Free Russia
by William Hepworth Dixon · English · Gutenberg #51117 · 805,562 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Free Russia
Author: William Hepworth Dixon
Release date: February 3, 2016 [eBook #51117]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREE RUSSIA ***
Transcriber's Note.
Apparent typographical errors have been corrected. The inconsistent
use of hyphens has been retained.
Italics are indicated by _underscores_. Small capitals have been
replaced by full capitals.
[Illustration: CONVENT OF SOLOVETSK IN THE FROZEN SEA.]
[Illustration: RUSSIAN INFANTRY ON EASTERN STEPPE ESCORTED BY KOZAKS
AND KIRGHIZ.]
FREE RUSSIA.
BY
WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON.
AUTHOR OF
"FREE AMERICA." "HER MAJESTY'S TOWER." &c.
[Illustration]
_NEW YORK_:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1870.
PREFACE.
_Svobodnaya_ Rossia--_Free_ Russia--is a word on every lip in that
great country; at once the Name and Hope of the new empire born of the
Crimean war. In past times Russia was free, even as Germany and France
were free. She fell before Asiatic hordes; and the Tartar system
lasted, in spirit, if not in form, until the war; but since that
conflict ended, the old Russia has been born again. This new
country--hoping to be pacific, meaning to be Free--is what I have
tried to paint.
My journeys, just completed, carried me from the Polar Sea to the Ural
Mountains, from the mouth of the Vistula to the Straits of Yeni Kale,
including visits to the four holy shrines of Solovetsk, Pechersk, St.
George, and Troitsa. My object being to paint the Living People, I
have much to say about pilgrims, monks, and parish priests; about
village justice, and patriarchal life; about beggars, tramps, and
sectaries; about Kozaks, Kalmuks, and Kirghiz; about workmen's artels,
burgher rights, and the division of land; about students' revolts and
soldiers' grievances; in short, about the Human Forces which underlie
and shape the external politics of our time.
Two journeys made in previous years have helped me to judge the
reforms which are opening out the Japan-like empire of Nicolas into
the Free Russia of the reigning prince.
_February, 1870._
_6 St. James's Terrace._
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.--UP NORTH 11
II.--THE FROZEN SEA 16
III.--THE DVINA 20
IV.--ARCHANGEL 24
V.--RELIGIOUS LIFE 29
VI.--PILGRIMS 34
VII.--FATHER JOHN 40
VIII.--THE VLADIKA 46
IX.--A PILGRIM-BOAT 51
X.--THE HOLY ISLES 57
XI.--THE LOCAL SAINTS 62
XII.--A MONASTIC HOUSEHOLD 68
XIII.--A PILGRIM'S DAY 73
XIV.--PRAYER AND LABOR 78
XV.--BLACK CLERGY 84
XVI.--SACRIFICE 91
XVII.--MIRACLES 96
XVIII.--THE GREAT MIRACLE 103
XIX.--A CONVENT SPECTRE 110
XX.--STORY OF A GRAND DUKE 114
XXI.--DUNGEONS 118
XXII.--NICOLAS ILYIN 124
XXIII.--ADRIAN PUSHKIN 130
XXIV.--DISSENT 135
XXV.--NEW SECTS 142
XXVI.--MORE NEW SECTS 146
XXVII.--THE POPULAR CHURCH 151
XXVIII.--OLD BELIEVERS 158
XXIX.--A FAMILY OF OLD BELIEVERS 161
XXX.--CEMETERY OF THE TRANSFIGURATION 167
XXXI.--RAGOSKI 173
XXXII.--DISSENTING POLITICS 179
XXXIII.--CONCILIATION 183
XXXIV.--ROADS 187
XXXV.--A PEASANT POET 192
XXXVI.--FOREST SCENES 197
XXXVII.--PATRIARCHAL LIFE 202
XXXVIII.--VILLAGE REPUBLICS 208
XXXIX.--COMMUNISM 213
XL.--TOWNS 218
XLI.--KIEF 222
XLII.--PANSLAVONIA 225
XLIII.--EXILE 229
XLIV.--THE SIBERIANS 235
XLV.--ST. GEORGE 241
XLVI.--NOVGOROD THE GREAT 246
XLVII.--SERFAGE 250
XLVIII.--A TARTAR COURT 254
XLIX.--ST. PHILIP 257
L.--SERFS 262
LI.--EMANCIPATION 267
LII.--FREEDOM 272
LIII.--TSEK AND ARTEL 278
LIV.--MASTERS AND MEN 284
LV.--THE BIBLE 289
LVI.--PARISH PRIESTS 294
LVII.--A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION 299
LVIII.--SECRET POLICE 306
LIX.--PROVINCIAL RULERS 312
LX.--OPEN COURTS 318
LXI.--ISLAM 324
LXII.--THE VOLGA 330
LXIII.--EASTERN STEPPE 336
LXIV.--DON KOZAKS 341
LXV.--UNDER ARMS 346
LXVI.--ALEXANDER 351
FREE RUSSIA.
CHAPTER I.
UP NORTH.
"White Sea!" laughs the Danish skipper, curling his thin red lip; "it
is the color of English stout. The bed may be white, being bleached
with the bones of wrecked and sunken men; but the waves are never
white, except when they are ribbed into ice and furred with snow. A
better name is that which the sailors and seal-fishers give it--the
Frozen Sea!"
Rounding the North Cape, a weird and hoary mass of rock, projecting
far into the Arctic foam, we drive in a south-east course, lashed by
the wind and beaten by hail and rain, for two long days, during which
the sun never sets and never rises, and in which, if there is dawn at
the hour of midnight, there is also dusk at the time of noon.
Leaving the picturesque lines of fiord and alp behind, we run along a
dim, unbroken coast, not often to be seen through the pall of mist,
until, at the end of some fifty hours, we feel, as it were, the land
in our front; a stretch of low-lying shore in the vague and far-off
distance, trending away towards the south, like the trail of an
evening cloud. We bend in a southern course, between Holy Point
(Sviatoi Noss, called on our charts, in rough salt slang, Sweet Nose)
and Kanin Cape, towards the Corridor; a strait some thirty miles wide,
leading down from the Polar Ocean into that vast irregular dent in the
northern shore of Great Russia known as the Frozen Sea.
The land now lying on our right, as we run through the Corridor, is
that of the Lapps; a country of barren downs and deep black lakes;
over which a few trappers and fishermen roam; subjects of the Tsar and
followers of the Orthodox rite; but speaking a language of their own,
not understood in the Winter Palace, and following a custom of their
fathers, not yet recognized in St. Isaac's Church. Lapland is a tangle
of rocks and pools; the rocks very big and broken, the pools very deep
and black; with here and there a valley winding through them, on the
slopes of which grows a little reindeer moss. Now and then you come
upon a patch of birch and pine. No grain will grow in these Arctic
zones, and the food of the natives is game and fish. Rye-bread, their
only luxury, must be fetched in boats from the towns of Onega and
Archangel, standing on the shores of the Frozen Sea, and fed from the
warmer provinces in the south. These Lapps are still nomadic; cowering
through the winter months in shanties; sprawling through the summer
months in tents. Their shanty is a log pyramid thatched with moss to
keep out wind and sleet; their tent is of the Comanche type; a roll of
reindeer skins drawn slackly round a pole, and opened at the top to
let out smoke.
A Lapp removes his dwelling from place to place, as the seasons come
and go; now herding game on the hill-sides, now whipping the rivers
and creeks for fish; in the warm months, roving inland in search of
moss and grass; in the frozen months, drawing nearer to the shore in
search of seal and cod. The men are equally expert with the bow, their
ancient weapon of defense, and with the birding-piece, the arm of
settlers in their midst. The women, looking any thing but lovely in
their seal-skin tights and reindeer smocks, are infamous for magic and
second sight. In every district of the North, a female Lapp is feared
as a witch--an enchantress--who keeps a devil at her side, bound by
the powers of darkness to obey her will. She can see into the coming
day. She can bring a man ill-luck. She can throw herself out into
space, and work upon ships that are sailing past her on the sea. Far
out in the Polar brine, in waters where her countrymen fish for cod,
stands a lump of rock, which the crews regard as a Woman and her
Child. Such fantasies are common in these Arctic seas, where the waves
wash in and out through the cliffs, and rend and carve them into
wondrous shapes. A rock on the North Cape is called the Friar; a group
of islets near that cape is known as the Mother and her Daughters.
Seen through the veil of Polar mist, a block of stone may take a
mysterious form; and that lump of rock in the Polar waste, which the
cod-fishers say is like a woman with her child, has long been known to
them as the Golden Hag. She is rarely seen; for the clouds in summer,
and the snows in winter, hide her charms from the fishermen's eyes;
but when she deigns to show her face in the clear bright sun, her
children hail her with a song of joy, for on seeing her face they know
that their voyage will be blessed by a plentiful harvest of skins and
fish.
Woe to the mariner tossed upon their coast!
The land on our left is the Kanin peninsula; part of that region of
heath and sand over which the Samoyed roams; a desert of ice and snow,
still wilder than the countries hunted by the Lapp. A land without a
village, without a road, without a field, without a name; for the
Russians who own it have no name for it save that of the Samoyeds'
Land; this province of the great empire trends away north and east
from the walls of Archangel and the waters of Kanin Cape to the
summits of the Ural chain and the Iron Gates of the Kara Sea. In her
clefts and ridges snow never melts; and her shore-lines, stretching
towards the sunrise upwards of two thousand miles, are bound in icy
chains for eight months in the twelve. In June, when the winter goes
away, suddenly the slopes of a few favored valleys grow green with
reindeer moss; slight specks of verdure in a landscape which is even
then dark with rock and gray with rime. On this green moss the
reindeer feed, and on these camels of the Polar zone the wild men of
the country live.
Samoyed means cannibal--man-eater; but whether the men who roam over
these sands and bogs deserve their evil fame is one of the questions
open to new lights. They use no fire in cooking food; and perhaps it
is because they eat the reindeer raw that they have come to be accused
of fondness for human flesh. In chasing the game on which they feed,
the Samoyeds crept over the Ural Mountains from their far-off home in
the north of Asia, running it down in a tract too cold and bare for
any other race of men to dwell on. Here the Zarayny found them,
thrashed them, set them to work.
These Zarayny, a clever and hardy people, seem connected in type and
speech with the Finns; and they are thought to be the remnant of an
ancient colony of trappers. Fairer than the Samoyeds, they live in log
huts like other Russians, and are rich in herds of reindeer, which
they compel the Samoyeds to tend like slaves. This service to the
higher race is slowly changing the savage Samoyed into a civilized
man; since it gives him a sense of property and a respect for life. A
red man kills the beast he hunts; kills it beyond his need, in the
animal wantonness of strength. A Samoyed would do the same; but the
Zarayny have taught him to rear and tend, as well as to hunt and
snare, his food. A savage, only one degree above the Pawnee and the
Ute, a Samoyed builds no shed; plants no field; and owns no property
in the soil. He dwells, like the Lapp, in a tent--a roll of skins,
sewn on to each other with gut, and twisted round a shaft, left open
at the top, and furnished with skins to lie on like an Indian lodge.
No art is lavished on this roll of skin; not so much as the totem
which a Cheyenne daubs on his prairie tent. Yet the Samoyed has
notions of village life, and even of government. A collection of tents
he calls a Choom; his choom is ruled by a medicine-man; the official
name of whom in Russian society is a pope.
The reigning Emperor has sent some priests to live among these tribes,
just as in olden times Marfa of Novgorod sent her popes and monks into
Lapland and Karelia; hoping to divert the natives from their Pagan
habits and bring them over to the church of Christ. Some good, it may
be hoped, is done by these Christian priests; but a Russ who knows the
country and the people smiles when you ask him about their doings in
the Gulf of Obi and around the Kara Sea. One of these missionaries
whom I chanced to meet had pretty well ceased to be a civilized man.
In name, he was a pope; but he lived and dressed like a medicine-man;
and he was growing into the likeness of a Mongol in look and gait.
Folk said he had taken to his bosom a native witch.
Through the gateway held by these tribes we enter into Russia--Great
Russia; that country of the old Russians, whose plains and forests the
Tartar horsemen never swept.
Why enter Russia by these northern gates? If the Great Mogul had
conquered England in the seventeenth century; if Asiatic manners had
been paramount in London for two hundred years; if Britain had
recovered her ancient freedom and civil life, where would a foreign
observer, anxious to see the English as they are, begin his studies?
Would he not begin them in Massachusetts rather than in Middlesex,
even though he should have to complete his observations on the Mersey
and the Thames?
A student of the Free Russia born of the Crimean War, must open his
work of observation in the northern zones; since it is only within
this region of lake and forest that he can find a Slavonic race which
has never been tainted by foreign influence, never been broken by
foreign yoke. The zone from Onega to Perm--a country seven times
larger than France--was colonized from Novgorod the Great, while
Novgorod was yet a free city, rich in trade, in piety, in art; a rival
of Frankfort and Florence; and, like London and Bruges, a station of
the Hanseatic League. Her colonies kept the charter of their freedom
safe. They never bent to the Tartar yoke, nor learned to walk in the
German ways. They knew no masters, and they held no serfs. "We never
had amongst us," said to me an Archangel farmer, "either a noble or a
slave." They clung, for good and evil, to their ancient life; and when
the Patriarch Nikon reformed the Church in a Byzantine sense (1667),
as the Tsar Godunof had transformed the village in a Tartar sense
(1601), they disowned their patriarch just as they had denied their
Tsar. In spite of every force that could be brought against them by a
line of autocrats, these free colonists have not been driven into
accepting the reformed official liturgies in preference to their
ancient rites. They kept their native speech, when it was ceasing to
be spoken in the capital; and when the time was ripe, they sent out
into the world a boy of genius, peasant-born and reared (the poet,
Michael Lomonosof), to impose that popular language on the college, on
the senate, on the court.
CHAPTER II.
THE FROZEN SEA
At Cape Intsi we pass from the narrow straits dividing the Lapp
country from the Samoyed country into this northern gulf.
About twice the size of Lake Superior in the United States, this
Frozen Sea has something of the shape of Como; one narrow northern
bay, extending to the town of Kandalax, in Russian Lapland; and two
southern bays, divided from each other by a broad sandy peninsula, the
home of a few villagers employed in snaring cod and hunting seal.
These southern bays are known, from the rivers which fall into them,
as Onega Bay and Dvina Bay. At the mouths of these rivers stand the
two trading ports of Onega and Archangel.
The open part of this inland gulf is deep--from sixty to eighty
fathoms; and in one place, off the entrance into Kandalax Bay, the
line goes down no less than a hundred and sixty fathoms. Yet the shore
is neither steep nor high. The gulf of Onega is rich in rocks and
islets; many of them only banks of sand and mud, washed out into the
sea from the uplands of Kargopol; but in the wide entrance of Onega
Bay, between Orlof Point and the town of Kem, stands out a notable
group of islets--Solovetsk, Anzersk, Moksalma, Zaet and others; islets
which play a singular part in the history of Russia, and connect
themselves with curious legends of the Imperial court.
In Solovetsk, the largest of this group of islets, stands the famous
convent of that name; the house of Saints Savatie and Zosima; the
refuge of St. Philip; the shrine to which emperors and peasants go on
pilgrimage; the haunt of that Convent Spectre which one hears
described in the cod-fisher's boat and in the Kozak's tent; the scene
of many great events, and of one event which Russians have agreed to
sing and paint as the most splendid miracle of these latter days.
Off the Dvina bar stands the new tower and lighthouse, where the
pilots live; a shaft some eighty feet high, not often to be seen above
the hanging drapery of fog. A pilot comes on board; a man of soft and
patient face, with gray-blue eyes, and flow of brownish hair, who
tells us in a bated tone--as though he feared we might be vexed with
him and beat him--that the tide is ebbing on the bar, and we shall
have to wait for the flow. "Wait for the tide!" snaps our Danish jarl;
"stand by, we'll make our course." The sun has just peeped out from
behind his veil; but the clouds droop low and dark, and every one
feels that a gale is coming on. Two barks near the bar--the "Thera"
and the "Olga"--bob and reel like tipsy men; yet our pale Russ pilot,
urged by the stronger will, gives way with a smile; and our speed
being lowered by half, we push on slowly towards the line of red and
black signals floating in our front.
The "Thera" and the "Olga" are soon behind us, shivering in all their
sheets, like men in the clutch of ague--left in our wake to a swift
and terrible doom. In half an hour we pass the line of buoys, and gain
the outer port.
Like all great rivers, the Dvina has thrown up a delta of isles and
islets near her mouth, through which she pours her flood into the sea
by a dozen arms. None of these dozen arms can now be laid down as her
main entrance; for the river is more capricious than the sea; so that
a skipper who leaves her by one outlet in August, may have to enter by
another when he comes back to her in June. The main passage in the old
charts flowed past the Convent of St. Nicolas; then came the turn of
Rose Island; afterwards the course ran past the guns of Fort Dvina:
but the storms which swept the Polar seas two summers since, destroyed
that passage as an outlet for the larger kinds of craft. The port
police looked on in silence. What were they to do? Archangel was cut
off from the sea, until a Danish blacksmith, who had set up forge and
hammer in the new port, proposed that the foreign traders should hire
a steamer and find a deliverance for their ships. "If the water goes
down," he said, "it must have made a way for itself. Let us try to
find it out." A hundred pounds were lodged in the bank, a steamer was
hired, and a channel, called the Maimax arm, was found to be deep
enough for ships to pass. The work was done, the city opened to the
sea; but then came the question of port authorities and their rules.
No bark had ever left the city by this Maimax arm; no rules had been
made for such a course of trade; and the port police could not permit
a ship to sail unless her papers were drawn up in the usual forms. In
vain the merchants told them the case was new, and must be governed by
a rule to match. They might as well have reasoned with a Turkish bey.
Here rode a fleet of vessels, laden with oats and deals for the Elbe,
the Maas, and the Thames; there ran the abundant Maimax waters to the
sea; but the printed rules of the port, unconscious of the freaks of
nature and of the needs of man, forbade this fleet to sail.
Appeal was made to Prince Gagarine, governor of Archangel: but
Gagarine, though he laughed at these port rules and their forms, had
no deals and grain of his own on board the ships. Gospodin Sredine, a
keen-witted master of the customs, tried to open the ports and free
the ships by offering to put officers on the new channel; but the
police were--the police. In vain they heard that the goods might
spoil, that the money they cost was idle, and that every ruble wasted
would be so much loss to their town.
To my question, "How was it arranged at last?" a skipper, who was one
of the prisoners in the port, replies, "I will tell you in a word. We
sent to Petersburg; the minister spoke to the Emperor; and here is
what we have heard they said. 'What's all this row in Archangel
about?' asks the Emperor. 'It is all about a new mouth being found in
the Dvina, sir, and ships that want to sail down it, sir, because the
old channel is now shoaled up, sir.' 'In God's name,' replied the
Emperor, 'let the ships go out by any channel they can find.'"
Whether the thing was done in this sailor-like way, or by the more
likely method of official report and order, the Maimax mouth was
opened to the world in spite of the port police and their printed
rules.
A Hebrew of the olden time would have called this sea a whited
sepulchre. Even men of science, to whom wintry storms may be summed up
in a line of figures--so many ships in the pack, so many corpses on
the beach--can find in the records of this frozen deep some show of an
excuse for that old Lapland superstition of the Golden Hag. The year
before last was a tragic time, and the memory of one dark day of wrack
and death has not yet had time to fade away.
At the end of June, a message, flashed from the English consul at
Archangel--a man to represent his country on these shores--alarmed our
board of trade by such a cry for help as rarely reaches a public
board. A hundred ships were perishing in the ice. These ships were
Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and English; luggers, sloops, corvettes, and
smacks; all built of wood, and many of them English manned. Could any
thing be done to help them? "Help is coming," flashed the wires from
Charing Cross; and on the first day of July, two steamers left the
Thames to assist in rescuing those ships and men from the Polar ice.
On the fifteenth night from home these English boats were off Cape
Gorodetsk on the Lapland coast, and when morning dawned they were
striving to cross the shallow Archangel bar. They could not pass; yet
the work of humanity was swiftly and safely done by the English crews.
That fleet of all nations, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, left
the Dvina ports on news coming up the delta that the pack was breaking
up in the gulf; but on reaching that Corridor through which we have
just now come, they met the ice swaying to and fro, and crashing from
point to point, as the changing wind veered round from north to south.
By careful steering they went on, until they reached the straits
between Kanin Cape and Holy Point. The ice in their front was now
thick and high; no passage through it could be forced; and their
vessels reeled and groaned under the blows which they suffered from
the floating drifts. A brisk north wind arose, and blowing three days
on without a pause, drove blocks and bergs of ice from the Polar Ocean
down into the gut, forcing the squadrons to fall back, and closing up
every means of escape into the open sea. The ships rolled to and fro,
the helmsmen trying to steer them in mid-channel, but the currents
were now too strong to stem, and the helpless craft were driven upon
the Lapland reefs, where the crews soon saw themselves folded and
imprisoned in the pack of ice.
