The novel consists of five parts – each one describes one of the plagues of the Lord that fell on the earth, as predicted by the prophet Ezekiel.
Part 1
Part one, “The Parable of the Lost Brother,” tells the story of famine, the second plague. The setting is famine-stricken Ukraine during collectivization in 1933. In a rural teahouse, Maria, a beggar girl, tries to beg something for Christ’s sake [~alms for the love of Allah] , but no one gives her anything, except for a Jewish boy who shares with her the unclean bread of exile [Ezekiel 4:12-13]. The villagers are outraged by the stranger’s action and the girl’s bread is taken away. The boy who gave his bread is Dan, the Asp, the Antichrist, brother of Christ the Messiah. Through the revelations of the prophets, he is in communication with the Lord, who has sent him to earth, to Russia, since this people belied the Lord, abandoned Him – and so replaced the wooden yoke with an iron one.
Then Maria and her younger brother Vasya return to their starving village. The mother decides to break the family up – to leave some of the children to strangers and to simply abandon the others; she herself leaves to work in another town. Before leaving, she takes Maria and Vasya to the city. The stranger again gives the hungry children bread, but their mother throws it away since it is alien and un-Orthodox. Later, in the city, the children will once again ask the Antichrist for alms, but this time they will be stopped by a policeman, since begging is prohibited.
Abandoned by their mother, the children end up in foster care. They are given a guide so that with his help they can return home. On the way, the guide rapes Maria and runs away. The children are put in the orphanage again. At night, a watchman tells them a story about “God’s child,” “Jesus Christ,” who was tortured by the Jews. Maria is taken somewhere out of town. She runs away. Finding herself alone in a snowy field, she wanders through it, crying with God’s cry, and her heart is filled with light. Maria then finds her older sister Ksenia and lives with her for about a year. One day she becomes an accidental witness to family problems (her sister cheats on her husband with her lover), and she is sent back to the village. No one is happy to see her there either; crying from injustice, Maria again wanders through the field; there she meets Dan, the Antichrist. When asked about the reason for her tears, the girl replies: “Because the Yids killed the Son of God and he is now in heaven, and Vasya, my brother, is on earth, in the city of Izyum.”
Thus the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled: “I was revealed to those who did not ask about Me; those who did not seek Me found Me.” [Isaiah 65:1]
Maria goes to Kerch, to her mother. After some time, the mother dies, Maria becomes a dockside prostitute. One day, hungry, she encounters Dan again, who gives her more of the unclean bread. Maria repays him with her body. The Antichrist goes further: for belying the Lord this land and people are destined for a second punishment – the sword. Maria, convicted of prostitution and vagrancy, gives birth in prison to a son, Vasya, by Dan. In 1936 she dies.
Part 2
The second part begins with a discussion about imitation of the Lord – instinctively or through reason. The author defends the idea that Jews are a people no better or worse than others; but they are marked out by their prophets who knew how to listen to the Lord.
The “Parable of the Torment of the Wicked” tells the story of Annushka. She lives in Rzhev with her mother and two brothers; one of the brothers perishes through her fault. One day, thieves steal from the room occupied by Annushka’s family and during the investigation she identifies an innocent man, who is sent to prison. The mother is given a new apartment.
One day Dan, the Antichrist, visits Annushka. Looking at the walls (Annushka lives in a former church building and the face of Christ appears on the wall from behind the wallpaper), he reflects on the fact that the Church Fathers replaced Christ with an idol, an emaciated Alexandrian monk [that is, Jesus was a corporeal male Jew and the Christians made him something different]; now, in the spring of 1941, this monk, in turn, has been replaced by the “Assyrian bathhouse attendant” – Stalin. Over the Rzhev barracks, the Antichrist has a vision of a sword – the words of the Lord come true: “Woe to the city of blood, and I will build a great fire.” [Ezekiel 24:9].
The war begins. Annushka’s mother is killed and she herself ends up in an orphanage. Annushka, who learned to have dealings with the Germans during the occupation, has come to hate the Jews. Shulamith, another girl in the orphanage, annoys her. Envious that during the evacuation the Jewish girl had a good foster mother, Annushka informs the Germans that Shulamith is non-Russian. They kill her and Annushka is sent to Germany to work.
Before her departure, Dan comes to the train and asks her to read aloud the text that he hands her once she gets to Germany. The Antichrist must curse the Germans, just as the Lord once cursed Babylon through Jeremiah. The prophet himself cannot enter unholy land.
One of the women taken into slavery along with Annushka asks Dan to take her child, Pelageya. The Germans try to kill Dan as being a Jew, but it is impossible to kill the Antichrist.
Annushka fulfils Dan’s instructions – the wicked Germany that hates God and His beloved people is cursed. Annushka herself soon dies of a fever.
Part 3
The action of “The Parable of Adultery”, which describes lust, the third plague, takes place in 1948. The Koposov family – Andrei, an ex-serviceman, his wife Vera and two daughters, Tasya and Ustya – live in the city of Bor on the Volga. A strange Jewish family lives nearby – Dan Yakovlevich and his daughter Rufina, who doesn’t look Jewish at all.
