Читать книгу The Rise of Wisdom Moon - Krishna mishra - Страница 36

introduction

About Religion,” in mind.10 In sum, although Krishna· mishra’s contribution to Indian literature was not the invention of allegory as such, he may nonetheless be credited with introducing its employment in order to structure an entire literary work from beginning to end. That the tradition itself recognized this to be an original contribution may be gathered from the fact that several of the later Sanskrit allegories, and more than a dozen are known, explicitly refer back to “The Rise of Wisdom Moon,” often underscoring this fact by the use of clearly imitative titles (Krishnamachariar 1970 [1937]: 675–85).

Allegory, however, is an unfortunate genre. It suffers from the constraint of its major premise, for it must tell a story that is in fact a second story, a double task restricting the author’s free creation and often lending to allegorical works a rigid, contrived quality, as we know from European medieval mysteries like “Everyman,” or from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” That Krishna·mishra succeeded in his task better than most is demonstrated by his work’s enduring success. However, it is difficult in this case not to concur with the assessment of one of the path-breakers in the study of Sanskrit literary history, S.K. De:

With … abstract and essentially scholastic subject-matter, it is difficult to produce a drama of real interest. But it is astonishing that, apart from the handicaps inherent in the method and purpose, Krsnamisra succeeds, to a remarkable degree, in giving us an ingenious picture of the spiritual struggle of the human mind in the dramatic form of a vivid conflict, in which the erotic, comic and

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