Like shots from a fort, the crews on board the stronger ships could
hear in the grim waste around them hull after hull crashing up, in
that fierce embrace, like fine glass trinkets in a strong man's hand.
When a ship broke up and sank, the crew leaped out upon the ice and
made for the nearest craft, from which in a few hours more they might
have to fly in turn. One man was wrecked five times in a single day;
each of the boats to which he clung for safety parting beneath his
feet and gurgling down into the frozen deep.
When the tale of loss was made up by the relieving steamers, this
account was sent home to the Board of Trade:
The number of ships abandoned by their crews was sixty-four; of this
great fleet of ships, fourteen were saved and fifty lost. Of the fifty
ships lost in those midsummer days, eighteen were English built and
manned; and the master mentions with a noble pride, that only one ship
flying the English flag was in a state to be recovered from the ice
after being abandoned by her crew.
It would be well for our fame if the natives had no other tales to
tell of an English squadron in the Frozen Sea.
CHAPTER III.
THE DVINA.
By the Maimax arm we steam through the delta for some twenty miles;
past low, green banks and isles like those in the Missouri bed; though
the loam in the Dvina is not so rich and black as that on the American
stream. Yet these small isles are bright with grass and scrub. Beyond
them, on the main-land, lies a fringe of pines, going back into space
as far as the eye can pierce.
The low island lying on your right as you scrape the bar is called St.
Nicolas, after that sturdy priest, who is said to have smitten the
heretic Arius on his cheek. No one knows where this Nicolas lived and
died; for it is clear from the Acta, that he had no part in the
Council of Nice. The Book of Saints describes him as born in Liki and
living in Mira; whence they call him the Saint of Mirliki; but not a
line of his writing is extant, and the virtues assigned to him are of
opposing kinds. He is a patron of nobles and of children, of sailors,
of cadgers, and of pilgrims. Yet, in spite of his doubtful birth and
genius, Nicolas is a popular saint. Poor people like him as one who is
good to the poor; a friend of beggars, fishermen and tramps. A Russian
turns to him as the hope of starving and drowning men; so that his
name is often heard, his image often seen, in these northern wilds;
more than all else, on the banks of rivers and on the margins of the
Frozen Sea. A peasant learns with delight from his Book of Saints (his
Bible, Epos, Drama, Code, and History all in one) that Nicolas is the
most potent saint in heaven; sitting on the right hand of God; and
having a cohort of three hundred angels, armed and ready to obey his
nod. A mujik asked a foreign friend to tell him who will be God when
God dies? "My good fellow," said he, smiling, "God will never die." At
first the peasant seemed perplexed. "Never die!" and then a light fell
on him. "Yes," he retorted, slowly; "I see it now. You are an
unbeliever; you have no religion. Look you; I have been better taught.
God will one day die; for He is very old; and then St. Nicolas will
get his place."
Though he is common to all Russians--adored on the Dnieper, on the
Volkhof, on the Moskva, no less than on the Dvina--he is worshipped
with peculiar zeal in these northern zones. Here he is the sailor's
saint, the adventurer's help; and all the paintings of him show that
his watchful eyes are bent in eager tenderness upon the swirl and
passion of the Frozen Sea. This delta might be called his province;
for not only was the island on your right called after him, but also
the ancient channel, and the bay itself. The oldest cloister in the
district bears his name.
On passing into the Maimax arm, your eyes--long dimmed by the sight of
sombre rock, dark cloud, and sullen surf--are charmed by soft, green
grass and scrub; but the sight goes vainly out, through reeds and
copse, in search of some cheery note of house and farm. One log hut
you pass, and only one. Two men are standing near a bank, in a little
clearing of the wood; a lad is idling in a frail canoe, which the wash
of your steamer lifts and laves; but no one lodges in the shed; the
men and boy have come from a village some miles away. Dropping down
the river in their boat to cut down grass for their cows, and gather
up fuel for their winter fires, they will jump into their canoe at
vespers, and hie them home.
On the banks of older channels the villages are thick; slight groups
of sheds and churches, with a cloister here and there, and a scatter
of windmills whirling against the sky; each village and mill in its
appointed place, without the freak and medley of original thought.
Here nothing is done by individual force; a pope, an elder, an
imperial officer, must have his say in every case; and not a mouse can
stir in a Russian town, except by leave of some article in a printed
code. Fort Dvina was erected on a certain neck of land in the ancient
river-bed, and nature was expected to conform herself forever to the
order fixed by imperial rule.
On all these banks you note a forest of memorial crosses. When a
sailor meets with bad weather, he goes on shore and sets up a cross.
At the foot of this symbol he kneels in prayer, and when a fair wind
rises, he leaves his offering on the lonely coast. When the peril is
sharp, the whole ship's crew will land, cut down and carve tall trees,
and set up a memorial with names and dates. All round the margins of
the Frozen Sea these pious witnesses abound; and they are most of all
numerous on the rocks and banks of the Holy Isles. Each cross erected
is the record of a storm.
Some of these memorial crosses are historic marks. One tree, set up by
Peter the Great when he escaped from the wreck of his ship in the
frozen deep, has been taken from the spot where he planted it, and
placed in the cathedral at Archangel. "This cross was made by Captain
Peter," says a tablet cut in the log by the Emperor's own knife; and
Peter being a carver in wood and stone, the work is not without
touches of art and grace. Might not a word be urged in favor of this
custom of the sea, which leaves a picture and a blessing on every
shore? An English mariner is apt to quit a coast on which he has been
kept a prisoner by adverse winds with a curse in his heart and a bad
name on his tongue. Jack is a very grand fellow in his way; but surely
there is a beauty, not less winning than the piety, in this habit of
the Russian tar.
Climbing up the river, you come upon fleets of rafts and praams, on
which you may observe some part of the native life. The rafts are
floats of timber--pine logs, lashed together with twigs of willow,
capped with a tent of planks, in which the owner sleeps, while his
woodmen lie about in the open air when they are not paddling the raft
and guiding it down the stream. These rafts come down the Dvina and
its feeders for a thousand miles. Cut in the great forests of Vologda
and Nijni Konets, the pines are dragged to the waterside, and knitted
by rude hands into these broad, floating masses. At the towns some
sturdy helpers may be hired for nothing; many of the poor peasants
being anxious to get down the river on their way to the shrines of
Solovetsk. For a passage on the raft these pilgrims take a turn at the
oar, and help the owners to guide her through the shoals.
In the praams the life is a little less bleak and rough than it is on
board the rafts. In form the praam is like the toy called a Noah's
ark; a huge hull of coarse pine logs, riveted and clamped with iron,
covered by a peaked plank roof. A big one will cost from six to seven
hundred rubles (the ruble may be reckoned for the moment as half a
crown), and will carry from six to eight hundred tons of oats and rye.
A small section of the praam is boarded off to be used as a room. Some
bits of pine are shaped into a stool, a table, and a shelf. From the
roof-beam swings an iron pot, in which the boatmen cook their food
while they are out in the open stream; at other times--that is to say,
when they are lying in port--no fire is allowed on board, not even a
pipe is lighted, and the watermen's victuals must be cooked on shore.
Four or five logs lashed together serve them for a launch, by means of
which they can easily paddle to the bank.
Like the rafts, these praams take on board a great many pilgrims from
the upper country; giving them a free passage down, with a supply of
tea and black bread as rations, in return for their labor at the
paddle and the oar. Not much labor is required, for the praam floats
down with the stream. Arrived at Archangel, she empties her cargo of
oats into the foreign ships (most of them bound for the Forth, the
Tyne, and the Thames), and then she is moored to the bank, cut up, and
sold. Some of her logs may be used again for building sheds, the rest
is of little use, except for the kitchen and the stove.
The new port of Archangel, called Solambola, is a scattered handful of
log houses, that would remind you of a Swiss hamlet were it not for
the cluster of green cupolas and spires, reminding you still more
strongly of a Bulgarian town. Each belfry bears a crescent, crowned by
a cross. Along the brink of the river runs a strand, some six or eight
feet above the level plain; beyond this strand the fields fall off, so
that the country might be laid under water, while the actual strand
stood high and dry. The new port is a water-village; for in the
spring-time, when the ice is melting up stream, the flood goes over
all, and people have to pass from house to magazine in boats.
Not a grain of this strand in front of the sheds is Russ; the whole
line of road being built of ballast brought into the Dvina by foreign
ships, and chiefly from English ports. This ridge of pebble, marl, and
shells comes nearly all from London, Liverpool, and Leith; the Russian
trade with England having this peculiarity, that it is wholly an
export trade. A Russian sends us every thing he has for sale; his
oats, his flax, his deals, his mats, his furs, his tar; he buys either
nothing, or next to nothing, in return. A little salt and wine, a few
saw-mills--chiefly for foreign account--are what come back from
England by way of barter with the North. The payment is gold, the
cargo ballast; and the balance of account between the two countries
is--a strand of English marl and shells.
CHAPTER IV.
ARCHANGEL.
On passing up the Dvina from the Polar Sea, your first experience
shows that you are sailing from the West into the East.
When scraping the bar, you notice that the pilot refuses to drop his
lead. "Never mind," he says, "it is deep enough; we shall take no
harm; unless it be the will of God." A pilot rarely throws out his
line. The regulation height of water on the bar is so and so; and
dropping a rope into the sea will not, he urges, increase the depth.
When climbing through the delta, you observe that every peasant on the
shore, both man and woman, wears a sheepskin wrap--the garment of
nomadic tribes; not worn as a rule by any of the settled races on the
earth.
In catching a first glimpse of the city, you are struck by the forest
of domes and spires; the domes all color and the spires all gold; a
cluster of sacred buildings, you are apt to fancy, out of all
proportion to the number of people dwelling in the town.
On feeling for the river-side, a captain finds no quay, no dock, no
landing-pier, no stair. He brings-to as he can; and drags his boat
into position with a pole, as he would have to do in the Turkish ports
of Vidin and Rustchuk. No help is given him from the shore. Except in
some ports of Palestine, you will nowhere find a wealthy trade
conducted by such simple means.
When driving up that strand of English marl, towards the city of which
you see the golden lights, you hear that in Archangel, as in Aleppo,
there is no hotel; not even, as in Aleppo, a public khan.
Full of these signs, you turn to your maps, and notice that Archangel
lies a little to the east of Mecca and Trebizond.
Yet these highways of the Dvina are not those of the genuine East.
Baksheesh is hardly known. Your pilot may sidle up, and give your hand
a squeeze (all Russians of the lower ranks are fond of squeezing!) on
your safe arrival in the port; and if you fail to take his hint, as
probably you will, he whispers meekly in your ear, as though he were
telling you an important secret, that very few strangers come into the
Dvina, but those few never fail to reward with na-chai (tea-money) the
man who has brought them in from the sea of storms. But from the port
officials nothing can be got by giving vails in the bad old way. Among
the many wise things which have been done in the present reign, is
that of reducing the number of men employed in the customs, and of
largely increasing the salaries paid to them by the crown. No man is
now underpaid for the service he has to do, and no one in the Customs
is allowed to accept a bribe. Prince Obolenski, chief of this great
department, is a man of high courage as well as high principles, and
under his eye the service has been purged of those old abuses which
caused it to be branded with black and red in so many books. One case
came under my notice, in which a foreign skipper had given to an
officer in the port a dozen oranges; not as a bribe, but as a treat;
oranges being rarely seen in this northern clime. Yet, when the fact
was found out by his local superior, the man was reduced from a high
post in the service to a low one. "If he will take an orange, he will
take a ruble," said his chief; and a year elapsed before the offender
was restored to his former grade.
The new method is not so Asiatic as the old; but in time it will lead
the humblest officer in Russia to feel that he is a man.
Archangel is not a port and city in the sense in which Hamburg and
Hull are ports and cities; clusters of docks and sheds, with shops,
and wagons, and a busy private trade. Archangel is a camp of shanties,
heaped around groups of belfries, cupolas and domes. Imagine a vast
green marsh along the bank of a broad brown river, with mounds of clay
cropping here and there out of the peat and bog; put buildings on
these mounds of clay; adorn the buildings with frescoes, crown them
with cupolas and crosses; fill in the space between church and
convent, convent and church, with piles and planks, so as to make
ground for gardens, streets, and yards; cut two wide lanes, from the
church called Smith's Wife to the monastery of St. Michael, three or
four miles in length; connect these lanes and the stream by a dozen
clearings; paint the walls of church and convent white, the domes
green and blue; surround the log houses with open gardens; stick a
geranium, a fuschia, an oleander into every window; leave the grass
growing everywhere in street and clearing--and you have Archangel.
Half-way from Smith's Wife's quarter to the Monastery, stand, in
picturesque groups, the sites determined by the mounds of clay, the
public buildings; fire-tower, cathedral, town-hall, court of justice,
governor's house, museum; new and rough, with a glow of bright new
paint upon them all. The collection in the museum is poor; the gilt on
the cathedral rich. When seen from a distance, the domes and turrets
of Archangel give it the appearance of some sacred Eastern city rather
than a place of trade.
This sea-port on the Dvina is the only port in Russia proper.
Astrachan is a Tartar port; Odessa an Italian port; Riga a Livonian
port; Helsingfors a Finnish port. None of these outlets to the sea are
in Russia proper, nor is the language spoken in any of them Russ. Won
by the sword, they may be lost by the sword. As foreign conquests,
they must follow the fate of war; and in Russia proper their loss
might not be deeply felt; Great Russia being vast enough for
independence and rich enough for happiness, even if she had to live
without that belt of lesser Russias in which for her pride and
punishment she has lately been clasped and strained. Archangel, on the
other side, is her one highway to the sea; the outlet of her northern
waters; her old and free communication with the world; an outlet given
to her by God, and not to be taken away from her by man.
Such as they are, the port and city of Archangel owe their birth to
English adventure, their prosperity to English trade.
In the last year of King Edward the Sixth, an English ship, in
pressing her prow against the sand-banks of the Frozen Sea, hoping to
light on a passage to Cathay, met with a broad sheet of water, flowing
steadily and swiftly from the south. That ship was the "Bonaventure;"
her master was Richard Challoner; who had parted from his chief, Sir
Hugh Willoughby, in a storm. The water coming down from the south was
fresh. A low green isle lay on his port, which he laid down in his
chart as Rose Island; afterwards to be famous as the cradle of our
northern trade. Pushing up the stream in search of a town, he came
upon a small cloister, from the monks of which he learned that he was
not in Cathay, but in Great Russia.
Great was a name given by old Russians, not only to the capital of
their country, but to the country itself. Their capital was Great
Novgorod; their country was Great Russia.
Sir Hugh Willoughby was driven by storms into "the harbor of death,"
in which he and his crews all perished in the ice; while his luckier
lieutenant pushed up the Dvina to Vologda, whence he forced his way to
Moscow, and saw the Grand Duke, Ivan the Fourth. In that age Russia
was known to Europe as Moscovia, from the city of Moscow; a city which
had ravaged her old pre-eminence from Novgorod, and made herself
mistress of Great Russia.
Challoner was wrecked and drowned on his second voyage; but those who
followed him built an English factory for trade on Rose Island, near
the cloister; while the Russians, on their side, built a fort and town
on the Dvina, some thirty miles from its mouth; in which position they
could watch the strangers in their country, and exchange with them
their wax and skins for cotton shirts and pewter pans. The builder of
this fort and town was Ivan Vassilivitch, known to us as Ivan the
Terrible--Ivan the Fourth.
Ivan called his town the New Castle of St. Michael the Archangel; an
unwieldy name, which his raftmen and sailors soon cut down--as raftmen
and sailors will--into the final word. On English lips the name would
have been St. Michael; but a Russian shrinks from using the name of
that prince of heaven. To him Michael is not a saint, as Nicolas and
George are saints; but a power, a virtue, and a sanctity, before whose
lance the mightiest of rebel angels fell. No Russian speaks of this
celestial warrior as a saint. He is the archangel; greatest of the
host; selected champion of the living God. Convents and churches are
inscribed to him by his celestial rank; but never by his personal
name. The great cathedral of Moscow is only known as the Archangel's
church. Michael is understood; for who but Michael could be meant?
Ivan Vassilivitch had such a liking for this fighting power, that on
his death-bed he gave orders for his body to be laid, not in that
splendid pile of St. Vassili, which he had spent so much time and
money in building near the Holy Gate, but in a chapel of the
Archangel's church; and there the grim old tyrant lies, in a plain
stone coffin, covered with a velvet pall.
Peter the Great rebuilt Archangel on a larger scale with more enduring
brick. Peter was fond of the Frozen Sea, and twice, at least, he
sailed over it to pray in the Convent of Solovetsk; a place which he
valued, not only as a holy shrine, but as a frontier fortress, held by
his brave old Russ against the Lapps and Swedes. Archangel was made by
Peter his peculiar care; and masons were fetched from Holland to erect
his lines of bastions, magazines, and quays. A castle rose from the
ground on the river bank; an island was reclaimed from the river and
trimmed with trees; a summer palace was designed and built for the
Tsar. A fleet of ships was sent to command the Dvina mouth. In fact,
Archangel was one of the three sites--St. Petersburg and Taganrog
being the other two--on which the Emperor designed to build cities
that, unlike Novgorod and Moscow, should be at once fortresses and
ports.
The city of Ivan and the city of Peter have each in turn gone by. Not
a stone of Ivan's town remains; for his new castle and monastery,
being built of logs, were duly rotted by rain and consumed by fire. A
fort and a monastery still protect and adorn the place; but these have
both been raised in more recent years. Of Peter's city, though it
seemed to be solid as the earth itself, hardly a house is standing to
show the style. A heap of arches, riven by frost and blackened by
smoke, is seen on the Dvina bank; a pretty kiosk peeps out from
between the birches on Moses Isle; and these are all!
In our western eyes Archangel may seem to be over-rich in domes, as
the delta may appear to be over-rich in crosses; but then, in our
western eyes, the city is a magazine of oats and tar, of planks and
skins; while in native eyes it is the archangel's house, the port of
Solovetsk, and the gate of God.
CHAPTER V.
RELIGIOUS LIFE.
A friend is one day driving me from house to house in Archangel,
making calls, when we observe from time to time a smart officer going
into courtyards.
"This man appears to be dogging our steps."
"Ha!" laughs my friend; "that fellow is an officer of police."
"Why is he following us?"
"He is not following us; he is going his rounds; he is warning the
owners of all good houses that four candles must be lighted in each
front window to-night at eight o'clock."
"Four candles! For what?"
"The Emperor. You know it is his angel's day; you will see the streets
all lighted--by police suggestion--at the proper time."
"Surely the police have no need to interfere. The Emperor is popular;
and who can forget that this is St. Alexander's Day?"
"There you are wrong; our people hardly know the court at all. You see
these shops are open, yon stalls are crowded, that mill is working, as
they would be on the commonest day in all the year. A mujik cares but
little for kings and queens; he only knows his own angel--his peculiar
saint. If you would test his reverence, ask him to make a coat, repair
a tarantass, or fetch in wood, on his angel's day. He would rather die
at your feet than sully such a day with work. In fact, a mujik is not
a courtier--he is only a religious man."
My friend is right in the main, though his illustration takes me as a
stranger by surprise.
The first impulse in a Russian heart is duty to God. It is an impulse
of observance and respect; at once moral and ceremonial; an impulse
with an inner force and an outer form; present in all ranks of
society, and in all situations of life; in an army on the march, in a
crowd at a country fair, in a lecture-room full of students; showing
itself in a princess dancing at a ball, in a huckster writing at his
desk, in a peasant tugging at his cart, in a burglar rioting on his
spoil.
This duty adorns the land with fane and altar, even as it touches the
individual man with penitential grace. Every village must have its
shrine, as every child must have his guardian angel and baptismal
cross. The towns are rich in churches and convents, just as the
citizens are rich in spiritual gifts. I counted twenty spires in
Kargopol, a city of two thousand souls. Moscow is said to have four
hundred and thirty churches and chapels; Kief, in proportion to her
people, is no less rich. All public events are celebrated by the
building of a church. In Kief, St. Andrew's Church commemorates the
visit of an apostle; St. Mary's, the introduction of Christianity In
Moscow, St. Vassili's commemorates the conquest of Kazan; the Donskoi
Convent, Fedor's victory over the Crim Tartars; St. Saviour's, the
expulsion of Napoleon. In Petersburg, St. Alexander's commemorates the
first victory won by Russians over Swedes; St. Isaac's, the birth of
Peter the Great; Our Lady of Kazan's, the triumphs of Russian arms
against the Persian, Turk, and Frank. Where we should build a bridge,
the Russians raise a house of God: so that their political and social
history is brightly written in their sacred piles.
By night and day, from his cradle to his grave, a Russian lives, as it
were, with God; giving up to His service an amount of time and money
which no one ever dreams of giving in the West. Like his Arabian
brother, the Slavonian is a religious being; and the gulf which
separates such men from the Saxon and the Gaul is broader than a
reader who has never seen an Eastern town will readily picture to his
mind.
