A.S. Pushkin, the great Russian poet, once wrote, 'I think we shall never give the people anything better than the Scriptures ... Religion has created all the great works of art and literature from very ancient times ... Without it, there would have been no philosophy, nor poetry, nor ethics ... The Bible is universal... It is unique in the world. There is everything in it.' The truth behind Pushkin's statement seemed self-evident for many centuries. It is only in our age, both in Russia and in the West (though perhaps for different reasons), that religious aspects of literature have very often been neglected by scholars and critics, or at least have been treated as something ornamental and so not important for the proper understanding of literary works. This book is an attempt to establish justice, and to look at the complex relationship between literature and religion, from the perspective of our own time.