[She is Pelageya and she isn’t Jewish.]
Vera Koposova, whose relationship with her husband is very complicated (he believes that his wife cheated on him during the war), having met Dan, falls in love with him. (К) Realizing that she cannot directly seduce a Jew, she uses her daughter Tasya instead. Tasya also falls in love with Dan, and they begin meeting regularly. The father finds out about these meetings. Together with the informer Pavlov, he tries to kill the Antichrist, but this turns out to be impossible.
Vera tells Dan she will intercede if he sleeps with her. The Antichrist, who loves the daughter, is forced to commit adultery with her mother. Rufina has accidentally witnessed their meeting, while Tasya sees everything and tells her father about her mother’s sin. He first tries to kill his wife, then on the same day he dies of grief. Rufina, meanwhile, runs off into the woods; there she is almost raped by the lustful anti-Semite Pavlov; but she is saved by the appearance of of two bears [?2 Kings 23-25]. After her experience, Rufina realizes that she is a prophetess and makes peace with her father, who has been cleansed of his sin by a curse.
Part 4
Part four, the basis of which is “The Parable of the Sickness of the Spirit,” describes the persecution of the Jews [in the Soviet Union] in the early 1950s. The parable is preceded by an introduction – the author’s reflection on Russian anti-Semitism. For this spiritual illness, God sends the fourth plague – disease, pestilence.
Two children, Nina and Misha, from Vitebsk, come to Moscow to live with the the Ivolgin family, consisting of a Jewish art critic, his Russian wife Claudia and their son Savely. The children are Claudia’s nephews; their parents have been arrested on charges of Belarusian nationalism. But the Ivolgins, people who are afraid of everything, who hide their Jewishness in every possible way, refuse to shelter these children. The Ivolgin family is silently watched by two of their neighbors in their shared apartment – Jewish janitor Dan Yakovlevich and his daughter. At this time, mass denunciations of cosmopolitan Jews are taking place in the country [Jew ~ rootless cosmopolitan ~ traitor]. The cowardly Ivolgin, who is trying to protect himself from arrest by participating in the persecution of his own people, is soon also arrested. During the his first interrogation, the investigator kills him.
After 1953, the widowed Claudia has a new admirer – old Ilovaisky, a moderate anti-Semite. He has long discussions with Dan about Russian Christianity. As an example, an old man breaks a cup: intact, it is simple; broken, it becomes complex. Dan, the Antichrist, feels that it is impossible to overcome Ilovaisky in argument- Christianity has become too distorted in Greek and medieval interpretations. The word about which Ilovaisk and St John’s Gospel of John speak in fact only cheapens the meaning.
Part 5
The preface to the fifth part – “The Parable of the Broken Cup” – contains the author’s ideas about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
The protagonists of the fifth part are the children of the Antichrist by different mothers: Andrei Koposov, Vera’s son; Vasily Korobkov, Mary’s son; and Pelageya-Rufina, the prophetess, Dan’s adopted daughter. Vasily and Andrei together with Savely Ivolgin are studying at the Literary Institute. Andrei himself comes to the Bible, and realizes that its meaning is opposite to what Christians think. One day, the young people meet at a fashionable exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery; Pelageya recognises that the militant anti-Semite Vasily is her father’s son. He, cursing the Jews, creates a scandal. Convinced of his resemblance to his father, a Jew, Vasily hangs himself.
His mother, Vera Koposova, comes to see Andrei. She tells him that he is Dan’s son. Andrei, the “good seed,” meets his father; the assembled family quietly celebrates a Jewish religious holiday.
Half-mad from unslaked lust, Savely creates two “philosophical homunculi” in an alchemical flask. In conversations with them, he learns the answers to the most important questions – about the paths to God, about truth, good and evil, about the rational justification for faith in God. He finally descends into madness, and he is taken to a mental hospital.
Pelageya, who is a virgin, feels that the time has come to become a woman. Following the example of the daughters of Lot, she seduces her father, the Antichrist. He, feeling that the plan of the Lord is being accomplished, rapes her while drunk. So the prophetess Pelageya conceives a son by the Antichrist. Dan, who has done all that was destined for him on earth, dies. Before his death, he gives instructions to his son Andrei, who makes his way to God in the most difficult way – through reason and doubt.
The son of Pelageya and the Antichrist, also called Dan, listens to his mother reading from Deuteroisaiah, which contain ideas also expressed by Christ, but a long time before Him.
Andrei, Pelageya and her son Dan, together with Savely who has now recovered, go out of town, into the forest. Looking at the harsh winter landscape, they comprehend the essence of the antagonism of Christ and Antichrist: the first is the protector of sinners and persecutors, the second protects the victims of the persecuted [those to whom evil is done/do evil in return].
The requital for persecution is approaching; this fifth and most terrible plague is thirst for the word of the Lord, from which even Christ cannot save mankind.
Notes of an idealist 