An Oriental is a man of prayer. He seems to live for heaven and not
for earth; and even in his commonest acts, he pays respect to what he
holds to be a celestial law. One hand is clean, the other unclean. One
cup is lawful, another cup is unlawful. If he rises from his couch a
prayer is on his lips; if he sits down to rest a blessing is in his
heart. When he buys and when he sells, when he eats and when he
drinks, he remembers that the Holy One is nigh. If poor in purse, he
may be rich in grace; his cabin a sanctuary, his craft a service, his
daily life an act of prayer.
Enter into a Russian shed--you find a chapel. Every room in that shed
is sanctified; for in every room there is a sacred image, a domestic
altar, and a household god. The inmate steps into that room with
reverence; standing for a moment at the threshold, baring his head,
crossing himself, and uttering a saintly verse. Once in the house, he
feels himself in the Presence, and every act of his life is dedicated
to Him in whom we live and move. "Slava Bogu"--Glory to God--is a
phrase forever on his lips; not as a phrase only, to be uttered in a
light vein, as a formal act, but with an inward bending and confession
of the soul. He fasts very much, and pays a respect beyond our measure
to sacred places and to sacred things. He thinks day and night of his
angel; and payments are made by him at church for prayers to be
addressed in his name to that guardian spirit. He finds a divine
enjoyment in the sound of cloister-bells, a foretaste of heaven in
kneeling near the bones of saints. The charm of his life is a profound
conviction of his own unworthiness in the sight of God, and no mere
pride of rank ever robs him of the hope that some one higher in virtue
than himself will prove his advocate at the throne of grace. He feels
a rapture, strange to a Frank, in the cadence of a psalm, and the
taste of consecrated bread is to him a fearful joy. Such things are to
him not only things of life and death, but of the everlasting life and
the ever-present death.
The church is with a Russian early and late. A child is hardly
considered as born into the world, until he has been blessed by the
pope and made by him a "servant of God."
As the child begins, so he goes on. The cross which he receives in
baptism--which he receives in his cradle, and carries to his grave--is
but a sign. Religion goes with him to his school, his play-ground, and
his workshop. Every act of his life must begin with supplication and
end with thanks. A school has a set of prayers for daily use; with
forms to be used on commencing a term, on parting for holidays, on
engaging a new teacher, on opening a fresh course. It is the same with
boys who work in the mill and on the farm. Every one has his office to
recite and his fast to keep. The fasting is severe; and more than half
the days in a Russian year are days of fasting and humiliation. During
the seven weeks before Easter, no flesh, no fish, no milk, no eggs, no
butter, can be touched. For five or six weeks before St. Peter's Day,
and for six weeks before Christmas Day, no flesh, no milk, no eggs, no
butter, can be used. For fifteen days in August, a fast of great
severity is held in honor of the Virgin's death. A man must fast on
every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year, eating nothing save
fish. Besides keeping these public fasts, a man should fast the whole
week before making his confession and receiving his sacrament;
abstaining from every dainty, from sugar, cigarettes, and every thing
cooked with fire.
On the eve of Epiphany--the day for blessing the water--no one is
suffered to eat or drink until the blessing has been given, about four
o'clock, when the consecrated water may be sipped and dinner must be
eaten with a joyful heart. To fetch away the water, people carry into
church their pots and pans, their jacks and urns; each peasant with a
taper in his hand, which he lights at the holy fire, and afterwards
burns before his angel until it dies.
Every new house in which a man lives, every new shop which he opens
for trade, must be blessed. A man who moves from one lodging to
another must have his second lodging purified by religious rites. Ten
or twelve times a year, the parish priest, attended by his reader and
his deacon, enters into every house in his district, sprinkles the
rooms with holy water, cleanses them with prayer, and signs them with
the cross.
In his marriage, on his dying bed, the Church is with a Russ even more
than at his birth and baptism. Marriage, held to be a sacrament, and
poetically called a man's coronation, is a long and intricate affair,
consisting of many offices, most of them perfect in symbolism as they
are lovely in art. Prayers are recited, rings exchanged, and blessings
invoked; after which the ceremony is performed; an actual circling of
the brows with a golden rim. "Ivan, servant of God," cries the pope,
as he puts the circlet on his brows, "is crowned with Nadia, handmaid
of God." The bride is crowned with Ivan, servant of God.
Some people wear their bridal crowns for a week, then put them back
into the sacristy, and obtain a blessing in exchange. Religion touches
the lowliest life with a passing ornament. The bride is always a
queen, the groom is always a king, on their wedding-day.
A man's angel is with him early and late; a spirit with whom he dares
not trifle; one whom he can never deceive. He puts a picture of this
angel in his bedroom, over the pillow on which he sleeps. A light
should burn before that picture day and night. The angel has to be
propitiated by prayers, recited by a consecrated priest. His day must
be strictly kept, and no work done, except works of charity, from dawn
to dusk. A feast must be spread, the family and kindred called under
one roof, presents made to domestics, and alms dispensed to the poor.
On his angel's day a man must not only go to church, but buy from the
priests some consecrated loaves, which he must give to servants,
visitors, and guests. On that day he should send for his parish
priest, who will bring his gospel and cross, and say a prayer to the
angel, for which he must be paid a fee according to your means. A
child receives his angel's name in baptism, and this angelic name he
can never change. A peasant who was tried in the district court of
Moscow on a charge of having forged a passport and changed his name,
in order to pass for another man, replied that such a thing could not
be done. "How," he asked in wonder, "could I change my name? I should
lose my angel. I only forged my place of birth."
So closely have religious passions passed into social life, that civil
rights are made to depend in no slight degree on the performance of
religious duties. Every man is supposed to attend a weekly mass, and
to confess his sins, and take a sacrament once a year. A man who
neglects these offices forfeits his civil rights; unless, as sometimes
happens in the best of cities, he can persuade his pope to give him a
certificate of his exemplary attendance in the parish church!
CHAPTER VI.
PILGRIMS.
Next to his religious energy, the mastering passion of a Russ is the
untamable craving of his heart for a wandering life.
All Slavonic tribes are more or less fond of roving to and fro; of
peddling, and tramping, and seeing the world; of living, as it were,
in tents, as the patriarchs lived; but the propensity to ramble from
place to place is keener in the Russ than it is in the Bohemian and
the Serb.
A while ago the whole of these Slavonic tribes were still nomadic; a
people of herdsmen, driving their flocks from plain to plain, in
search of grass and water; camping either in tents of skin, or in
frames of wood not much more solid than tents of skin; carrying with
them their wives and children, their weapons of war, and their
household gods. They chased the wild game of their country, and when
the wild game failed them, they ate their flocks. Some few among them
tilled the soil, but only in a crude and fitful way--as an Adonan
tends his patch of desert, as a Pawnee trifles with his stretch of
plain; for the Slavonic husbandman was nearly as wild a wanderer as
the driver of kine and goats. His fields were so vast, his kin so
scattered, that the soil which he cropped was of no more value to him
than the water he crossed, the air he breathed. He never dreamt of
occupying his piece of ground after it had ceased to yield him, in the
unbought bounty of nature, his easy harvest of oats and rye.
Some trace of these wandering habits may still be found, especially in
the pilgrim bands.
These pilgrim bands are not a rabble of children and women, gay and
empty folk, like those you meet when the vintage is gathered in Sicily
and the south of France; mummers who take to the pilgrim's staff in
wantonness of heart, and end a week of devotion by a feast in the
auberge and a dance under the plaintain leaves. At best that French or
Sicilian rabble is but a spent tradition and a decaying force. But
these Northern pilgrims are grave and sad in their doings, even as the
North is grave and sad. You never hear them laugh; you rarely see them
smile; their movements are sedate; the only radiance on their life is
the light of prayer and praise. Seeing these worshippers in many
places and at many times--before the tomb of Sergie near Moscow, and
before the manger at Bethlehem, I have everywhere found them the same,
in reverence, in humility, in steadfastness of soul. One of these
lowly Russ surprised me on the Jordan at Bethabara; and only yesterday
I helped his brother to cross the Dvina on his march from Solovetsk.
The first pilgrim had visited the tombs of Palestine, from Nazareth to
Marsaba; the second, after toiling through a thousand miles of road
and river to Solovetsk, is now on his way to the shrines at Kief. As
my horses rattled down the Dvina bluffs I saw this humble pilgrim on
his knees, his little pack laid by, and his forehead bent upon the
ground in prayer. He was waiting at the ford for some one to come
by--some one who could pay the boatman, and would give him a passage
on the raft. The day had not yet dawned; the wind came up the river in
gusts and chills; yet the face of that lowly man was good to see; a
soft and tender countenance, shining with an inward light, and glad
with unearthly peace. The world was not much with him, if one might
judge from his sackcloth garb, his broken jar, his crust of black
bread; but one could not help thinking, as he bowed in thanks, that it
might be well for some of us who wear fine linen and dine off dainty
food to be even as that poor pilgrim was.
This pilgrimage to the tombs and shrines of Russian saints, so far
from being a holiday adventure, made when the year is spent and the
season of labor past, is to the pilgrim a thing of life and death. He
has degrees. A pilgrim perfect in his calling will go from shrine to
shrine for several years. If God is good to him, he will strive, after
making the round of his native shrines, to reach the valley of
Nazareth, and the heights of Bethlehem and Zion. Some hundreds of
these Russian pilgrims annually achieve this highest effort of the
Christian life on earth; making their peace with heaven by kissing the
stones in front of the Redeemer's tomb. Of course the poorer and
weaker man can never expect to reach this point of grace; but his
native soil is holy. Russia is a land of saints; and his map is dotted
with sacred tombs, to which it is better for him to toil than rest at
home in his sloth and sin.
These pilgrims go on foot, in bands of fifty or sixty persons, men,
women, children, each with a staff in his hand, a water-bottle hanging
from his belt; edifying the country as they march along, kneeling at
the wayside chapel, and singing their canticles by day and night. The
children whine a plaintive little song, of which the burden runs:
"Fatherkins and motherkins,
Give us bread to eat;"
and this appeal of the children is always heard, since all poor people
fancy that the knock of a pilgrim at their window may be that of an
angel, and will bring them luck.
A part--a very large part--of these rovers are simple tramps, who make
a trade of piety; carrying about with them relics and rags which they
vend at high rates to servant-girls and superstitious crones.
A man who in other days would have followed his sheep and kine, now
seeks a wild sort of freedom as a pilgrim, hugging himself on his
immunity from tax and rent, from wife and brat; migrating from
province to province; a beggar, an impostor, and a tramp; tickled by
the greeting of young and old as he passes their door, "Whither, oh
friend, is the Lord leading thee?" Sooner or later such a man falls in
with a band of pilgrims, which he finds it his good to join. The
Russian Autolycus slings a water-bottle at his belt, and his female
companion limps along the forest road on her wooden staff. You meet
them on every track; you find them in the yard of every house. They
creep in at back-doors, and have an assortment of articles for sale,
which are often as precious in the eyes of a mistress as in those of
her maid; a bit of rock from Nazareth, a drop of water from Jordan, a
thread from the seamless coat, a chip of the genuine cross. These are
the bolder spirits: but thousands of such vagrants roam about the
country, telling crowds of gapers what they have seen in some holy
place, where miracles are daily performed by the bones of saints. They
show you a cross from Troitsa; they give you a morsel of consecrated
bread from St. George. They can describe to you the defense of
Solovetsk, and tell you of the incorruptible corpses of Pechersk.
These are the impostors--rank and racy impostors--yet some of these
men and women who pass you on the roads are pious and devoted souls,
wandering about the earth in search of what they fancy is a higher
good. A few may be rich; but riches are dust in the eyes of God; and
in seeking after His glory they dare not trust to an arm of flesh.
Equally with his meekest brother, the rich pilgrim must take his
staff, and march on foot, joining his brethren in their devotions and
confessions, in their matins and their evening song.
Most of these pilgrim bands have to beg their crust of black bread,
their sup of sour quass, from people as poor as themselves in money
and almost as rich in the gifts of faith. Like the hadji going to
Mecca, a pilgrim coming to Archangel, on his way to the shrines, is a
holy man, with something of the character of a pope. The peasant, who
thinks the crossing of his door-step by the stranger brings him
blessings, not only lodges him by night, but helps him on the road by
day. A pilgrim is a sacred being in rustic eyes. If his elder would
let him go, he would join the band; but if he may not wend in person,
he will go in spirit, to the shrine. A prayer shall be said in his
name by the monks, and he will send his last kopeck in payment for
that prayer by the hand of this ragged pilgrim, confident that the
fellow would rather die than abuse his trust.
The men who escape from Siberian mines put on the pilgrim frock and
seize the pilgrim staff. Thus robed and armed, a man may get from Perm
to Archangel with little risk, even though his flesh may be burnt and
his papers forged. Pietrowski has told the story of his flight, and
many such tales may be heard on the Dvina praams.
A peasant living in a village near Archangel killed his father in a
quarrel, but in such a way that he was not suspected of the crime; and
he would never have been brought to justice had not Vanka, a friend
and neighbor, been a witness of the deed. Now Vanka was weak and
superstitious, and every day as he passed the image of his angel in
the street, he felt an inner yearning to tell what he had seen. The
murderer, watching him day and night, observed that he prayed very
much, and crossed himself very often, as though he were deeply
troubled in his mind. On asking what ailed him, he heard to his alarm
that Vanka could neither eat nor sleep while that terrible secret lay
upon his soul. But what could he do? Nothing; absolutely nothing? Yes;
he could threaten to do for him what he had done by accident for a
better man. "Listen to me, Vanka," he said, in a resolute tone; "you
are a fool; but you would not like to have a knife in your throat,
would you?" "God take care of me!" cried Vanka. "Mind me, then," said
the murderer: "if you prate, I will have your blood." Vanka was so
much frightened that he went to the police that very night and told
them all he knew; on which his friend was arrested, brought to trial
in Archangel, and condemned to labor on the public works for life.
Vanka was the main witness, and on his evidence the judge pronounced
his sentence. Then a scene arose in court which those who saw it say
they shall not forget. The man in the dock was bold and calm, while
Vanka, his accuser, trembled from crown to sole; and when the sentence
of perpetual exile to the mines was read, the murderer turned to his
friend and said, in a clear, firm voice, "Vanka! remember my words.
To-day is yours: I am going to Siberia; but I shall come to your house
again, and then I shall take your life. You know!" Years went by, and
the threat, forgotten by every one else, was only remembered by Vanka,
who, knowing his old friend too well, expected each passing night
would be his last on earth. At length the tragedy came in a ghastly
form. Vanka was found dead in his bed; his throat was cut from ear to
ear; and in a drinking-den close by lay his murderer, snoring in his
cups. He had made his escape from the mines; he had traversed the
whole length of Asiatic Russia; he had climbed the Ural chain, and
walked through the snow and ice of Perm, travelling in a pilgrim's
garb, and singing the pilgrim's song, until he came to the suburbs of
Archangel, where he slipped away from his raft, hid himself in the
wood until nightfall, crept to the familiar shed and drew his knife
across Vanka's throat.
No one suspects a pilgrim. With a staff in his hand, a sheepskin on
his back, a water-bottle at his belt, and a clot of bass tied loosely
round his feet, a peasant of the Ural Mountains quits his home, and
makes no merit of trudging his two or three thousand miles. On the
river he takes an oar, on the wayside he endures with incredible
fortitude the burning sun by day, the biting frost at night. In Moscow
I heard the history of three sisters, born in that city, who have
taken up the pilgrim's staff for life. They are clever women,
milliners by trade, and much employed by ladies of high rank. If they
could only rest in their shop, they might live in comfort, and end
their days in peace. But the religious and nomadic passions of their
race are strong upon them. Every year they go to Kief, Solovetsk, and
Jerusalem; and the journey occupies them forty-nine weeks. Every year
they spend three weeks at home, and then set out again--alone, on
foot--to seek, in winter snow and summer heat, salvation for their
souls. No force on earth, save that which drives an Arab across the
desert, and a Mormon across the prairie, is like this force.
In the hope of seeing these pilgrim bands, of going with them to
Solovetsk, and studying them on the spot, as also of inquiring about
the convent spectre, and solving the mystery which for many years past
connected that spectre with the Romanof family, I rounded the North
Cape, and my regret is deep, when landing at Archangel, to hear that
the last pilgrim band has sailed, and that no more boats will cross
the Frozen Sea until the ice breaks up in May next year.
CHAPTER VII.
FATHER JOHN.
Stung by this news of the pilgrim-boat having sailed, and haunting,
unquietly, the Pilgrim's Court in the upper town, I notice a good many
sheepskin garbs, with wearers of the burnt and hungry sort you meet in
all seasons on the Syrian roads. They are exceedingly devout, and even
in their rags and filth they have a certain grace of aspect and of
mien. A pious purpose seems to inform their gestures and their speech.
Yon poor old man going home with his morsel of dried fish has the air
of an Arab sheikh. These pilgrims, like myself, have been detained by
storms; and a hope shoots up into my heart that as the monks must
either send away all these thirsty souls unslaked, or lodge and feed
them for several months, they may yet contrive to send a boat.
A very small monk, not five feet high, with girl-like hair and
rippling beard, which parts and flows out wildly in the wind, is
standing in the gateway of the Pilgrim's Court; and hardly knowing how
it might be best to put the matter in my feeble Russ, I ask him in
that tongue where a man should look for the Solovetsk boat.
"English?" inquires the girl-like monk.
"Yes, English," I reply, in some surprise; having never before seen a
monk in Russia who could speak in any other tongue than Russ. "The
boat," he adds, "has ceased to run, and is now at Solovetsk laid up in
dock."
In dock! This dwarf must be a wag; for such a conjunction as monks and
docks in a country where you find a quay like that of Solambola is, of
course, a joke. "In dock!"
"Oh yes, in dock."
"Then have you a dock in the Holy Isle?"
"A dock--why not? The merchants of Archangel have no docks, you say?
Well, that is true; but merchants are not monks. You see, the monks of
Solovetsk labor while the merchants of Archangel trade. Slava Bogu! A
good monk does his work; no shuffling, and no waste. In London you
have docks?"
"Yes, many: but they were not built by monks."
"In England you have no monks; once you had them; and then they built
things--eh?"
This dwarf is certainly a wag. What, monks who work, and docks in the
Frozen Sea! After telling me where he learned his English (which is of
nautical and naughty pattern), the manikin comforts me with news that
although the pilgrim-boat has gone back to Solovetsk (where her
engines are to be taken out, and put by in warm boxes near a stove for
the winter months), a provision-boat may sail for the monastery in
about a week.
"Can you tell me where to find the captain of that boat?"
"Hum!" says the dwarf, slowly, crossing himself the while, and lipping
his silent prayer, "_I_ am the skipper!"
My surprise is great. This dwarf, in a monk's gown and cap, with a
woman's auburn curls, the captain of a sea-going ship! On a second
glance at his slight figure, I notice that his eyes are bright, that
his cheek is bronze, that his teeth, though small, are bony and well
set. In spite of his serge gown and his girl-like face, there _is_
about the tiny monk that look of mastery which becomes the captain of
a ship.
"And can you give me a passage in your boat?"
"You! English, and you wish to see the holy tombs? Well, that is
something new. No men of your nation ever sail to Solovetsk. They come
over here to buy, and not to pray. Sometimes they come to fight."
The last five words, spoken in a low key, come out from between his
teeth with a snap which is highly comic in a man so lowly and so
small. A lady living at Onega told me some days ago that once, when
she was staying for a week at Solovetsk with a Russian party, she was
compelled to hide her English birth, from fear lest the monks should
kill her. A woman's fancy, doubtless; but her words came back upon my
mind with a very odd sort of start as the manikin knits his brow and
hisses at the English fleet.
"Where is your boat, and what is she called?"
"She lies in the lower port, by the Pilgrim's Wharf; her name is the
'Vera;' as you would say, the 'Faith.'"
"How do you call your captain?" I inquire of a second monk, who is
evidently a sailor also; in fact, he is the first mate, serving on
board the "Faith."
"Ivan," says the monk; a huge fellow, with hasty eyes and audacious
front; "but we mostly call him Vanoushka, because he is little, and
because we like him." Vanoushka is one of the affectionate forms of
Ivan: Little Ivan, Little John. The skipper, then, is properly Father
John.
As for the next ten days and nights we are to keep company, it may be
best for me to say at once what I came to know of the queer little
skipper in the long gown and with the woman's curls.
Father John is an infant of the soil. Born in a Lapland village, he
had before him from his cradle the hard and hopeless life of a woodman
and cod-fisher--the two trades carried on by all poor people in these
countries, where the modes of life are fixed by the climate and the
soil. In the summer he would cut logs and grass; in the winter he
would hunt the sea in search of seal and cod. But the lad was smart
and lively. He wished to see the world, and hoped in some future time
to sail a boat of his own. In order to rise, he must learn; in order
to become a skipper, he must study the art of guiding ships at sea.
