title: Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations
author: Sergius Bulgakov
description: With its scholarly discussions of myth, German idealist philosophy, negative theology, and mysticism, shot through with reflections on personal religious experiences, <em>Unfading Light</em> documents what a life in Orthodoxy came to mean for Sergius Bulgakov on the tumultuous eve of the 1917 October Revolution. Written in the final decade of the Russian Silver Age, the book is a typical product of that era of experimentation in all fields of culture and life. Bulgakov referred to the book as miscellanies, a patchwork of chapters articulating in symphonic form the ideas and personal experiences that he and his entire generation struggled to comprehend. Readers may be reminded of St. Augustine's <em>Confessions</em> and <em>City of God</em> as they follow Bulgakov through the challenges and opportunities presented to Orthodoxy by modernity.
zlib_text: Chapter I 
   
  It was a little before eight o'clock in the morning when Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin, a titular councillor, woke up from a long sleep. 
  He yawned, stretched, and at last opened his eyes completely. For two minutes, however, he lay in his bed without moving, as 
  though he were not yet quite certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real 
  and actual, or the continuation of his confused dreams. Very soon, however, Mr. Golyadkin's senses began more clearly and more 
  distinctly to receive their habitual and everyday impressions. The dirty green, smoke-begrimed, dusty walls of his little room, with 
  the mahogany chest of drawers and chairs, the table painted red, the sofa covered with American leather of a reddish colour with 
  little green flowers on it, and the clothes taken off in haste overnight and flung in a crumpled heap on the sofa, looked at him 
  familiarly. At last the damp autumn day, muggy and dirty, peeped into the ro