Writing in the American periodical Forum in 1925, the French
literary critic Jules Bois remembered the extraordinary impact which the story
of the Bab continued to have on educated opinion in Europe as the nineteenth
century closed:
All Europe was stirred to pity and indignation .... Among
the litterateurs of my generation, in the Paris of 1890, the martyrdom of the
Báb was still as fresh a topic as had been the first news of His death [in
1850]. We wrote poems about Him. Sarah Bernhardt entreated Catulle Mendes for a
play on the theme of this historic tragedy. (Shoghi Effendi, ‘God Passes By’,
and ‘The Baha'i World, vol. 9, 1940-1944’)
Writers as-diverse as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Edward
Granville Browne, Ernest Renan, Aleksandr Tumanskiy, A.L.M. Nicolas, Viktor
Rosen, Clement Huart, George Curzon, Matthew Arnold, and Leo Tolstoy were
affected by the spiritual drama that had unfolded in Persia during the middle
years of the nineteenth century. (Douglas Martin, ‘The Mission of the Bab:
Retrospective, 1944-1994’, The Baha’i World, 1994-1995)
A Russian poetess, member of the Philosophic, Oriental and
Bibliological Societies of St. Petersburg, published in 1903 a drama entitled
"The Báb," which a year later was played in one of the principal theatres
of that city, was subsequently given publicity in London, was translated into
French in Paris, and into German by the poet Fiedler, was presented again, soon
after the Russian Revolution, in the Folk Theatre in Leningrad, and succeeded
in arousing the genuine sympathy and interest of the renowned Tolstoy, whose
eulogy of the poem was later published in the Russian press. (Shoghi Effendi,
‘God Passes By’)