Some thirty miles from the hamlet where he lived stood Kem, an ancient
town established on the Lapland coast by colonists from Novgorod the
Great, in which town there was a school of navigation; rude and simple
as became so poor a place, but better than none at all; and to this
provincial school Father John contrived to go. That movement was his
first great step in life.
From Kem you can see a group of high and wooded islands towards the
rising sun, the shores of which shine with a peculiar light in the
early dawn. They seem to call you, as it were, by a spell, into some
paradise of the north. Every view is green, and every height is
crowned by a church with a golden cross. These islands are the
Solovetsk group; and once, at least, the lad went over from Kem in a
boat to pray in that holy place. The lights, the music, and the ample
cheer appealed to his fancy and his stomach; leaving on his mind an
impression of peace and fullness never to be effaced.
He got his pass as a seaman, came over to Archangel, fell into loose
ways, and meeting with some German sailors from the Baltic, listened
to their lusty songs and merry tales, until he felt a desire to leave
his own country and go with them on a voyage. Now sailors are scarce
in the Russian ports; the Emperor Nicolas was in those days drafting
his seamen into the Black Sea fleets; and for a man to quit Russia
without a pass from the police was a great offense. Such a pass the
lad felt sure he could never get; and when the German vessel was about
to sail he crept on board her in the night, and got away to sea
without being found out by the port police.
The vessel in which he escaped from his country was the "Hero," of
Passenburg, in Hanover, plying as a rule between German and Danish
ports, but sometimes running over to the Tyne and the Thames. Entered
on the ship's books in a foreign name, Father John adopted the tastes
of his new comrades; learned to eat English beef, to drink German
beer, and to carry himself like a man of the world. But the teaching
of his father and his pope was not lost upon him, even in the slums of
Wapping and on the quays of Rotterdam. He began to pine for religion,
as a Switzer pines for his Alp and an Egyptian for his Nile. What
could he do? The thought of going home to Kem was a fearful dream. The
lash, the jail, the mine awaited him--he thought--in his native land.
Cut off from access to a priest of his own religion, he talked to his
fellows before the mast about their faith. Some laughed at him; some
cursed him; but one old sailor took him to the house of a Catholic
priest. For four or five weeks Father John received a lesson every day
in the creed of Rome; but his mind misgave him as to what he heard;
and when his vessel left the port he was still without a church. In
the Levant, he met with creeds of all nations--Greek, Italian,
Lutheran, Armenian--but he could not choose between them, and his mind
was troubled with continual longings for a better life.
Then he was wrecked in the Gulf of Venice, and having nearly lost his
life, he grew more and more uneasy about his soul. A few months later
he was wrecked on the coast of Norway; and for the second time in one
year he found himself at the gates of death. He could not live without
religion; and the only religion to whisper peace to his soul was that
of his early and better days. But then the service of his country is
one of strict observance, and a man who can not go to church can not
exercise his faith. How was he to seek for God in a foreign port?
A chance of coming back to Russia threw itself in his path. The ship
in which he served--a German ship--was chartered by an English firm
for Archangel; and as Father John was the only Russ on board, the
skipper saw that his man would be useful in such a voyage. But the
news was to John a fearful joy. He longed to see his country once
more, to kneel at his native shrines, to give his mother some money he
had saved; but he had now been twelve years absent without leave, and
he knew that for such an offense he could be sent to Siberia, as he
phrased it, "like a slave." His fear overcame his love, and he
answered the skipper that he would not go, and must quit the ship.
But the skipper understood his trade. Owing John some sixteen pounds
for pay, he told him that he had no money where he lay, and could not
settle accounts until they arrived in Archangel, where he would
receive his freight. "Money," says the Russ proverb, "likes to be
counted," and when Father John thrust his hands into empty pockets, he
began to think, after all, it might be better to go home, to get his
wages, and see what would be done.
With a shaven chin and foreign name, he might have kept his secret and
got away from Archangel undiscovered by the port police, had he not
yielded the night before he should have sailed, and gone with some
Germans of the crew to a drinking-den. Twelve years of abstinence from
vodka had caused him to forget the power of that evil spirit; he drank
too much, he lost his senses; and when he woke next day he found that
his mates had left him, that his ship had sailed. What could he do? If
he spoke to the German consul, he would be treated as a deserter from
his post. If he went to the Russian police, he fancied they would
knout him to death. Not knowing what to say or how to act, he was
mooning in the port, when he met an old schoolfellow from Kem, one
Jacob Kollownoff (whom I afterwards came to know). Like most of the
hardy men of Kem, Jacob was prospering in the world; he was a skipper,
with a boat of his own, in which he made distant and daring voyages.
At the moment when he met Father John he was preparing for a run to
Spitzbergen in search of cod, to be salted at sea, and carried to the
markets of Cronstadt. Jacob saw no harm in a sailor drinking a glass
too much, and knowing that John was a good hand, he gave him a place
in his boat and took him out on his voyage. The cod was caught, and
Cronstadt reached; but the return was luckless; and John was cast away
for a third time in his life. A wrecked and broken man, he now made up
his mind to quit the sea, and even to take his chance of what his
people might do with him at home.
Returning to Kem with the skipper, he was seized by the police on the
ground of his papers being out of order, and cast into the common jail
of the town, where he lay for twelve months untried. The life in jail
was not harder than his life on deck; for the Government paid him, as
a prisoner, six kopecks a day; enough to supply his wants. He was
never brought before a court. Once, if not more than once, the elder
hinted that a little money would make things straight, and he might go
his way. The sum suggested as enough for the purpose was seventy-five
rubles--nearly ten pounds in English coin. "Tell him," said John to
his brother, who brought this message to the jail, "he shall not get
from me so much as one kopeck."
A week later he was sent in a boat from Kem to Archangel, under
sentence, he was told, of two years' hard labor in the fort; but
either the elder talked too big, or his message was misread; for on
going up to the police-office in that city, the prisoner was examined
and discharged.
A dream of the summer isles and golden pinnacles came back to him; he
had lived his worldly life, and longed for rest. Who can wonder that
he wished to become a monk of Solovetsk!
To the convent his skill in seamanship was of instant use. A steamer
had just been bought in Glasgow for the carriage of pilgrims to and
fro; and on her arrival in Archangel, Feofan, Archimandrite of
Solovetsk, discharged her Scottish crew and manned her with his monks.
At first these holy men felt strange on deck; they crossed themselves;
they sang a hymn; and as the pistons would not move, they begged the
Scottish engineer to return; since the machine--being made by
heretics--had not grace enough to obey the voice of a holy man. They
made two or three midsummer trips across the gulf, getting hints from
the native skippers, and gradually warming to their work. A priest was
appointed captain, and monks were sent into the kitchen and the
engine-room. All went well for a time; Savatie and Zosima--the local
saints of Solovetsk--taking care of their followers in the fashion of
St. Nicolas and St. George.
Yet Father John was a real God's gift to the convent, for the voyage
is not often to be described as a summer trip; and even so good a
person as an Archimandrite likes to know, when he goes down into the
Frozen Sea, that his saints are acting through a man who has sailed in
the roughest waters of the world.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE VLADIKA.
"You have a letter of introduction to the Archimandrite of Solovetsk?"
asks Father John, as we are shaking hands under the pilgrim's lamp.
"No! Then you must get one."
"Why? Are you so formal when a pilgrim comes to the holy shrine?"
"You are not quite a pilgrim. You will need a room in the guest-house
for yourself. You may wish to have horses, boats, and people to go
about. You will want to see the sacristy, the jewels, and the books.
You may like to eat at the Archimandrite's board."
"But how are these things to be done?"
"You know the Most Sacred Vladika of Archangel, perhaps?"
"Well, yes, a little. One of the Vladika's closest friends has been
talking to me of that sacred personage, and has promised to present me
this very day."
"Get from him a line to the Archimandrite. That will make all things
smooth," says Father John.
"Are they great friends?"
"Ha! who can tell? You see, the Most Sacred Vladika used to be master
of every one in the Holy Isles; and now ... but then the Vladika of
Archangel and the Archimandrite of Solovetsk are holy men, not likely
to fall out. You'll get a line?"
"Yes, if he will give me one; good-bye."
"Count on a week for the voyage, and bring white bread," adds the
dwarf. "Prosteté--Pardon me."
Of course, the Vladika (bishop or archbishop) is a monk; for every
high-priest in the Orthodox Church, whether his rank be that of vicar,
archimandrite, bishop, or metropolite, must wear the hood, and must
have taken vows. The rule that a bishop must be "the husband of one
wife," is set aside so far as regards the clergy of higher grades. A
parish priest is a married man; must, in fact, be a married man; and
no young deacon can obtain a church until he has first obtained a
bride. The social offices of the Church are done by these family men;
baptism, purifying, marriage, confession, burial; yet the higher seats
in the hierarchy are all reserved (as yet) for celibates who are under
vows.
The Holy Governing Synod--highest court of the Orthodox Church--consists
of monks, with one lay member to assist them by his knowledge of the
world. No married priest has ever had a seat on that governing board.
The metropolites are monks; and not only monks, but actual rulers of
monastic houses, Isidore, metropolite of Novgorod, is archimandrite of
the great Convent of St. George. Arseny, metropolite of Kief, is
archimandrite of the great Convent of Pechersk. Innocent, metropolite
of Moscow, is archimandrite of the great Convent of Troitsa. All the
vicars of these high-priests are monks. The case of Archangel and
Solovetsk is, therefore, the exception to a general rule. St. George,
Pechersk, and Troitsa, are governed by the nearest prince of the
Church; and in former times this was also the case with Solovetsk; but
Peter the Great, in one of his fits of reverence, broke this old
connection of the convent and the see of Archangel; endowing the
Archimandrite of Solovetsk with a separate standing and an independent
power. Some people think the Archbishop of Archangel nurses a grudge
against the civil power for this infringement of his ancient rights;
and this idea was probably present in the mind of Father John.
Acting on Father John's advice, I put on my clothes of state--a plain
dress suit; the only attire in which you can wait on a man of
rank--and drive to my friend's abode, and finding him ready to go with
me, gallop through a gust of freezing rain to the palace-door.
The archbishop is at home, though it is not yet twelve o'clock. It is
said of him that he seldom goes abroad; affecting the airs of an exile
and a martyr; but doing--in a sad, submissive way, as if the weapon
were unworthy of its work--a great deal of good; watching over his
church, admonishing his clergy, both white and black, and thinking,
like a father, for the poor.
Leaving our wraps in an outer hall (the proper etiquette of guests),
we send in our cards by an usher, and are received at once.
The Most Sacred Vladika, pale as a ghost, dressed in a black gown, on
which hangs a sapphire cross, and wearing his hood of serge, rises to
greet us; and coming forward with a sweet and vanishing smile, first
blesses his penitent, and then shakes hands with his English guest.
This Most Sacred Father Nathaniel is now an aged, shadowy man, with
long white beard, and a failing light in his meek blue eyes. But in
his prime he is said to have been handsome in person, eager in gait,
caressing in style. In his youth he was a village pastor--one of the
White Clergy--married, and a family man; but his wife died early; and
as a pastor in his church can not marry a second time, he followed a
fashion long ago set by his aspiring brethren--he took the vows of
chastity, became a monk, and began to rise. His fine face, his courtly
wit, his graceful bearing, brought him hosts of fair penitents, and
these fair penitents made for him high friends at court. He was
appointed Vicar of St. Petersburg--a post not higher in actual rank
than that of a Dean of St. Paul's, but one which a popular and
ambitious man prefers to most of the Russian sees. Father Nathaniel
was an idol of the city. Fine ladies sought his advice, and women of
all classes came to confess to him their sins. Princes fell beneath
his sway; princesses adored him; and no rank in the Church, however
high, appeared to stand beyond his reach. But these court triumphs
were his ruin. He was such a favorite with ladies that his brethren
began to smile with malicious leer when his back was turned, and drop
their poisonous hints about the ways in which he walked. They said he
was too fond of power; they said he spent more time with his female
penitents than became a monk. It is the misery of these vicars and
bishops that they can not be married men, with wives of their own to
turn the edges of such shafts. Men's tongues kept wagging against
Nathaniel's fame; and even those who knew him to be earnest in his
faith began to think it might be well for the Church if this
fascinating father could be honorably sent to some distant see.
Whither was he to go?
While a place was being sought for him, he happened to give deep
offense in high quarters; and as Father Alexander, Vladika of
Archangel (hero of Solovetsk), was eager to go south and be near the
court, Father Nathaniel was promoted to that hero's place.
He left St. Petersburg amidst the tears of fair women, who could not
protect their idol against the malice of envious monks. Taking his
promotion meekly as became his robe, he sighed to think that his day
was come, and in the future he would count in his church as a fallen
man. Arriving in Archangel, he shut himself up in his palace near the
monastery of St. Michael; a house which he found too big for his
simple wants. Soon after his coming he abandoned this palace for a
smaller house; giving up his more princely pile to the monks of St.
Michael for a public school.
A spirit of sacrifice is the pre-eminent virtue of the Russian Church.
The shadowy old man compels me to sit on the sofa by his side; talks
of my voyage round the North Cape; shows me a copy in Russian of my
book on the Holy Land; inquires whether I know the Pastor Xatli in
London. Fancying that he means the Russian pope in Welbeck Street, I
answer yes; on which we get into much confusion of tongues; until it
flashes upon me that he is talking of Mr. Hatherley of Wolverhampton,
the gentleman who has gone over from the English to the Russian rite,
and is said to have carried some twenty souls of the Black Country
with him. What little there is to tell of this Oriental Church in our
Black Country is told; and in return for my scanty supply of facts,
the Vladika is good enough to show me the pictures hanging on his
wall. These pictures are of two classes, holy and loyal; first the
sacred images--those heads of our Saviour and of the Virgin Mother
which hang in the corners of every Russian room, the tutelary
presence, to be adored with reverence at the dawn of day and the hour
of rest; then the loyal and local pictures--portraits of the reigning
house, and of former archbishops--which you would expect to find in
such a house; a first Alexander, with flat and dreamy face; a Nicolas,
with stiff and haughty figure; a second Alexander, hung in the place
of honor, and wearing a pensive and benignant smile. More to my mind,
as less familiar than these great ones of the hour, is the fading
image of a lady, thoroughly Russ in garb and aspect--Marfa, boyarine
of Novgorod and colonizer of the North.
Nathaniel marks with kindling eyes my interest in this grand old
creature--builder alike of convents and of towns--who sent out from
Novgorod two of her sons, and hundreds of her people, to the bleak
north country, then inhabited by pagan Lapps and Karels, worshippers
of the thunder-cloud, and children of the Golden Hag. Her story is the
epic of these northern shores.
While Red and White Rose were wasting our English counties with sword
and fire, this energetic princess sent her sons and her people down
the Volkhoff, into Lake Ladoga, whence they crept up the Swir into
Lake Onega; from the banks of which lake they marched upward, through
the forests of birch and pine, into the frozen north. She sent them to
explore the woods, to lay down rivers and lakes, to tell the natives
of a living God. They came to Holmogory, on the Dvina, then a poor
fishing-village occupied by Karels, a tribe not higher in type than
the Samoyeds of the present day. They founded Suma, Soroka, and Kem.
They took possession of the Frozen Sea and its clustering isles. In
dropping down a main arm of the river, Marfa's two sons were pitched
from their boat and drowned. Their bodies being washed on shore and
buried in the sand, she caused a cloister to be raised on the spot,
which she called the Monastery of St. Nicolas, after the patron of
drowning men.
That cloister of St. Nicolas was the point first made by Challoner
when he entered the Dvina from the Frozen Sea.
"You are going over to Solovetsk?" says the Vladika, coming back to
his sofa. "We have no authority in the isles, although they lie within
our See. It pleased the Emperor Peter, on his return from a stormy
voyage, to raise the Convent of Savatie to independent rank, to give
it the title of Lavra--making it the equal, in our ecclesiastical
system, with Troitsa, Pechersk, and St. George. From that day
Solovetsk became a separate province of the Church, dependent on the
Holy Governing Synod and the Tsar. Still I can give you a line to
Feofan, the Archimandrite."
Slipping into an inner room for five minutes, he composes a mandate in
my favor, in the highest Oriental style.
CHAPTER IX.
A PILGRIM-BOAT.
A lady, who knows the country, puts up in a crate such things as a
pilgrim may chance to need in a monastic cell--good tea, calf's
tongue, fresh butter, cheese, roast beef, and indispensable white
bread. These dainties being piled on a drojki, propped on pillows and
covered with quilts--my bedding in the convent and the boat--we rattle
away to the Pilgrim's Wharf.
Yes, there it is, an actual wharf--the only wharf in Archangel along
which boats can lie, and land their passengers by a common sea-side
plank!
Moored to the capstan by a rope, lies the pretty craft; a gilt cross
on her foremast, a saintly pennant on her main. Four large gold
letters tell her name:
В Ѣ Р А
(pronounced Verra), and meaning Faith. Father John is standing on his
bridge, giving orders in a low voice to his officers and crew, many of
whom are monks--mate, steward, cook, and engineer--each and all
arrayed in the cowl and frock.
On the Pilgrim's Wharf, which lies in a yard cut off by gates from the
street, and paved with chips and shavings to form a dry approach,
stands a new pile of monastic buildings; chapels, cells, store-rooms,
offices, stalls, dormitories; in fact, a new Pilgrim's Court. A
steamer can not reach the port in the upper town, where the original
Pilgrim's Court was built; and the fathers, keeping pace with the
times, have let their ancient lodgings in the town, and built a new
house lower down the stream.
Crowds of men and women--pilgrims, tramps, and soldiers--strew the
wharf with a litter of baskets, tea-pots, beds, dried-fish, felt
boots, old rugs and furs, salt-girkins, black bread; through which the
monks step softly and sadly; helping a child to trot on board, getting
a free pass for a beggar, buying rye-loaves for a lame wretch, and
otherwise aiding the poorest of these poor creatures in their need.
For, even though the season is now far spent, nearly two hundred
pilgrims are in waiting on the Pilgrim's Wharf; all hoping to get over
to the Holy Isles. Most of these men have money to pay their fare; and
some among the groups are said to be rich. A dozen of the better sort,
natives of Archangel, too busy to pass over the sea in June, when
their river was full of ships, are taking advantage of the lull in
trade, and of the extra boat. Each man brings with him a basket of
bread and fish, a box of tea, a thick quilt, and a pair of felt
leggings, to be worn over his boots at night. These local pilgrims
carry a staff; but in place of the leathern belt and water-bottle,
they carry a teapot and a cup. One man wears a cowl and gown, who is
not of the crew; a jolly, riotous monk, going back to his convent as a
prisoner. "What has he been doing?" "Women and drink," says Father
John. The fares are low: first-class, six rubles (fifteen shillings);
second-class, four rubles. Third-class, three rubles. This tariff
covers the cost of going out and coming back--a voyage of four hundred
miles--with lodgings in the guest-house, and rations at the common
tables, during a stay of five or six days. A dozen of these poor
pilgrims have no rubles in their purse, and the question rises on the
wharf, whether these paupers shall be left behind. Father John and his
fellow-skipper have a general rule; they must refuse no man, however
poor, who asks them for a passage to Solovetsk in the name of God.
A bell tolls, a plank is drawn, and we are off. As we back from the
wharf, getting clear, a hundred heads bow down, a hundred hands sign
the cross, and every soul commends itself to God. Every time that, in
dropping down the river, we pass a church, the work of bowing and
crossing begins afresh. Each head uncovers; each back is bent; each
lip is moved by prayer. Some kneel on deck; some kiss the planks. The
men look contrite, and the women are sedate. The crews on
fishing-craft salute us, oftentimes kneeling and bowing as we glide
past, and always crossing themselves with uncovered heads. Some beg
that we will pray for them; and the most worldly sailors pause in
their work and hope that the Lord will give us a prosperous wind.
A gale is blowing from west and north. In the river it is not much
felt, excepting for the chill, which bites into your bone. Father
John, with a monk's contempt for caution, gives the Maimax Channel a
free berth, and having a boat in hand of very light draught, drops
down the ancient arm as a shorter passage into the gulf.
Before we quit the river, our provident worshippers have begun to brew
their tea and eat their supper of girkin and black bread.
The distribution on board is simple. Only one passenger has paid the
first-class fare. He has the whole state cabin to himself; a room some
nine feet square, with bench and mat to sleep on; a cabin in which he
might live very well, had it not pleased the monks to stow their
winter supply of tallow in the boxes beneath his couch. Two persons
have paid the second-class fare--a skipper and his wife, who have been
sailing about the world for years, have made their fortunes, and are
now going home to Kem. "Ah!" says the fair, fat woman, "you English
have a nice country to live in, and you get very good tea; but...."
The man is like his wife. "Prefer to live in Kem? Why not? In London
you have beef and stout; but you have no summer and no winter; all
your seasons are the same; never hot, never cold. If you want to enjoy
life, you should drive in a reindeer sledge over a Lapland plain, in
thirty degrees of frost."
