made them stop being abstractions: they lacked a living image that would be the very idea, present in the flesh. Later, this became a morbid necessity of mine: I always wanted to see appeals and ideas incarnated in clear-cut facial features ? not in a blurred or generalised form but in as much detail as possible. I wanted to see a map of the path to follow. This is what I've always considered the role of the fine arts to be: to create an image.

I recently wrote to a German friend of mine (I don't mean to quote Camus) that the art of Christian countries came full circle: from the sign to the image and back to the sign. In other words, it went from pagan times to Christianity and back. This has a direct connection to incarnation. What I had in mind was simple: a sign, no matter how expressive or striking it is, can't incarnate anything, for it has no flesh. Anthropomorphism, too, isn't enough in itself: incarnation is something bigger than anthropomorphism. An image is not simply a body but a unique and inimitable body, a unique and transitory sheath for soul and passion. When it loses this type of anthropomorphism, art, by force of circumstance, becomes pagan. I don't know if my correspondent understood me: my arguments might have been too emotional and confused. In any case, he replied by asking me, with an exactitude that is typical of Europeans, to define what I mean by Christian and pagan art. I therefore must have not expressed myself very well. Yet I can say it more clearly.

The significance of the image of Christ is that it incarnated (in the literal sense of the word) an idea, i.e., an abstraction took form, found a body and, moreover, became vulnerable and got the opportunity to suffer and the privilege of feeling pain. When it manifested itself in a vulnerable mortal sheath, the abstraction ceased to be an abstraction.

This is precisely what I conceive the artistic image to be. It's a transfusion of feelings, ideas and passions into a concrete body and a concrete face which are living and whose life incarnates these ideas and passions. As the image is vulnerable, the sheath is unprotected and the person who incarnates the idea is mortal, the abstraction acquires strength and persuasiveness. This is how I understand the task of anthropomorphic art. I believe that the image of Christ is an example of the artistic image as such. One has to incarnate an idea in such a way that it becomes living and is able to suffer, i.e., become part of life.

What other purpose did Christian art have? Pagan art was so significant and beautiful that nothing else could have ever equalled it in grandeur, beauty and splendour. Christian art didn't even try. Its images are modest and vulnerable. In fact, they exist only to be vulnerable.

An image is vulnerable both with respect to the life for which it was created and the will which engendered it. How could have things been structured otherwise? I, too, inherited such thoughts and convictions, without any consent on my part, which make it difficult not to appear insane. In the same way, you shared my love and became involved in history ? a history that's perhaps absurd yet is nevertheless unique. This is why beauty exists: it is the tangible incarnation of passion, in the Christian sense of the word. Without asking for your assent, I endowed your image with all that I've learned from my father and from books and for the sake of which I've painted.

These are nothing but poor and empty words; I want to say something completely different. You and your brick-red sweater and skinny shoulders clarified certain things to me that had previously been obscure because they lacked a body. This is exactly what occurred. I used to be an assiduous and foolish student of abstractions, yet I lacked the opportunity to see these abstractions in a living image. It has so happened that your sheath has now become not only yours and not only you. In your countenance, in its concrete features, I desired to see the union of East and West and of heavenly and worldly love. In your face, I wanted to see Russia and its pitiful, haughty destiny. I'm only speaking about what I was able to see myself; I know all too well that I wasn't able to grasp the most important thing. Now everything depends on you: if you turn away, nothing will remain of these lofty words. And I won't ever find out whether the pain in my heart was history or just an ordinary pain. What do I care? What difference does it make? I've nowhere to go: there is no way ? neither to the West nor to the East ? that leads out of this wasteland.

What I'm afraid will happen is that love and history will pass by, and the image that was so distinctly and clearly traced in my mind will blur until it becomes nothing but a smudge or an incomprehensible sign, for everything blurs in this wasteland. It's my own fault (I know I'm the only one to blame) that what once dazzled and enticed grows dim and mute and leaves no recollection or hope behind. You'll leave the band of light, turn away and go off. Your face will disappear along with the map of this land. What map can there be of a wasteland? How can there be an atlas of this empty and useless bald patch? Then it will become clear that it was silly to expect anything in this land: everything happened in the only way it could. Incarnation is an impressive thing, it's true, yet there's something even more formidable than incarnation. I'm referring to disincarnation, which happens to us every minute. Our image becomes less distinct and recognisable: it loses its form and merges with the wasteland. When you go off and leave me (for I know that it'll happen someday and that I'll be unable to stop you), everything will collapse at once, and I'll understand how much I've lost.

You'll leave me like history abandons this foolish country of ours, like the West abandons the East and like hope abandons the frozen wasteland. You'll disappear just like an image disappears and turns into a sign, a point or a line on the horizon. I know that it will happen one day and that I will remain alone, covering my face with my hands.

Yet even when I'll shout from despair and when I'll be unable to bear it any longer, I'll still have many of those things that you've given to me. I'll have that vast world which you once incarnated for me. I'll have the cup of cold tea on the window-sill and the broken poplar tree beneath my window. I'll have the history which dissolved me completely. I'll have those whom I saw with your eyes and those who looked at me through your eyes. I can't separate your image from all those which have come to live in my consciousness for good, from all those which aren't you yet which have become inseparable from you. I can't separate this love from other affections that will rest for ever in our hearts; we'll never betray or reject a single one of them. You and I are composed of other people, just like our love is composed of the feelings of others, and every one of these people is you and me. Yes, this is the way that you appeared to me, and it was you ? unique and inimitable ? that I depicted, yet, believe me, your facial features will become so well defined in the course of time that the shape of your nose or the colour of your eyes will cease to matter entirely. Your features will become sharper than in everyday life and more clear-cut than ever. Then thousands of other faces will speak through your face, and your arms will open thousands of other affections.