The book itself is somewhat suggestive of the "little book" in Revelation.

"The Dove Book" falls from Alatyr, the "burning white stone on the Island of Buyan," the heathen Paradise, which corresponds to our Fortunate Isles of the Blest, in the Western Sea, but lies far towards sunrise, in the "Ocean Sea." The heathen significance of this stone is not known, but it is cleverly explained in "The Dove Book" as the stone whereon Christ stood when he preached to his disciples.

This "little book," "forty fathoms long and twenty wide," was written by St.John the Evangelist, and no man can read it.

The prophet Isaiah deciphered only three pages of it in as many years.

But the "Most Wise Tzar David" undertakes to give, from memory, the book's answers to various questions put to him by Tzar Vladimir, as spokesman of a throng of emperors and princes.