The rest of our fellow-pilgrims are on deck and in the hold; rich and
poor, lame and blind, merchant and beggar, charlatan and saint; a
motley group, in which a painter might find models for a Cantwell, a
Torquemada, a St. John. You see by their garb, and hear in their
speech, that they have come from every province of the Empire; from
the Ukraine and from Georgia, from the Crimea and from the Ural
heights, from the Gulf of Finland and from the shores of the Yellow
Sea. Some of these men have been on foot, trudging through summer
sands and winter snows, for more than a year.
The lives of many of my fellow-passengers are like an old wife's
tales.
One poor fellow, having no feet, has to be lifted on board the boat.
He is clothed in rags; yet this poor pilgrim's face has such a patient
look that one can hardly help feeling he has made his peace. He tells
me that he lives beyond Viatka, in the province of Perm; that he lost
his feet by frost-bite years ago; that he lay sick a long time; that
while he was lying in his pain he called on Savatie to help him,
promising that saint, on his recovery, to make a pilgrimage to his
shrine in the Frozen Sea. By losing his legs he saved his life; and
then, in his poverty and rags, he set forth on his journey, crawling
on his stumps, around which he has twisted a coarse leather splinth,
over fifteen hundred miles of broken road.
Another pilgrim, wearing a felt boot on one leg, a bass shoe on the
other, has a most abject look. He is a drunkard, sailing to Solovetsk
to redeem a vow. Lying tipsy on the canal bank at Vietegra, he rolled
into the water, and narrowly escaped being drowned. As he lay on his
face, the foam oozing slowly from his mouth, he called on his saints
to save him, promising them to do a good work in return for such help.
To keep that vow he is going to the holy shrines.
A woman is carrying her child, a fine little lad of six or seven
years, to be offered to the monks and educated for the cowl. She has
passed through trouble, having lost her husband, and her fortune, and
she is bent on sacrificing the only gift now left to her on earth. To
put her son in the monastery of Solovetsk is to secure him, she
believes, against all temporal and all spiritual harm. Poor creature!
It is sad to think of her lot when the sacrifice is made; and the
lonely woman, turning back from the incense and glory of Solovetsk,
has to go once more into the world, and without her child.
An aged man, with flowing beard and priestly mien, though he is
wrapped in rags, is noticeable in the groups among which he moves. He
is a vowed pilgrim; that is to say, a pilgrim for life, as another man
would be a monk for life; his whole time being spent in walking from
shrine to shrine. He has the highest rank of a pilgrim; for he has
been to Nazareth and Bethlehem, as well as to Novgorod and Kief. This
is the third time he has come to Solovetsk; and it is his hope, if God
should spare him for the work, to make yet another round of the four
most potent shrines, and then lay up his dust in these holy isles.
Some of these pilgrims, even those in rags, are bringing gifts of no
small value to the convent fund. Each pilgrim drops his offering into
the box: some more, some less, according to his means. Many bear gifts
from neighbors and friends who can not afford the time for so long and
perilous a voyage, but who wish to walk with God, and lay up their
portion with His saints.
On reaching the river mouth we find a fleet of fishing-boats in dire
distress; and the two ships that we passed a week since, bobbing and
reeling on the bar like tipsy men, are completely gone. The "Thera" is
a Norwegian clipper, carrying deals; the "Olga" a Prussian bark,
carrying oats; they are now aground, and raked by the wash from stem
to stern. We pass these hulls in prayer; for the gale blows dead in
our teeth; and we are only too well aware that before daylight comes
again we shall need to be helped by all the spirits that wait on
mortal men.
With hood and gown wrapped up in a storm-cape, made for such nights,
Father John is standing on his bridge, directing the course of his
boat like an English tar. His monks meet the wind with a psalm, in the
singing of which the pilgrims and soldiers join. The passenger comes
for a moment from his cabin into the sleet and rain; for the voices of
these enthusiasts, pealing to the heavens through rack and roar, are
like no sounds he has ever yet heard at sea. Many of the singers lie
below in the hold; penned up between sacks of rye and casks of grease;
some of them deadly sick, some groaning as though their hearts would
break; yet more than half these sufferers follow with lifted eyes and
strenuous lungs the swelling of that beautiful monkish chant. It is
their even-song, and they could not let the sun go down into the surge
until that duty to their Maker was said and sung.
Next day there comes no dawn. A man on the bridge declares that the
sun is up; but no one else can see it; for a veil of mist droops
everywhere about us, out of which comes nothing but a roar of wind and
a flood of rain.
The "Faith" is bound to arrive in the Bay of Solovetsk by twelve
o'clock; but early in the day Father John comes to tell me (apart)
that he shall not be able to reach his port until five o'clock; and
when five is long since past, he returns to tell me, with a patient
shrug, that we want more room, and must change our course. The
entrance to Solovetsk is through a reef of rocks.
"Must we lie out all night?"
"We must." Two hours are spent in feeling for the shore; Father John
having no objection to use his lead. When anchorage is found, we let
the chain go, and swinging round, under a lee shore, in eight fathoms
of water, find ourselves lying out no more than a mile from land.
Then we drink tea; the pilgrims sing their even-song; and, with a
thousand crossings and bendings, we commit our souls to heaven. Lying
close in shore, under cover of a ridge of pines, we swing and lurch at
our ease; but the storm howls angrily in our wake; and we know that
many a poor crew, on their frail northern barks, are struggling all
night with the powers of life and death. A Dutch clipper, called the
"Ena," runs aground; her crew is saved, and her cargo lost. Two
Russian sloops are shattered and riven in our track; one of them
parting amidships and going down in a trough of sea with every soul on
board.
In the early watch the wind goes down; sunlight streaks the
north-eastern sky; and, in the pink dawn, we catch, in our front, a
little to the west, a glimpse of the green cupolas and golden crosses
of Solovetsk--a joy and wonder to all eyes; not more to pilgrims, who
have walked a thousand miles to greet them, than they are to their
English guest.
Saluting the holy place with prayer, and steaming by a coast-line
broken by rocks and beautified by verdure, we pass, in a flood of soft
warm sunshine, up a short inland reach, in which seals are plashing,
over which doves are darting, each in their happy sport, and, by eight
o'clock of a lovely August morning, swing ourselves round in a
secluded bay under the convent walls.
CHAPTER X.
THE HOLY ISLES.
Chief in a group of rocks and banks lying off the Karel coast--a group
not yet surveyed, and badly laid down in charts--Solovetsk is a small,
green island, ten or twelve miles long, by eight or nine miles wide.
The waters raging round her in this stormy sea have torn a way into
the mass of stones and peat; forming many little coves and creeks; and
near the middle, where the convent stands, these waters have almost
met. Hardly a mile of land divides the eastern bay from the western
bay.
Solovetsk stands a little farther north than Vatna Jökull; the
sixty-fifth degree of latitude passing close to the monastic pile. The
rocks and islets lying round her are numerous and lovely, for the sea
runs in and out among them, crisp with motion and light with foam; and
their shores are everywhere green with mosses and fringed with forests
of birch and pine. The lines are not tame, as on the Karel and Lapland
coasts, for the ground swells upward into bluffs and downs, and one at
least of these ridges may be called a hill. Each height is crowned by
a white church, a green cupola, and a golden cross. On the down which
may be called a hill stands a larger church, the belfry of which
contains a light. Land, sea, and sky are all in keeping; each a wonder
and a beauty in the eyes of pilgrims of the stormy night.
Running alongside the wharf, on to which we step as easily as on to
Dover Pier, we notice that beyond this beauty of nature, which man has
done so much to point and gild, there is a bright and even a busy look
about the commonest things. Groups of strange men dot the quays;
Lopars, Karels, what not; but we soon perceive that Solovetsk is a
civilized no less than an enchanted isle. The quay is spacious, the
port is sweet and fresh. On our right lies that dock of which Father
John was speaking with such pride. The "Hope," a more commodious
pilgrim-boat than the "Faith," is lying on her stays. On our left
stands a guest-house, looking so airy, light, and clean, that no
hostelry on Italian lake could wear a more cheerful and inviting face.
We notice a lift and crane, as things not seen in the trading ports;
and one has hardly time to mark these signs of science ere noticing an
iron tramway, running from the wharf to a great magazine of stores and
goods.
A line of wall, with gates and towers, extends along the upper quay;
and high above this line of wall, spring convent, palace, dome, and
cross. A stair leads up from the water to the Sacred Gates; and near
the pathway from this stair we see two votive chapels; marking the
spots on which the Imperial pilgrims, Peter the Great and Alexander
the Beneficent, landed from their boats.
Every thing looks solid, many things look old. Not to speak of the
fortress walls and turrets, built of vast boulders torn up from the
sea-bed in the days of our own Queen Bess, the groups of palace,
church, and belfry rising within those walls are of older date than
any other work of man in this far-away corner of the globe. One
cathedral--that of the Transfiguration--is older than the fortress
walls. A second cathedral--that of the Ascension--dates from the time
when St. Philip was prior of Solovetsk. Besides having this air of
antiquity, the place is alive with color, and instinct with a sense of
art. The votive chapels which peep out here and there from among the
trees are so many pictures; and these red crosses by the water-margin
have been so arranged as to add a motive and a moral to the scene.
Some broad but not unsightly frescoes brighten the main front of the
old cathedral, and similar pictures light the spandrel of the Sacred
Gates; while turrets and cupolas of church and chapel are everywhere
gay with green and gold.
One dome, much noticed, and of rarest value in a pilgrim's eye, is
painted azure, fretted with golden stars. That dome is the crown of a
new cathedral built in commemoration of 1854--that year of
wonders--when an English fleet was vanquished by the Mother of God.
Within, the convent looks more durable and splendid than without.
Wall, rampart, guest-house, prison, tower, and church, are all of
brick and stone. Every lobby is painted; often in a rude and early
style; but these rough passages from Holy Writ have a sense and
keeping higher than the morals conveyed by a coat of lime. The screens
and columns in the churches glow with a nobler art; though here,
again, an eye accustomed to admire no other than the highest of
Italian work will be only too ready to slight and scorn. The drawing
is often weak, the pigment raw, the metal tawdry; yet these great
breadths of gold and color impress both eye and brain, especially when
the lamps are lit, the psalm is raised, the incense burning, and the
monks, attired in their long black hoods and robes, are ranged in
front of the royal gates.
This pretty white house under the convent wall, near the Sacred Gates,
was built in witness of a miracle, and is known as the Miracle Church.
A pilgrim, eating a bit of white bread, which a pope had given him,
let a crumb of it fall to the ground, when a strange dog tried to
snatch it up. The crumb seemed to rise into the dog's mouth and then
slip away from him, as though it were alive. That dog was the devil.
Many persons saw this victory of the holy bread, and the monks of
Solovetsk built a shrine on the spot to keep the memory of that
miracle alive; and here it stands on the bay, between the chapels
erected on the spots where Peter the Great and Alexander the Second
landed from their ships.
When we come to drive, and sail, and walk into the recesses of this
group of isles, we find them not less lovely than the first sweet
promise of the bay in which we land. Forests surround, and lakelets
pursue us, at every step. The wood is birch and pine; birch of the
sort called silver, pine of the alpine stock. The trees are big enough
for beauty, and the undergrowths are red with berries and bright with
Arctic flowers. Here and there we come upon a clearing, with a dip
into some green valley, in the bed of which slumbers a lovely lake. A
scent of hay is in the air, and a perfume new to my nostrils, which my
companions tell me breathes from the cotton-grass growing on the
margin of every pool. At every turn of the road we find a cross, well
shaped and carved, and stained dark red; while the end of every forest
lane is closed by a painted chapel, a lonely father's cell. A deep,
soft silence reigns through earth and sky.
But the beauty of beauties lies in the lakes. More than a hundred of
these lovely sheets of water nestle in the depths of pine-wood and
birch-wood. Most famous of all these sheets is the Holy Lake, lying
close behind the convent wall; most beautiful of all, to my poor
taste, is the White Lake, on the road to St. Savatie's Cell and
Striking Hill.
Holy Lake, a sheet of black water, deep and fresh, though it is not a
hundred yards from the sea, has a function in the pilgrim's course.
Arriving at Solovetsk, the bands of pilgrims march to this lake and
strip to bathe. The waters are holy, and refresh the spirit while they
purify the flesh. Without a word, the pilgrims enter a shed, throw off
their rags, and leap into the flood; except some six or seven
city-folk, who shiver in their shoes at the thought of that wholesome
plunge. Their bath being finished, the pilgrims go to dinner and to
prayers.
White Lake lies seven or eight miles from the convent, sunk in a green
hollow, with wooded banks, and a number of islets, stopping the lovely
view with a yet more lovely pause. If St. Savatie had been an artist,
one need not have wondered at his wandering into such a spot.
Yet the chief islet in this paradise of the Frozen Sea has one defect.
When looking down from the belfry of Striking Hill on the intricate
maze of sea and land, of lake and ridge, of copse and brake, of lawn
and dell; each tender breadth of bright green grass, each sombre belt
of dark-green pine, being marked by a white memorial church; you gaze
and wonder, conscious of some hunger of the sense; it may be of the
eye, it may be of the ear; your heart declaring all the while that,
wealthy as the landscape seems, it lacks some last poetic charm. It is
the want of animal life. No flock is in the meadow, and no herd is on
the slope. No bark of dog comes on the air; no low of kine is on the
lake. Neither cow nor calf, neither sheep nor lamb, neither goat nor
kid, is seen in all the length of country from Striking Hill to the
convent gate. Man is here alone, and feels that he is alone.
This defect in the landscape is radical; not to be denied, and never
to be cured. Not that cattle would not graze on these slopes and
thrive in these woods. Three miles in front of Solovetsk stands the
isle called Zaet, on which sheep and cattle browse; and five or six
miles in the rear lies Moksalma, a large grassy isle, on which the
poultry cackle, the horses feed, and the cows give milk. These animals
would thrive on the holy isle, if they were not driven away by
monastic rule; but Solovetsk has been sworn of the celibate order; and
love is banished from the saintly soil. No mother is here permitted to
fondle and protect her young; a great defect in landscapes otherwise
lovely to eye and heart--a denial of nature in her tenderest forms.
The law is uniform, and kept with a rigor to which the imperial power
itself must bend. No creature of the female sex may dwell on the isle.
The peasants from the Karel coast are said to be so strongly impressed
with the sin of breaking this rule, that they would rather leap into
the sea than bring over a female cat. A woman may come in the pilgrim
season to say her prayers, but that duty done she must go her way.
Summer is a time of license--a sort of carnival season, during which
the letter of a golden rule is suspended for the good of souls. A
woman may lodge in the guest-house, feed in the refectory; but she
must quit the wards before nine at night. Some of the more holy
chapels she may not enter: and her day of privilege is always short. A
male pilgrim can reside at Solovetsk for a year; a female must be gone
with the boats that bring her to the shrine. By an act of imperial
grace, the commander of his majesty's forces in the island--an army
some sixty strong--is allowed to have his wife and children with him
during the pilgrim's year; that is to say, from June to August; but
when the last boat returns to Archangel with the men of prayer, the
lady and her little folk must leave their home in this holy place. A
reign of piety and order is supposed to come with the early snows, and
it is a question whether the empress herself would be allowed to set
her foot on the island in that better time.
The rule is easily enforced in the bay of Solovetsk, under the convent
walls; not so easily enforced at Zaet, Moksalma, and the still more
distant isles, where tiny little convents have been built on spots
inhabited by famous saints. In these more distant settlements it is
hard to protect the holy men from female intrusion; for the Karel
girls are fond of mischief, and they paddle about these isles in their
light summer craft by day and night. The aged fathers only are allowed
to live in such perilous spots.
CHAPTER XI.
THE LOCAL SAINTS.
This exclusion of women from the Holy Isle was the doing of Savatie,
first of the Local Saints.
Savatie, the original anchoret of Solovetsk, was one day praying near
a lake, when he heard a cry, as of a woman in pain. His comrade said
it must have been a dream: for no woman was living nearer to their
"desert" than the Karel coast. The saint went forth again to pray; but
once again his devotions were disturbed by cries and sobs. Going round
by the banks of the lake to see, he found a young woman lying on the
ground, with her flesh all bruised, her back all bleeding from recent
blows. She was a fisherman's wife. On being asked who had done her
this harm, she said that two young men, with bright faces and dressed
in white raiment, came to her hut while her husband was away, and
telling her she must go after him, as the land belonged to God, and no
woman must sleep on it a single night, they threw her on the ground,
struck her with rods, and made her cry with pain.
When she could walk, the poor creature got into her boat, and St.
Savatie saw her no more. The fisherman came to fish, but his wife
remained at home; and in this way woman was driven by angels from the
Holy Isle. No monk, no layman, ever doubts this story. How can he?
Here, to this day, stands the log house in which Savatie dwelt, and
twenty paces from it lies the mossy bank on which he knelt. Across the
water there, beside yon clump of pines, rose the fisherman's shed. The
sharp ascent on which the church and lighthouse glisten, is still
called Striking Hill.
This St. Savatie was a monk from Novgorod living at the old convent of
Belozersk, in which he served the office of tonsurer--shaver of heads;
but longing for a life of greater solitude than his convent gave him,
he persuaded one of his brethren, named Valaam, to go up with him into
the deserts near the Polar Sea. Boyars from his country-side were then
going up into the north; and why should holy men not bear as much for
Christ as boyars and traders bore for pelf? On praying all night in
their chapels, these boyars and traders ran to their archbishop with
the cry: "Oh, give us leave, Vladika, to go forth, man and horse, and
win new lands for St. Sophia." Settling in Kem, in Suma, in Soroka,
and at other points, these men were adding a region larger than the
mother-country to the territories ruled by Novgorod the Great. The
story of these boyars stirred up Savatie to follow in their wake, and
labor in the desolate land which they were opening up.
Toiling through the virgin woods and sandy plains, Savatie and his
companion Valaam arrived on the Vieg (in 1429), and found a pious
monk, named German, who had also come from the south country. Looking
towards the east, these monks perceived, in the watery waste, a group
of isles; and trimming a light skiff, Savatie and German crossed the
sea. Landing on the largest isle, they made a "desert" on the shore of
a lakelet, lying at the foot of a hill on which birch and pine trees
grew to the top. Their lake was sheltered, the knoll was high; and
from the summit they could see the sprinkle of isles and their
embracing waves, as far as Orloff Cape to the south, the downs of Kem
on the west.
Savatie brought with him a picture of the Virgin, not then known to
possess miraculous virtues, which he hung up in a chapel built of
logs. Near to this chapel he made for himself and his companion a hut
of reeds and sticks, in which they lived in peace and prayer until the
rigor of the climate wore them out. After six years spent in solitude,
German sailed back to the Vieg; and Savatie, finding himself alone on
the rock, in that desert from which he had banished woman and love,
became afraid of dying without a priest being at hand to shrive and
put him beneath the grass. Getting into his skiff, he also crossed to
Soroka, where he obtained from Father Nathaniel, a prior who chanced
to visit that town, the bread and cup; and then, his work on earth
being done, he passed away to his eternal rest.
Laying him in the sands at Soroka, Nathaniel raised a chapel of pine
logs, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, above his grave; and there
Savatie would have lain forever, his name unknown, his saintly rank
unrecognized on earth, had he not fallen in the path of a man of
stronger and more enduring spirit.
One of the bold adventurers from Novgorod, named Gabriel, settling
with his wife Barbara in the new village of Tolvui, on the banks of
Lake Onega, had a son, whom he called Zosima, and devoted to God.
Zosima, a monk while he was yet a child, took his vows in the
monastery of Palaostrofsk, near his father's home; and on reaching the
age when he could act for himself, he divided his inheritance among
his kin, and taking up his pilgrim's staff departed for the north. At
Suma he fell in with German, who told him of the life he had lived six
years in his desert on the lonely rock. Zosima, taken by this tale,
persuaded German to show him the spot where he and Savatie had dwelt
so long. They crossed the sea. A lucky breeze bore them past Zaet,
into a small and quiet bay; and when they leaped on shore--then strewn
with boulders, and green with forest trees--they found themselves not
only on the salt sea, but close to a deep and lustrous lake, the
waters of which were sweet to the taste, and swarming with fish, the
necessary food of monks.
Kneeling on the sand in prayer, Zosima was nerved by a miraculous
vision to found a religious colony in that lonely island, even as
Marfa's people were founding secular colonies at Suma, Soroka, and
Kem. He saw, as in a dream, a bright and comely monastic pile, with
swelling domes and lofty turrets, standing on the brink of that lovely
sheet of water--henceforth to be known as the Holy Lake. Starting from
his knees, he told his companion, German, of the vision he had seen;
described the walls, the Sacred Gates, the clusters of spires and
domes; in a word, the convent in the splendor of its present form.
They cut down a pine, and framed it into a cross, which they planted
in the ground; in token that this island in the frozen deep belonged
to God and to His saints. This act of consecrating the isle took place
(in 1436) a year after St. Savatie died.
The monks erected cabins near this cross; in which cabins they dwelt,
about a mile apart, so as not to crowd upon each other in their desert
home. The sites are marked by chapels erected to perpetuate their
fame.
The tale of these young hermits living in their desert on the Frozen
Sea being noised abroad in cloisters, monks from all sides of the
north country came to join them; bringing strong thews and eager souls
to aid in their task of raising up in that wild region, and among
those savage tribes, a temple of the living God. In time a church grew
round and above the original cross; and as none of the hermits were in
holy orders, they sent a messenger to Yon, then archbishop of
Novgorod, asking him for a blessing on their work, and praying him to
send them a prior who could celebrate mass. Yon gave them his
benediction and his servant Pavel. Pavel travelled into the north, and
consecrated their humble church; but the climate was too hard for him
to bear. A second prior came out in Feodosie; a third prior in Yon;
both of whom staid some time in the Frozen Sea, and only went back to
Novgorod when they were broken in health and advanced in years.
When Yon, the third prior, left them, the fathers held a meeting to
consider their future course. Sixteen years had now passed by since
Zosima and German crossed the sea from Suma; ten or twelve years since
Pavel consecrated their humble church. In less than a dozen years
three priors had come and gone; and every one saw that monks who had
grown old in the Volkhoff district could not live in the Frozen Sea.
The brethren asked their archbishop to give them a prior from their
own more hardy ranks; and all these brethren joined in the prayer that
Zosima, leader of the colony from first to last, would take this
office of prior upon himself. His poor opinion of himself gave place
to a sense of the public good.
Marching on foot to Novgorod, a journey of more than a thousand miles,
through a country without a road, Zosima went up to the great city,
where he was received by the Vladika, and was ordained a priest. From
the mayor and chief boyars he obtained a more definite cession of the
isles than Prior Yon had been able to secure; and thus he came back to
his convent as pope and prior, with the fame of a holy man, to whom
nothing might be denied. Getting leave to remove the bones of Savatie
from Soroka to Solovetsk, he took up his body from the earth, and
finding it pure and fresh, he laid the incorruptible relics in the
crypt of his infant church.
More and more monks arrived in the lonely isles; and pilgrims from far
and near began to cross the sea; for the tomb of Savatie was said to
work miraculous cures. But as the monastery grew in fame and wealth,
the troubles of the world came down upon the prior and his monks. The
men of Kem began to see that this bank in the Frozen Sea was a
valuable prize; and the lords of Anzersk and Moksalma quarrelled with
the monks; disputing their right over the foreshores, and pressing
them with claims about the waifs and strays. At length, in his green
old age, Zosima girded up his loins, and taking his pastoral staff in
hand, set out for Novgorod, in the hope of seeing Marfa in person, and
of settling, once and forever, the question of his claim to these
rocks by asking for the lordship of Kem itself to be vested in the
prior of Solovetsk!
On a column of the great cathedral of St. Sophia, in the Kremlin of
Novgorod, a series of frescoes tells the story of this visit of St.
Zosima to the parent state. One picture takes the eye with a singular
and abiding force--a banquet in a noble hall, in which the table is
surrounded by headless guests.
Passing through the city from house to house, Zosima was received in
nearly all with honor, as became his years and fame; but not in all.
The boyars of Kem had friends in the city; and the Marfa's ear had
been filled with tales against his monkish guile and monkish greed.
From her door he was driven with scorn; and her house was that in
which he was most desirous of being received in peace. Knowing that he
could do nothing without her aid, Zosima set himself, by patient
waiting on events, to overcome her fury against the cause which he was
there to plead. At length, her feeling being subdued, she granted him
a new charter (dated 1470, and still preserved at Solovetsk),
confirming his right over all the lands, lakes, forests and
fore-shores of the Holy Isles, together with the lordship of Kem, made
over, then and for all coming time, to the service of God.
Before Zosima left the great city, Marfa invited him to her table,
where he was to take his leave, not only of herself, but of the chief
boyars. As the prior sat at meat, the company noticed that his face
was sad, that his eyes were fixed on space, that his soul seemed moved
by some unseen cause. "What is the matter?" cried the guests. He would
not speak; and when they pressed around him closely, they perceived
that burning drops were rolling down his cheeks. More eagerly than
ever, they demanded to know what he saw in his fixed and terrible
stare. "I see," said the monk, "six boyars at a feast, all seated at a
table without their heads!"
That dinner-party is the subject painted on the column in St. Sophia;
and the legend says that every man who sat with him that day at
Marfa's table had his head sliced off by Ivan the Third, when the
proud and ancient republic fell before the destroyer of the Golden
Horde.
Strengthened by his new titles, Zosima came back to Solovetsk a
prince; and the pile which he governed took the style, which it has
ever since borne, of
The Convent that Endureth Forever.
Zosima ruled his convent as prior for twenty-six years; and after a
hermitage of forty-two years on his lowly rock he passed away into his
rest.
On his dying couch he told his disciples that he was about to quit
them in the flesh, but only in the flesh. He promised to be with them
in the spirit; watching in the same cells, and kneeling at the same
graves. He bade them thank God daily for the promise that their
convent should endure forever; safe as a rock, and sacred as a
shrine--even though it stood in the centre of a raging sea--in the
reach of pitiless foes. And then he passed away--the second of these
local saints--leaving, as his legacy to mankind, the temporal and
spiritual germs of this great sanctuary in the Frozen Sea.
About that time the third monk also died--German, the companion of
Savatie, in his cabin near Striking Hill; afterwards of Zosima, in his
hut by the Holy Lake. He died at Novgorod, to which city he had again
returned from the north. His bones were begged from the monks in whose
grounds they lay, and being carried to Solovetsk, were laid in a
shrine near the graves of his ancient and more famous friends.
Such was the origin of the convent over which the Archimandrite Feofan
now rules and reigns.
CHAPTER XII.
A MONASTIC HOUSEHOLD.
My letter from his Sanctity of Archangel having been sent in to
Feofan, Archimandrite of Solovetsk, an invitation to the palace
arrives in due form by the mouth of Father Hilarion; who may be
described to the lay world as the Archimandrite's minister for secular
affairs. Father Hilarion is attended by Father John, who seems to have
taken upon himself the office of my companion-in-chief. Attiring
myself in befitting robes, we pass through the Sacred Gates, and after
pausing for a moment to glance at the models of Peter's yacht and
frigate, there laid up, and to notice some ancient frescoes which line
the passage, we mount a flight of steps, and find ourselves standing
at the Archimandrite's door.
The chief of this monastery is a great man; one of the greatest men in
the Russian Church; higher, as some folks say, than many a man who
calls himself bishop, and even metropolite. Since the days of Peter
the Great, the monastery of Solovetsk has been an independent
spiritual power; owning no master in the Church, and answering to no
authority save that of the Holy Governing Synod.
Like an archbishop, the Archimandrite of Solovetsk has the right to
bless his congregation by waving three tapers in his right hand over
two tapers in his left. He lives in a palace; he receives four
thousand rubles a year in money; and the cost of his house, his table,
his vestments, and his boats, comes out of the monastic fund. He has a
garden, a vineyard, and a country-house; and his choice of a cell in
the sunniest nooks of these sacred isles. His personal rank is that of
a prince, with a dignity which no secular rank can give; since he
reigns alike over the bodies and the souls of men.
Dressed in his cowl and frock, on which hangs a splendid sapphire
cross, Feofan, a small, slight man--with the ascetic face, the
womanlike curls, and vanishing figure, which you note in nearly all
these celibate priests--advances to meet us near the door, and after
blessing Father John, and shaking me by the hand, he leads us to an
inner room, hung with choice prints, and warmed by carpets and rugs,
where he places me on the sofa by his side, while the two fathers
stand apart, in respectful attitude, as though they were in church.
"You are not English?" he inquires, in a tender tone, just marked by a
touch--a very light touch--of humor.
"Yes, English, certainly."
A turn of his eye, made slowly, and by design, directs my attention to
his finger, which reclines on an object hardly to have been expected
on an Archimandrite's table; an iron shell! The Tower-mark proves that
it must have been fired from an English gun. A faint smile flits
across the Archimandrite's face. There it stands; an English shell,
unburst; the stopper drawn; and two plugs near it on a tray. That
missile, it is clear, must have fallen into some soft bed of sand or
peat.
"You are the first pilgrim who ever came from your country to
Solovetsk," says Feofan, smiling. "One man came before you in a
steamship; he was an engineer--one Anderson; you know him, maybe? No!
He was a good man--he minded his engines well; but he could not live
on fish and quass--he asked for beef and beer; and when we told him we
had none to give him, he went away. No other English ever came."
He passes on to talk of the Holy Sepulchre and the Russian convent
near the Jaffa Gate.
"You are welcome to Solovetsk," he says at parting; "see what you wish
to see, go where you wish to go, and come to me when you like."
Nothing could be sweeter than his voice, nothing softer than his
smile, as he spake these words; and seeing the twinkle in his eye, as
we stand near the English shell, I also smile and add: "On the
mantel-piece of my writing-room in London there lies just such another
shell, a trifle thinner in the girth."
"Yes?" he asks, a little curious--for a monk.
"My shell has the Russian mark; it was fired from Sebastopol, and
picked up by a friend of my own in his trench before the Russian
lines."
Feofan laughs, so far as an Archimandrite ever laughs--in the eyes and
about the mouth. From this hour his house and household are at my
disposal--his boat, his carriage, and his driver; every thing is done
to make my residence in the convent pleasant; and every night my host
is good enough to receive from his officers a full report of what I
have seen and what I have said during the day!
Three hundred monks of all classes reside on the Holy Isle. The chief
is, of course, the Archimandrite; next to him come forty monks, who
are also popes; then come seventy or eighty monks who wear the hood
and have taken the final vows; after these orders come the postulants,
acolytes, singers, servants. Lodgers, scholars, and hired laymen fall
into a second class.
These brethren are of all ages and conditions, from the pretty child
who serves at table to the decrepit father who can not leave his cell;
from the monk of noble birth and ample fortune to the brother who
landed on these islands as a tramp. They wear the same habit, eat at
the same board, listen to the same chants, and live the same life.
Each brother has his separate cell, in which he sleeps and works; but
every one, unless infirm with years and sickness, must appear in
chapel at the hour of prayer, in refectory at the hour of meals. Hood
and gown, made of the same serge, and cut in the same style, must be
worn by all, excepting only by the priest who reads the service for
the day. They suffer their beards and locks to grow, and spend much
time in combing and smoothing these abundant growths. A flowing beard
is the pride of monks and men; but while the beard is coming, a young
fellow combs and parts his hair with all the coquetry of a girl. When
looking at a bevy of boys in a church, their heads uncovered, their
locks, shed down the centre, hanging about their shoulders, you might
easily mistake them for singers of the sweeter sex.
Not many of these fathers could be truly described as ordinary men. A
few are pure fanatics, who fear to lose their souls; still more are
men with a natural calling for religious life. A goodly list are
prisoners of the church, sent up from convents in the south and west.
These last are the salt and wine of Solovetsk; the men who keep it
sweet and make it strong. The offense for which they suffer is too
much zeal: a learned and critical spirit, a disposition to find fault,
a craving for reform, a wish to fall back on the purity of ancient
times. For such disorders of the mind an ordinary monk has no
compassion; and a journey to the desert of Solovetsk is thought to be
for such diseases the only cure.
An Archimandrite, appointed to his office by the Holy Governing Synod,
must be a man of learning and ability, able to instruct his brethren
and to rule his house. He is expected to burn like a shining light, to
fast very often, to pray very much, to rise very early, and to live
like a saint. The brethren keep an eye upon their chief. If he is hard
with himself he may be hard with them; but woe to him if he is weak in
the flesh--if he wears fine linen about his throat, if savory dishes
steam upon his board, if the riumka--that tiny glass out of which
whisky is drunk--goes often to his lips. In every monk about his
chamber he finds a critic; in nearly every one he fears a spy. It is
not easy to satisfy them all. One father wishes for a sterner life,
another thinks the discipline too strict. By every post some letters
of complaint go out, and every member of the Holy Governing Synod may
be told in secret of the Archimandrite's sins. If he fails to win his
critics, the appeals against his rule increase in number and in
boldness, till at length inquiry is begun, bad feeling is provoked on
every side, and the offending chieftain is promoted--for the sake of
peace--to some other place.
The Archimandrite of Solovetsk has the assistance of three great
officers, who may be called his manager, his treasurer, and his
custodian; officers who must be not only monks but popes.
Father Hilarion is the manager, with the duty of conducting the more
worldly business of his convent. It is he who lodges the guests when
they arrive, who looks after the ships and docks, who employs the
laborers and conducts the farms, who sends out smacks to fish, who
deals with skippers, who buys and sells stores, who keeps the
workshops in order, and who regulates the coming and going of the
pilgrim's boat. It is he who keeps church and tomb in repair, who sees
that the fathers are warmly clad, who takes charge of the buildings
and furniture, who superintends the kitchen, who keeps an eye on
corridor and yard, who orders books and prints, who manages the
painting-room and the photographer's office, who inspects the cells,
and provides that every one has a bench, a press, a looking-glass, and
a comb.
Father Michael is the treasurer, with the duty of receiving all gifts
and paying all accounts. The income of the monastery is derived from
two sources: from the sale of what is made in the monkish workshops,
and from the gifts of pilgrims and of those who send offerings by
pilgrims. No one can learn how much they receive from either source;
for the receiving-boxes are placed in corners, and the contributor is
encouraged to conceal from his left hand what his right hand drops in.
Forty thousand rubles a year has been mentioned to me as the sum
received in gifts; but five thousand pounds must be far below the
amount of money passing in a year under Father Michael's eye. It is
probably eight or ten. The charities of these monks are bounded only
by the power of the people to come near them; and in the harder class
of winters the peasants and fishermen push through the floes of ice
from beyond Orloff Cape and Kandalax Bay in search of a basket of
convent bread. These folks are always fed when they arrive, are always
supplied with loaves when they depart. The schools, too, cost no
little; for the monks receive all boys who come to them--sent as they
hold, by the Father whom they serve.
Father Alexander is the custodian, with the duty of keeping the
monastic wardrobe, together with the ritual books, the charters and
papers, the jewels and the altar plate. His office is in the sacristy,
with the treasures of which he is perfectly familiar, from the letter,
in Cyrilian character and Slavonic phrase, by which Marfa of Novgorod
gave this islet to the monks, down to that pious reliquary in which
are kept some fragments of English shells; kept with as much
veneration as bones of saints and chips from the genuine cross!
CHAPTER XIII.
A PILGRIM'S DAY.
A pilgrim's day begins in the early morning, and lengthens late into
the night.
At two o'clock, when it has hardly yet grown dark in our cells, a monk
comes down the passage, tinkling his bell and droning out, "Rise and
come to prayer." Starting at his cry, we huddle on our clothes, and
rush from our hot rooms, heated by stoves, into the open air; men and
women, boys and girls, boatmen and woodmen, hurrying through the night
towards the Sacred Gates.
At half-past two the first matins commence in the new church--the
Miracle Church--dedicated to the Victress, Mother of God; in which lie
the bones of St. Savatie and St. Zosima, in the corner, as the highest
place. A hundred lamps are lit, and the wall-screen of pictured saints
glows richly in our sleepy eyes. Men and women, soldiers and peasants,
turn into that sacred corner where the saints repose, cross themselves
seven times, bow their foreheads to the ground, and kiss the pavement
before the shrine.
Falling into our places near the altar-screen; arranging ourselves in
files, rank behind rank, in open order, so that each can kneel and
kiss the ground without pushing against his neighbor; we stand erect,
uncovered, while the pope recites his office, and the monks respond
their chant. These matins are not over until four o'clock.
A second service opens in the old cathedral at half-past three, and
lasts until half-past five; and when the first pope has given his
blessing, some of the more ardent pilgrims rush from the Virgin's
church to the cathedral, where they stand in prayer, and kneel to kiss
the stones for ninety minutes more; at the end of which time they
receive a second benediction from a second pope.
An hour is now spent by the pilgrims in either praying at the tombs of
saints, or pacing a long gallery, so contrived as to connect the
several churches and other monastic buildings by a covered way. Along
the walls of this gallery rude and early Russian artists have painted
the joys of heaven, the pains of purgatory, and the pangs of hell.
These pictures seize the eyes of my fellow-pilgrims, though in quaint
and dramatic terror they sink below the level of such old work in the
Gothic cloisters of the Rhine. A Russian painter has no variety of
invention; a devil is to him a monkey with a spiked tail and a tongue
of flame; and hell itself is only a hot place in which sinners are
either fried by a fiend, or chawed up, flesh and bone, by a monstrous
bear. Yet, children sometimes swoon, and women go mad from fright, on
seeing these threats of a future state. My own poor time is given to
scanning a miraculous picture of Jerusalem, said to have been painted
on the staircase by a monk of Solovetsk, as a vision of the Holy City,
seen by him in a dream. After studying the details for a while, I
recognize in this vision of the holy man a plan of Olivet and Zion
copied from an old Greek print!
All this time the pilgrims are bound to fast.
At seven o'clock the bells announce early mass, and we repair to the
Miracle Church, where, after due crossings and prostration before the
tomb, we fall into rank as before, and listen for an hour and a half
to the sacred ritual, chanted with increasing fire.
When this first mass is over, the time being nearly nine o'clock, the
weaker brethren may indulge themselves with a cup of tea; but the
better pilgrim denies himself this solace, as a temptation of the Evil
Spirit; and even his weaker brother has not much time to dally with
the fumes of his darling herb. The great bell in the convent yard, a
gift of the reigning Emperor, and one more witness to the year of
wonders, warns us that the highest service of the day is close at
hand.
Precisely at nine o'clock the monks assemble in the cathedral to
celebrate high mass; and the congregation being already met, the
tapers are lit, the deacon begins to read, the clergy take up the
responses, and the officiating priest, arrayed in his shining cope and
cap, recites the old and mystical forms of Slavonic prayer and praise.
Two hours by the clock we stand in front of that golden shrine; stand
on the granite pavement--all uncovered, many unshod--listening with
ravished ears to what is certainly the noblest ceremonial music of the
Russian Church.
High mass being sung and said, we ebb back slowly from the cathedral
into the long gallery, where we have a few minutes more of purgatorial
fire, and then a monk announces dinner, and the devoutest pilgrim in
the band accepts his signal with a thankful look.
The dining-hall to which we adjourn with some irregular haste is a
vaulted chamber below the cathedral, and in any other country than
Russia would be called a crypt. But men must build according to their
clime. The same church would not serve for winter and summer, on
account of the cold and heat; and hence a sacred edifice is nearly
always divided into an upper and a lower church; the upper tier being
used in summer, the lower tier in winter. Our dining-hall at Solovetsk
is the winter church.
Long tables run down the room, and curl round the circular shaft which
sustains the cathedral floor. On these tables the first course is
already laid; a tin plate for each guest, in which lies a wooden
spoon, a knife and fork; and by the side of this tin platter a pound
of rye bread. The pilgrims are expected to dine in messes of four,
like monks. A small tin dish is laid between each mess, containing one
salted sprat, divided into four bits by a knife, and four small slices
of raw onion. To each mess is given a copper tureen of sour quass, and
a dish of salt codfish, broken into small lumps, boiled down, and left
to cool.
A bell rings briskly; up we start, cross ourselves seven times, bow
towards the floor, sit down again. The captain of each mess throws
pepper and salt into the dish, and stirs up our pottage with the ladle
out of which he drinks his quass. A second bell rings; we dip our
wooden ladles into the dish of cod. A reader climbs into the desk, and
drawls the story of some saint, while a youth carries round a basket
of white bread, already blessed by the priest and broken into bits.
Each pilgrim takes his piece and eats it, crossing himself, time after
time, until the morsel gets completely down his throat.
A third bell rings. Hush of silence; sound of prayer. Serving-men
appear; our platters are swept away; a second course is served. The
boys who wait on us, with rosy cheeks, smooth chins, and hanging
locks, look very much like girls. This second course, consisting of a
tureen of cabbage-soup, takes no long time to eat. A new reader mounts
the desk, and gives us a little more life of saint. A fourth bell
jangles; much more crossing takes place; the serving-men rush in; our
tables are again swept clean.
Another course is served; a soup of fresh herrings, caught in the
convent bay; the fish very good and sweet. Another reader; still more
life of saint; and then a fifth bell rings.
A fourth and last course now comes in; a dainty of barley paste,
boiled rather soft, and eaten with sour milk. Another reader; still
more life of saint; and then sixth bell. The pilgrims rise; the reader
stops, not caring to finish his story; and our meal is done.
Our meal, but not the ritual of that meal. Rising from our bench, we
fall once more into rank and file; the women, who have dined in a room
apart, crowd back into the crypt; and we join our voices in a sacred
song. Then we stand for a little while in silence, each with his head
bent down, as humbling ourselves before the screen, during which a
pope distributes to each pilgrim a second morsel of consecrated bread.
Brisk bell rings again; the monks raise a psalm of thanksgiving; a
pope pronounces the benediction; and then the diners go their way
refreshed with the bread and fish.
It is now near twelve o'clock. The next church service will not be
held until a quarter to four in the afternoon. In the interval we have
the long cloister to walk in; the holy lake to see; the shrine of St.
Philip to inspect; the tombs of good monks to visit; the priestly
robes and monastic jewels to admire; with other distractions to devour
the time. We go off, each his own way; some into the country, which is
full of tombs and shrines of the lesser saints; others to lave their
limbs in the holy lake; not a few to the cells of monks who vend
crosses, amulets, and charms. A Russian is a believer in stones, in
rings, in rosaries, in rods; for he bears about him a hundred relics
of his ancient pagan creeds. His favorite amulet is a cross, which he
can buy in brass for a kopeck; one form for a man, a second form for a
woman; the masculine form being Nikon's cross, with a true Greek cross
in relief; the feminine form being a mixture of the two. Once tied
round the neck, this amulet is never to be taken off, on peril of
sickness and sudden death. To drop it is a fault, to lose it is a sin.
A second talisman is a bone ball, big as a pea, hollow, drilled and
fitted with a screw. A drop of mercury is coaxed into the hole, and
the screw being turned, the charm is perfect, and the ball is fastened
to the cross. This talisman protects the wearer from contagion in the
public baths.
Some pilgrims go in boats to the farther isles; to Zaet, where two
aged monks reside, and a flock of sheep browses on the herbage; to
Moksalma, a yet more secular spot, where the cattle feed, and the
poultry cluck and crow, in spite of St. Savatie's rule. These islets
supply the convent with milk and eggs--in which holy men rejoice, as a
relief from fish--in nature's own old-fashioned ways.
Not a few of the pilgrims, finding that a special pope has been
appointed to show things to their English guest, perceive that the way
to see sights is to follow that pope. They have to be told--in a
kindly voice--that they are not to follow him into the Archimandrite's
room. To-day they march in his train into the wardrobe of the convent,
where the copes, crowns, staffs and crosses employed in these church
services are kept; a rich and costly collection of robes, embroidered
with flowers and gold, and sparkling with rubies, diamonds and pearls.
Many of these robes are gifts of emperors and tsars. One of the
costliest is the gift of Ivan the Terrible; but even this splendid
garment pales before a gift of Alexander, the reigning prince, who
sent the Archimandrite--in remembrance of the Virgin's victory--a full
set of canonicals, from crown and staff to robe and shoe.
Exactly at a quarter before four o'clock, a bell commands us to
return; for vespers are commencing in the Miracle Church. Again we
kneel at the tombs and kiss the stones, the hangings, and the iron
rails; after which we fall in as before, and listen while the vespers
are intoned by monks and boys. This service concludes at half-past
four. Adjourning to the long gallery, we have another look at the
fires of purgatory and the abodes of bliss. Five minutes before six we
file into the cathedral for second vespers, and remain there standing
and uncovered--some of us unshod--until half-past seven.
At eight the supper-bell rings. Our company gathers at the welcome
sound; the monks form a procession; the pilgrims trail on; all moving
with a hungry solemnity to the crypt, where we find the long tables
groaning, as at dinner, with the pound of black bread, the salt sprat,
the onion parted into four small pieces with a knife, and the copper
tureen of quass. Our supper is the dinner served up afresh, with the
same prayers, the same bowing and crossing, the same bell-ringing, and
the same life of saint. The only difference is, that in the evening we
have no barley-paste and no stale milk.
When every one is filled and the fragments are picked up, we rise to
our feet, recite a thanksgiving, and join the fathers in their evening
song. A pope pronounces a blessing, and then we are free to go into
our cells.
A pilgrim who can read, and may happen to have good books about him,
is expected, on retiring to his cell, to read through a Psalm of
David, and to ponder a little on the Lives of Saints. The convent
gates are closed at nine o'clock; when it is thought well for the
pilgrim to be in bed.
At two in the morning a monk will come into his lobby, tinkle the
bell, and call him to the duties of another day.
CHAPTER XIV.
PRAYER AND LABOR.
But if the hours given up to prayer at Solovetsk are many, the hours
given up to toil are more. This convent is a hive of industry, not
less remarkable for what it does in the way of work than for what it
is in the way of art and prayer.
"Pray and work" was the maxim of monastic houses, when monastic houses
had a mission in the West. "Pray and work," said Peter the Great to
his council. But such a maxim is not in harmony with the existing
system; not in harmony with the Byzantine Church; and what you find at
Solovetsk is traceable to an older and a better source. No monk in
this sanctuary leads an idle life. Not only the fathers who are not
yet popes, but many of those who hold the staff and give the
benediction, devote their talents to the production of things which
may be useful in the church, in the refectory, and in the cell. A few
make articles for sale in the outer world; such articles as bread,
clothes, rosaries and spoons. All round these ramparts, within the
walls, you find a row of workshops, in which there is a hum of labor
from early dawn until long after dark; forges, dairies, salting-rooms,
studies, ship-yards, bake-houses, weaving-sheds, rope-walks,
sewing-rooms, fruit-stores, breweries, boot-stalls, and the like,
through all the forms which industry takes in a civilized age. These
monks appear to be masters of every craft. They make nearly every
thing you can name, from beads to frigates; and they turn out every
thing they touch in admirable style. No whiter bread is baked, no
sweeter quass is brewed, than you can buy in Solovetsk. To go with
Father Hilarion on his round of inspection is to meet a dozen
surprises face to face. At first the whole exhibition is like a dream;
and you can hardly fancy that such things are being done by a body of
monks, in a lonely islet, locked up from the world for eight months in
the twelve by storms of sleet and deserts of ice.
These monks make seal-skin caps and belts; they paint in oil and carve
in wood; they cure and tan leather; they knit woollen hose; they cast
shafts of iron; they wind and spin thread; they polish stones; they
cut out shoes and felts; they mould pewter plates; they dry fruit;
they fell and trim forest trees; they clip paper flowers; they build
carts and sledges; they embroider capes and bands; they bake bricks;
they weave baskets and panniers of silver bark; they quarry and hew
blocks of stone; they paint soup-ladles; they design altar-pieces,
chapels, and convents; they refine bees'-wax; they twist cord and
rope; they forge anchors and marling-spikes; they knit and sew, and
ply their needles in every branch of useful and decorative art. In all
these departments of industry, the thing which they turn out is an
example of honest work.
Many of the fathers find a field for their talents on the farm: in
breeding cattle, in growing potatoes, in cutting grass, in shearing
sheep, in rearing poultry, in churning butter, and making cheese. A
few prefer the more poetic labor of the garden: pruning grapes,
bedding strawberries, hiving bees, and preserving fruit. The honey
made at Mount Alexander is pure and good, the wax is also white and
fine.
The convent bakehouse is a thing to see. Boats run over from every
village on the coast to buy convent bread; often to beg it; and every
pilgrim who comes to pray takes with him one loaf as a parting gift.
This convent bread is of two sorts--black and white--leavened and
unleavened--domestic and consecrated. The first is cheap, and eaten at
every meal; the second is dear, and eaten as an act of grace. Both
kinds are good. A consecrated loaf is small, weighing six or eight
ounces, and is stamped with a sacred sign and blessed by a pope. The
stamp is a cross, with a legend running round the border in old
Slavonic type. These small white loaves of unleavened bread are highly
prized by pious people; and a man who visits such a monastery as
either Solovetsk, St. George, or Troitsa, can not bring back to his
servants a gift more precious in their eyes than a small white loaf.
The brewery is no less perfect in its line than the bakehouse. Quass
is the Russian ale and beer in one; the national drink; consumed by
all classes, mixed with nearly every dish. Solovetsk has a name and
fame for this Russian brew.
Connected with these good things of the table are the workshops for
carving platters and painting spoons. The arts of life are simple in
these northern wilds; forks are seldom seen; and knives are not much
used. The instrument by which a man mostly helps himself to his dinner
is a spoon. Nearly all his food is boiled; his cabbage-soup, his
barley mess, his hash of salt-cod, his dish of sour milk. A deep
platter lies in the centre of his table, and his homely guests sit
round it, armed with their capacious spoons. Platter and spoon are
carved of wood, and sometimes they are painted, with skill and taste;
though the better sorts are kept by pilgrims rather as keepsakes than
for actual use.
A branch of industry allied to carving spoons and platters is that of
twisting baskets and panniers into shape. Crockery in the forest is
rude and dear, and in a long land-journey the weight of three or four
pots and cups would be a serious strain. From bark of trees they weave
a set of baskets for personal and domestic use, which are lighter than
cork and handier than tin. You close them by a lid, and carry them by
a loop. They are perfectly dry and sweet; with just a flavor, but no
more, of the delicious resin of the tree. They hold milk. You buy them
of all sizes, from that of a pepper-box to that of a water-jar;
obtaining a dozen for a few kopecks.
The panniers are bigger and less delicate, made for rough passage over
stony roads and through bogs of mire. These panniers are fitted with
compartments, like a vintner's crate, in which you can stow away
bottles of wine and insinuate knives and forks. In the open part of
your pannier it is well (if you are packing for a long drive) to have
an assortment of bark baskets, in which to carry such trifles as
mustard, cream, and salt.
Among the odds and ends of workshops into which you drop, is that of
the weaving-shed, in one of the turrets on the convent wall; a turret
which is noticeable not only for the good work done in the looms, but
for the part which it had to play in the defense of Solovetsk against
the English fleet. The shot which is said to have driven off the
"Brisk" was fired from this Weaver's Tower.
Peering above a sunny corner of the rampart stands the photographic
chamber, and near to this chamber, in a new range of buildings, are
the cells in which the painters and enamellers toil. The sun makes
pictures of any thing in his range; boats, islets, pilgrims, monks;
but the artists toiling in these cells are all employed in devotional
art. Some are only copiers; and the most expert are artists only in a
conventional sense. This country is not yet rich in art, except in
that hard Byzantine style which Nikon the Patriarch allowed in private
houses, and enforced in convent, shrine, and church.
But these fathers pride themselves, not without cause, on being
greater in their works by sea than even in their works by land. Many
of them live on board, and take to the water as to their mother's
milk. They are rich in boats, in rigging, and in nets. They wind
excellent rope and cord. They know how to light and buoy dangerous
points and armlets. They keep their own lighthouses. They build
lorchas and sloops; and they have found by trial that a steamship can
be turned off the stocks at Solovetsk, of which every part, from the
smallest brass nail to the mainmast (with the sole exception of her
engines), is the produce of their toil.
That vessel is called the "Hope." Her crew is mainly a crew of monks;
and her captain is not only a monk--like Father John--but an actual
pope. My first sight of this priestly skipper is in front of the royal
gates where he is celebrating mass.
This reverend father takes me after service to see his vessel and the
dock in which she lies. Home-built and rigged, the "Hope" has charms
in my eyes possessed by very few ships. A steamer made by monks in the
Frozen Sea, is, in her way, as high a feat of mind as the spire of
Notre Dame in Antwerp, as the cathedral front at Wells. The thought of
building that steamer was conceived in a monkish brain; the lines were
fashioned by a monkish pen; monks felled the trees, and forged the
bolts, and wove the canvas, and curled the ropes. Monks put her
together; monks painted her cabin; monks stuffed her seats and
pillows. Monks launched her on the sea, and, since they have launched
her, they have sailed in her from port to port.
"How did you learn your trade of skipper?"
The father smiles. He is a young fellow--younger than Father John; a
fellow of thirty or thirty-two, with swarthy cheek, black eye, and
tawny mane; a man to play the pirate in some drama of virtuous love.
"I was a seaman in my youth," he says, "and when we wanted a skipper
in the convent, I went over to Kem, where we have a school of
navigation, and got the certificate of a master; that entitled me to
command my ship."
"The council of that school are not very strict?"
"No; not with monks. We have our own ways; we labor in the Lord; and
He protects us in what we do for Him."
"Through human means?"
"No; by His own right hand, put forth under all men's eyes. You see,
the first time that we left the convent for Archangel, we were weak in
hands and strange to our work. A storm came on; the 'Hope' was driven
on shore. Another crew would have taken to their boats and lost their
ship, if not their lives. We prayed to the Most Pure Mother of God: at
first she would not hear us on account of our sins; but we would not
be denied, and sang our psalms until the wind went down."
"You were still ashore?"
"Yes; grooved in a bed of sand; but when the wind veered round, the
ship began to heave and stir. We tackled her with ropes and got her
afloat once more. Slava Bogu! It was her act!"
The dock of which Father John spoke with pride turns out to be not a
dock only, but a dry dock! Now, a dock, even where it is a common
dock, is one of those signs by which one may gauge--as by the strength
of a city wall, the splendor of a court of justice and the beauty of a
public garden--the height to which a people have attained. In Russia
docks are extremely rare. Not a dozen ports in the empire can boast a
dock. Archangel has no dock; Astrachan has no dock; Rostoff has no
dock. It is only in such cities as Riga and Odessa, built and occupied
by foreigners, that you find such things. The dry dock at Solovetsk is
the only sample of its kind in the whole of Russia Proper! Cronstadt
has a dry dock; but Cronstadt is in the Finnish waters--a German port,
with a German name. The only work of this kind existing on Russian
ground is the product of monkish enterprise and skill.
Priests take their share in all these labors. When a monk enters into
orders he is free to devote himself, if he chooses, to the Church
service only, since the Holy Governing Synod recognizes the right of a
pope to a maintenance in his office; but in the Convent of Solovetsk,
a priest rarely confines his activity to his sacred duties. Work is
the sign of a religious life. If any man shows a talent for either art
or business, he is excited by the praise of his fellows and superiors
to pursue the call of his genius, devoting the produce of his labor to
the glory of God. One pope is a farmer, a second a painter, a third a
fisherman; this man is a collector of simples, that a copier of
manuscripts, and this, again, a binder of books.
Of these vocations that of the schoolmaster is not the least coveted.
All children who come to Solovetsk are kept for a year, if not for a
longer time. The lodging is homely and the teaching rough; for the
schools are adapted to the state of the country; and the food and
sleeping-rooms are raised only a little above the comforts of a
peasant's home. No one is sent away untaught; but only a few are kept
beyond a year. If a man likes to remain and work in the convent he can
hire himself out as a laborer, either in the fishing-boats or on the
farms. He dines in summer, like the monks, on bread, fish and quass;
in winter he is provided with salt mutton, cured on the farm--a luxury
his masters may not touch. Many of these boys remain for life, living
in a celibate state, like the monks; but sure of a dinner and a bed,
safe from the conscription, and free from family cares. Some of them
take vows. If they go back into the world they are likely to find
places on account of their past; in any case they can shift for
themselves, since a lad who has lived a few years in this convent is
pretty sure to be able to fish and farm, to cook his own dinner, and
to mend his own boots.
CHAPTER XV.
BLACK CLERGY.
All men of the higher classes in Russia talk of their Black Clergy as
a body of worthless fellows; idle, ignorant, profligate; set apart by
their vows as unsocial; to whom no terms should be offered, with whom
no capitulations need be kept. "Away with them, root and branch!" is a
general cry, delivered by young and liberal Russians in the undertone
of a fixed resolve.
The men who raise this cry are not simply scoffers and scorners,
making war on religious ideas and ecclesiastical institutions. Only
too often they are men who love their church, who support their parish
priests, and who wish to plant their country in the foremost line of
Christian states. Russia, they say, possesses ten thousand monks; and
these ten thousand monks they would hand over to a drill sergeant and
convert into regiments of the line.
This rancor of the educated classes towards the monks--a rancor roused
and fed by their undying hatred of reforms in Church and State--compels
one to mark the extent and study the sources of monastic power. This
study will take us far and wide: though it will also bring us in the
end to Solovetsk once more.
"A desert dotted with cloisters," would be no untrue description of
the country spreading southward from the Polar Sea to the Tartar
Steppe. In New Russia, in the khanates of Kazan and Crimea, in the
steppes of the Lower Volga, and in the wastes of Siberia, it would not
be true. But Great Russia is a paradise of monks. In the vast regions
stretching from Kem to Belgorod--an eagle's flight from north to south
of a thousand miles--from Pskoff on Lake Peipus, to Vasil on the
Middle Volga--a similar flight from west to east of seven hundred
miles--the land is everywhere bright with cloisters, musical with
monastic bells.
Nothing on this earth's surface can be drearier than a Russian forest,
unless it be a Russian plain. The forest is a growth of stunted birch
and pine; the trees of one height and girth; the fringe of black
shoots unvaried save by some break of bog, some length of colorless
lake. The plain is a stretch of moor, without a swell, without a tree,
without a town, for perhaps a hundred leagues; on which the grass, if
grass such herbage can be called, is brown; while the village, if such
a scatter of cabins can be called by a name so tender and picturesque,
is nothing but log and mud. A traveller's eye would weary, and his
heart would sicken, at the long succession of such lines, were it not
that here and there, in the opening of some forest glade, on the ridge
of some formless plain, the radiant cross and sparkling towers of a
convent spring towards heaven; a convent with its fringe of verdure,
its white front, its clustering domes and chains. The woods round
Kargopol, the marshes near Lake Ilmen, and the plains of Moscow, are
alive with light and color; while the smaller convents on river bank
and in misty wood, being railed and painted, look like works of art.
One of my sweetest recollections in a long, dull journey, is that of
our descent into the valley of Siya, when we sighted the great
monastery, lying in a watery dell amidst groves of trees, with the
rays of a setting sun on her golden cross and her shining domes--a
happy valley and a consecrated home; not to speak of such trifles as
the clean cell and the wholesome bread which a pilgrim finds within
her walls!
The old cities of Great Russia--Novgorod, Moscow, Pskoff,
Vladimir--are much richer in monastic institutions than their rivals
of a later time. For leagues above and leagues below the ancient
capital of Russia, the river Volkhoff, on the banks of which it
stands, is bright with these old mansions of the Church. Novgorod
enriched her suburbs with the splendid Convents of St. George, St.
Cyril, and of St. Anton of Rome. Moscow lies swathed in a belt and
mantle of monastic houses--Simonoff, Donskoi, Danieloff, Alexiefski,
Ivanofski, and many more; the belfries and domes of which lighten the
wonderful panorama seen from the Sparrow Hills. Pskoff has her
glorious Convent of the Catacombs, all but rivalling that of Kief.
Within the walls, these cloisters are no less splendid than the
promise from without. Their altars and chapels are always fine, the
refectories neat and roomy, the sacristies rich in crosses and
priestly robes. Many fine pictures--fine of their school--adorn the
screens and the royal gates. Nearly all possess portraits of the
Mother and Child encased in gold, and some have lamps and croziers
worth their weight in sterling coin. The greater part of what is
visible of Russian wealth appears to hang around these shrines.
These old monastic houses sprang out of the social life around them.
They were centres of learning, industry, and art. A convent was a
school, and in these schools a special excellence was sought and won.
This stamp has never been effaced; and many of the convents still
aspire to excellence in some special craft. The Convent of St. Sergie,
near Strelna, is famed for music; the New Monastery, near Kherson, for
melons; the Troitsa, near Moscow, for carving; the Catacombs, near
Kief, for service-books.
In the belfry of the old Cathedral of St. Sophia at Novgorod you are
shown a chamber which was formerly used as a treasure-room by the
citizens--in fact, as their place of safety and their tower of
strength. You enter it through a series of dark and difficult
passages, barred by no less than twelve iron doors; each door to be
unfastened by bolt and bar, secured in the catches under separate lock
and key. In this strong place the burghers kept, in times of peril,
their silver plate, their costly icons, and their ropes of pearl. A
robber would not--and a boyar dared not--force the sanctuary of God.
Each convent was, in this respect, a smaller St. Sophia; and every man
who laid up gold and jewels in such a bank could sleep in peace.
"You must understand," said the antiquary of Novgorod, as we paddled
in our boat down the Volkhoff, "that in ancient times a convent was a
home--a family house. A man who made money by trade was minded in his
old age to retire from the city and end his days in peace. In England
such a man would buy him a country-house in the neighborhood of his
native town, in which he would live with his wife and children until
he died. In a country like Old Russia, with brigands always at his
gates, the man who saved money had to put his wealth under the
protection of his church. Selecting a pleasant site, he would build
his house in the name of his patron saint, adorn it with an altar,
furnish it with a kitchen, dormitory, and cellar, and taking with him
his wife, his children, and his pope, would set up his tent in that
secure and comfortable place for the remainder of his days on earth."
"Could such a man have his wife and children near him?"
"Near him! With him; not only in his chapel but in his cell. The
convent was his home--his country-house; and at his death descended to
his son, who had probably become a monk. In some such fashion, many of
the prettiest of these smaller convents on the Volkhoff came to be."
Half the convents in Great Russia were established as country-houses;
the other half as deserts--like Solovetsk; and many a poor fellow
toiled like Zosima who has not been blessed with Zosima's fame.
But such a thing is possible, even now; for Russia has not yet passed
beyond the legendary and heroic periods of her growth. The latest case
is that of the new desert founded at Gethsemane, on the plateau of the
Troitsa, near Moscow; one of the most singular notes of the present
time.
In the year 1803 was born in a log cabin, in a small village called
Prechistoe (Very Clean), near the city of Vladimir, a male serf, so
obscure that his family name has perished. For many years he lived on
his lord's estate, like any other serf, marrying in his own class
(twice), and rearing three strapping sons. At thirty-seven he was
freed by his owner; when he moved from his village to Troitsa, took
the name of Philip, put on cowl and gown, and dug for himself a vault
in the earth. In this catacomb he spent five years of his life, until
he found a more congenial home among the convent graves, where he
lived for twenty years. Too fond of freedom to take monastic vows, he
never placed himself under convent rule. Yet seeing, in spite of the
proverb, that the hood makes the monk in Russia, if not elsewhere, he
robed his limbs in coarse serge, girdled his waist with a heavy chain,
and walked to the palace of Philaret, Metropolite of Moscow, begged
that dignitary's blessing, and craved permission to adopt his name.
Philaret took a fancy to the mendicant; and from that time forth
the whilom serf from Very Clean was known in every street as
Philaret-oushka--Philaret the Less.
Those grave-yards of the Troitsa lay in a pretty and silent spot on
the edge of a lake, inclosed in dark green woods. Among those mounds
the mendicant made his desert. Buying a few images and crosses in
Troitsa and Gethsemane at two kopecks apiece, he carried them into the
streets and houses of Moscow, where he gave them to people, with his
blessing; taking, in exchange, such gifts as his penitents pleased; a
ruble, ten rubles, a hundred rubles each. He very soon had money in
the bank. His images brought more rubles than his crosses; for his
followers found that his images gave them luck, while his crosses sent
them trouble. Hence a woman to whom he gave a cross went home with a
heavy heart. Unlike the practice in western countries, no peasant
woman adorns herself with this memorial of her faith; nor is the cross
a familiar ornament even in mansions of the rich. A priest wears a
cross; a spire is crowned by a cross; but this symbol of our salvation
is rarely seen among the painted and plated icons in a private house.
To "bear the cross" is to suffer pain, and no one wishes to suffer
pain. One cross a man is bound to bear--that hung about his neck at
the baptismal font; but few men care to carry a second weight.
An oddity in dress and speech, Philaret-oushka wore no shoes and
socks, and his greeting in the market was, "I wish you a merry angel's
day," instead of "I wish you well." In his desert, and in his rambles,
he was attended by as strange an oddity as himself; one Ivanoushka,
John the Less. This man was never known to speak; he only sang. He
sang in his cell; he sang on the road; he sang by the Holy Gate. The
tone in which he sang reflected his master's mood; and the voice of
John the Less told many a poor creature whether Philaret the Less
would give her that day an image or a cross.
This mendicant had much success in merchants' shops. The more delicate
ladies shrank from him with loathing, not because he begged their
money, but because he defiled their rooms. Though born in Very Clean,
this serf was dirtier than a monk; but his followers saw in his rusty
chains, his grimy skin, his unkempt hair, so many signs of grace. The
women of the trading classes courted him. A lady told me, that on
calling to see a female friend, the wife of a merchant of the first
guild, she found her kneeling on the floor, and washing this beggar's
feet. Her act was not a form; for the mendicant wore no shoes, and the
streets of Moscow are foul with mire and hard with flints. One old
maid, Miss Seribrikof, used to boast, as the glory of her life, that
she had once been allowed to wash the good man's sores. Young brides
would beg him to attend their nuptial feasts; at which he would
"prophesy" as they call it; hinting darkly at their future of weal or
woe. Sometimes he made a lucky hit. One day, at the wedding-feast of
Gospodin Sorokine, one of the richest men in Moscow, he turned to the
bride and said, "When your feastings are over, you will have to smear
your husband with honey." No one knew what he meant, until three days
later, when Sorokine died; on which event every one remembered that
honey is tasted at all Russian funerals; and the words of Philaret the
Less were likened to that Vision of Zosima, which has since been
painted on the pillar in Novgorod the Great.
Madame Loguinof, one of his rich disciples, gave this mendicant money
enough to build a church and convent, and when these edifices were
raised in the grave-yard of Troitsa his "desert" was complete.
At the age of sixty-five, this idol of the people passed away. When
his high patron died, Philaret the Less was not so happy in his desert
as of yore; for Innocent, the new Metropolite, was a real missionary
of his faith, and not a man to look with favor on monks in masquerade.
Deserting his desert, the holy man went his way from Troitsa into the
province of Tula, where, in the village of Tcheglovo, he built a
second convent, in which he died about a year ago. The two convents
built by his rusty chains and dirty feet are now occupied by bodies of
regular monks.
In these morbid growths of the religious sentiment, the Black Clergy
seek support against the scorn and malice of a reforming world.
These monks have great advantages on their side. If liberal thought
and science are against them, usage and repute are in their favor. All
the high places are in their gift; all the chief forces are in their
hands. The women are with them; and the ignorant rustics are mostly
with them. Monks have always attracted the sex from which they fly;
and every city in the empire has some story of a favorite father
followed, like Philaret the Less, by a female crowd. Vicar Nathaniel
was not worshipped in the Nevski Prospect with a softer flattery than
is Bishop Leonidas in the Kremlin gardens. Comedy but rarely touches
these holy men; yet one may see in Moscow albums an amusing sketch of
this gifted and fascinating man being lifted into higher place upon
ladies' skirts.
The monks have not only got possession of the spiritual power; but
they hold in their hands nearly all the sources of that spiritual
power. They have the convents, catacombs, and shrines. They guard the
bones of saints, and are themselves the stuff of which saints are
made. In the golden book of the Russian Church there is not one
instance of a canonized parish priest.
These celibate fathers affect to keep the two great keys of influence
in a land like Russia--the gift of sacrifice, and the gift of miracles.
CHAPTER XVI.
SACRIFICE.
Sacrifice is a cardinal virtue of the Church. To the Russian mind it
is the highest form of good; the surest sign of a perfect faith.
Sacrifice is the evidence of a soul given up to God.
A child can only be received into the church through sacrifice; and
one of the forms in which a man gives himself up to heaven is that of
becoming insane "for the sake of Christ."
Last year (1868), a poor creature called Ivan Jacovlevitch died in the
Lunatic Asylum in Moscow, after winning for himself a curious kind of
fame. One-half the world pronounced him mad; a second half respected
him as a holy man. The first half, being the stronger, locked him up,
and kept him under medical watch and ward until he died.
This Ivan, a burgher in the small town of Cherkesovo, made a
"sacrifice" of his health and comfort to the Lord. By sacred vows, he
bound himself never to wash his face and comb his hair, never to
change his rags, never to sit on chair and stool, never to eat at
table, never to handle knife and fork. In virtue of this sacrifice, he
lived like a dog; crouching on the floor, and licking up his food with
lips and tongue. When brought into the madhouse, he was washed with
soap and dressed in calico; but he began to mess himself on purpose;
and his keepers soon gave up the task of trying to keep him clean.
No saint in the calendar draws such crowds to his shrine as Ivan
Jacovlevitch drew to his chamber in this lunatic's house. Not only
servant girls and farmers' wives, but women of the trading classes,
came to him daily; bringing him dainties to eat, making him presents
in money, and telling him all the secrets of their hearts. Sitting on
the ground, and gobbling up his food, he stared at these visitors,
mumbling some words between his teeth, which his listeners racked
their brains to twist and frame into sense. He rolled the crumbs of
his patties into pills, and when sick persons came to him to be cured,
he put these dirty little balls into their mouths. This man was said
to have become "insane for the Lord."
The authorities of the asylum lent him a spacious room in which to
receive his guests. They knew that he was mad; they knew that a
crowded room was bad for him; but the public rush was so strong, that
they could neither stand upon their science, nor enforce their rules.
The lunatic died amidst the tears and groans of half the city. When
the news of his death was noised abroad, a stranger would have thought
the city was also mad. Men stopped in the street to kneel and pray;
women threw themselves on the ground in grief; and a crowd of the
lower classes ran about the bazars and markets, crying, "Ivan is dead!
Ivan is dead! Ah! who will tell us what to do for ourselves, now Ivan
is dead?"
On my table, as I write these words, lies a copy of the _Moscow
Gazette_--the journal which Katkoff edits, in which Samarin
writes--containing a proposal, made by the clergy, for a public
monument to Ivan Jacovlevitch, in the village where this poor lunatic
was born!
All monks prefer to live a life of sacrifice; the highest forms of
sacrifice being that of the recluse and the anchorite.
Every branch of the Oriental Church--Armenian, Coptic, Greek--encourages
this form; but no Church on earth has given the world so many hermits
as the Russ. Her calendar is full of anchorites, and the stories told
of these self-denying men and women are often past belief. One Sister
Maria was nailed up in a niche at Hotkoff, fed through a hole in the
rock, and lingered in her living tomb twelve years.
On the great plateau of the Troitsa, forty miles from Moscow, stands a
monastic village, called Gethsemane. This monastic village is divided
into two parts; the convent and the catacombs; separated by a black
and silent lake.
A type of poverty and misery, the convent is built of rough logs,
colored with coarse paint. Not a trace of gold or silver is allowed,
and the only ornaments are of cypress. Gowns of the poorest serge, and
food of the simplest kind, are given to the monks. No female is
allowed to enter this holy place, excepting once a year, on the feast
of the Virgin's ascent into heaven. Three women were standing humbly
at the gate as we drove in; perhaps wondering why their sex should be
shut out of Gethsemane, since their Lord was not betrayed in the
garden by a female kiss!
Across the black lake lie the catacombs, cut off from the convent by a
gate and fence; for into these living graves it is lawful for a female
to descend. Deep down from the light of day, below the level of that
sombre lake, these catacombs extend. We light each man his taper, as
we stand above the narrow opening into the vaults. A monk, first
crossing his breast and muttering his pass-words in an unknown tongue,
goes down the winding stairs. We follow slowly, one by one in silence;
shading the light and holding to the wall. A faint smell fills our
nostrils; a dull sound greets our ears; heavily comes our breath in
the damp and fetid air. The tapers faint and flicker in the gloom.
Gaining a passage, we observe some grated windows, narrow holes, and
iron-bound doors. These openings lead into cells. The roof above is
wet with slime, the floor is foul with crawling, nameless things.
"Hush!" drones the monk, as he creeps past some grated window and some
iron-clad door, as though he were afraid that we should wake the dead.
"What is this hole in the stone?" The monk stops short and waves his
lurid light: "A cell; a good man lies here; hush! his soul is now with
God!"
"Dead?"
"Yea--dead to the world."
"How long has he been here?"
"How long? Eleven years and more."
Passing this living tomb with a shiver, we catch the boom of a bell,
and soon emerge from the narrow passage into a tiny church. A lamp is
burning before the shrine; two monks are kneeling with their temples
on the floor; a priest is singing in a low, dull tone. The fittings of
this church are all of brass; for pine and birch would rot into paste
in a single year. Beyond the chapel we come to the holy well, the
water of which is said to be good for body and soul. It is certainly
earthy to the taste.
On coming into the light of day, we question the father sharply as to
that recluse who is said to have lived eleven years behind the
iron-clad door; and learn without surprise that he comes out from time
to time, to ring the convent-bell, to fetch in wood, and hear the
news! We learn that a man retired with his son into one of these
catacombs; that he remained in his grave--so to speak--two years and a
half, and then came out completely broken in his health. My eminent
Russian friend, Professor Kapoustin, turns to me and says, "When our
country was covered with forests, when our best road was a rut, and
our villages were all shut in, a man who wished for peace of mind
might wall himself up in a cell; but the country is now open, monks
read newspapers, travellers come and go, and the recluse likes to hear
the news and see the light of day."
Instead of living in their catacombs, the monks now turn a penny by
showing them to pilgrims, at the price of a taper, and by selling to
visitors the portraits of monks and nuns who lived in the sturdier
days of their church.
The spirit of sacrifice takes other and milder forms. In the
court-yards of Solovetsk one sees a strange creature, dressed in rags,
fed on garbage, and lodged in gutters, who belongs to the monastic
order, without being vowed as a regular monk. He lives by sufferance,
not by right. He offers himself up as a daily sacrifice. He follows,
so to speak, the calling of abjectness; and makes himself an example
of the worthlessness of earthly things. This strange being is much run
after by the poorer pilgrims, who regard him as a holy man; and he is
noticeable as a type of what the Black Clergy think meritorious in the
Christian life.
Father Nikita, the name by which this man is known, is a dwarf, four
feet ten inches high, with thin, gray beard, black face, and rat-like
eyes. He never pollutes his skin with water and soap; for what is man
that he should foster pride of the flesh? His garb is a string of rags
and shreds; for he spurns the warmer and more decent habit of a monk.
Instead of going to the store when he needs a frock, he crawls into
the waste-closet, where he begs as a favor that the father having
charge of the castaway clothes will give him the tatters which some
poor brother has thrown aside. A room is left for his use in the
cloister; but a bench of wood and a pillow of straw are things too
good for dust and clay; and in token of his unworthiness, he lives on
the open quay and sleeps in the convent yard. Nobody can persuade him
to sit down to the common meal; the sup of sour quass, the pound of
black bread, the morsel of salt cod being far too sumptuous food for
him; but when the meal is over, and the crumbs are swept up, he will
slink into the pantry, scrape into one dish the slops and bones, and
make a repast of what peasants and beggars have thrown away.
He will not take his place in church; he will not pass through the
Sacred Gates. When service is going on, he crouches in the darkest
corner of the church, and listens to the prayers and chants with his
head upon the ground. He likes to be spurned and buffeted by the
crowd. A servant of every one, he is only too happy if folk will order
him about; and when he can find a wretch so poor and dirty that every
one else shuns him, he will take that dirty wretch to be his lord. In
winter, when the snow lies deep on the ground, he will sleep in the
open yard; in summer, when the heat is fierce, he will expose his
shaven crown to the sun. He loves to be scorned, and spit upon, and
robbed. Like all his class, he is fond of money; and this love of
dross he turns into his sharpest discipline of soul. Twisting plaits
of birch-bark into creels and crates, he vends these articles to
boatmen and pilgrims at two kopecks apiece; ties the copper coins in a
filthy rag; and then creeps away to hide his money under a stone, in
the hope that some one will watch him and steal it when he is gone.
The first monk who held the chair of abjectness in Solovetsk, before
Nikita came in, was a miracle of self-denial, and his death was
commemorated by an act of the rarest grace. Father Nahum is that elder
and worthier sacrifice to heaven.
Nahum is said to have been more abject in manner, more self-denying in
habit, than Nikita; being a person of higher order, and having more
method in his scheme of sacrifice. He abstained from the refuse of
fish, as too great a delicacy for sinful men. He liked to sleep in the
snow. He was only too happy to lie down at a beggar's door. Once, when
he slept outside the convent gates all night, some humorous brother
suggested that perhaps he had been looking out for girls; and on
hearing of this ribald jest he stripped himself nearly naked, poked a
hole in the ice, and sat down in the frozen lake until his feet were
chilled to the bone. A wing of the convent once took fire, and the
monks began to run about with pails; but Nahum rolled a ball of snow
in his palms and threw it among the flames; and as the tongues lapped
higher and higher, he ran to the church, threw himself on the floor,
and begged the Lord to put them out. Instantly, say the monks, the
fire died down. An archimandrite saw him groping in a garden for
potatoes, tearing up the roots with his fingers. "That is cold work,
is it not, Nahum?" asked his kindly chief. "Humph!" said the monk;
"try it." When the present emperor came to Solovetsk, and every one
was anxious to do him service, Nahum walked up to him with a wooden
cup, half full of dirty water, saying, "Drink; it is good enough."
When this professor of abjectness died, he was honored by his brethren
with a special funeral, inside the convent gates. He was buried in the
yard, beneath the cathedral dome; where all day long, in the pilgrim
season, a crowd of people may be seen about the block of granite which
marks his grave; some praying beside the stone, as though he were
already a "friend of God," while others are listening to the stories
told of this uncanonized saint. Only one other monk of Solovetsk has
ever been distinguished by such a mark of grace. Time--and time
only--now seems wanting to Father Nahum's glory. In another
generation--if the Black Clergy hold their own--Nahum of Solovetsk,
canonized already by the popular voice of monks and pilgrims, will be
taken up in St. Isaac's Square, and raised by imperial edict to his
heavenly seat.
CHAPTER XVII.
MIRACLES.
Yet the gift of miracles is greater than the gift of sacrifice. The
Black Clergy stand out for miracles; not in a mystical sense, but in a
natural sense; not only in times long past, but in the present hour;
not only in the dark and in obscure hamlets, but in populous places
and in the light of day.
At Kief a friend drives me out to the caves of Anton and Feodosie,
where we find some men and women standing by the gates, expecting the
father who keeps the keys to bring them and unlock the doors. As these
living pilgrims occupy us more than the dead anchorets, we join this
party, pay our five kopecks, light our tapers, and descend with them
the rocky stairs into the vault. Candle in hand, an aged monk goes
forward, muttering in the gloom; stopping for an instant, here and
there, to show us, lying on a ledge of rock, some coffin muffled in a
pall. We thread a mile of lanes, saluting saint on saint, and twice or
thrice we come into dwarf chapels, in each of which a lamp burns dimly
before a shrine. The women kneel; the men cross themselves and pray.
Moving forward in the dark, we come upon a niche in the wall, covered
by a curtain and a glass door, on the ledge of which stands a silver
dish, a little water, and a human skull. Our pilgrims cross themselves
and mutter a voiceless prayer, while the aged monk lays down his taper
and unlocks the door. A woman sinks on her knees before the niche,
turns up her face, and shuts her eyes, while the father, dipping a
quill into the water, drops a little of the fluid on her eyelids. One
by one, each pilgrim undergoes this rite; and then, on rising from his
knees, lays down an offering of a few kopecks on the ledge of rock.
"What does this ceremony mean?" I ask the father. "Mean?" says he: "a
mystery--a miracle! This skull is the relic of a holy man whose eye
had suffered from a blow. He called upon the Most Pure Mother of God;
she heard his cry of pain; and in her pity she cured him of his
wound."
"What is the name of that holy man?"--"We do not know."
"When did he live and die?"--"We do not know."
"Was he a monk of Kief?"--"He was; and after he died his skull was
kept, because his fame was great, and every one with pain in his eyes
came hither to obtain relief."
Not one of our fellow-pilgrims has sore eyes; but who, as the father
urges, knows what the morrow may have in store? Bad eyes may come; and
who would not like to insure himself forever against pain and
blindness at the cost of five kopecks?
Such miracles are performed by the bones of saints in cities less holy
and old than Kief.
Seraphim, a merchant of Kursk, abandoned his wife, his children, and
his shop, to become a monk. Wandering to the cloister called the
Desert of Sarof, in the province of Tambof, he dug for himself a hole
in the ground, in which he lay down and slept. Some robbers came to
his cave, where they beat and searched him; but, on finding his
pockets empty, they knew that he must be a holy man. From that lucky
day his fame spread rapidly abroad; and people came to see him from
far and near; bringing presents of bread, of raiment, and of money;
all of which he took into his cave, and doled out afterwards to the
poor. A second window had to be cut into his cell; at one he received
gifts, at the other he dispensed them. His desert became a populous
place, and the Convent of Sarof grew into vast repute.
Seraphim founded a second desert for women, ten miles distant from his
own. A gentleman gave him a piece of ground; merchants sent him money;
for his favor was by that time reckoned as of higher value than house
and land. Lovely and wealthy women drove to see him, and to stay with
him; entering into the desert which he formed for them, and living
apart from the world, without taking on their heads the burden of
conventual vows. At length a miracle was announced. A lamp which hung
in front of a picture of the Virgin died out while Seraphim was
kneeling on the ground; the chapel grew dark and the face of the
Virgin faint; the pilgrims were much alarmed; when, to the surprise of
every one who saw it, a light came out from the picture and re-lit the
lamp! A second miracle soon followed. One day, a crowd of poor people
came to the desert for bread, when Seraphim had little in his cell to
give. Counting his loaves, he saw that he had only two; and how was he
to divide two loaves among all those hungry folk? He lifted up his
voice--and lo! not two, but twenty loaves were standing on his board.
From that time wonders were reported every year from Sarof; cures of
all kinds; and the court in front of Seraphim's cell was thronged by
the lame and blind, the deaf and dumb, by day and night.
Seraphim died in 1833; yet miracles are said to be effected at his
tomb to this very hour. Already called a saint, the people ask his
canonization from the Church. Every new Emperor makes a saint; as in
Turkey every new Sultan builds a mosque; and Seraphim is fixed upon by
the public voice as the man whom Alexander the Third will have to make
a saint.
One Motovilof, a landowner in the province of Penza, lame, unable to
walk, applied for help to Seraphim, who promised the invalid, on
conditions, a certain cure. Motovilof was to become a friend of Sarof;
a supporter of the female desert. Yielding to these terms, he was told
to go down
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