pictured God as a large, handsome old man, the kindly, clever master of the universe who could not conquer evil only because: ‘He cannot be everywhere at once, too many men have been born for that. But he will succeed, you see. But I can’t understand Christ at all! He serves no purpose as far as I’m concerned. There is God and that’s enough. But now there’s another! The son, they say. So what if he’s God’s son. God isn’t dead, not that I know of.’
49
This was the way the peasant thought of saints and natural gods as well: the two, in fact, were frequently combined or interchangeable in the peasant’s Christian-pagan religion. There was Poludnitsa, goddess of the harvest, worshipped through the placement of a sheaf of rye behind the icon in the peasant’s house; Vlas, the protector of the herds, who became in Christian times St Vlasius; and Lada, the deity of good fortune (an attribute much needed on the Russian roads), who featured with St George and St Nicholas in peasant wedding songs. The Chris-
tianization of the pagan gods was also practised in the Russian Church itself. At the core of the Russian faith is a distinctive stress on motherhood which never really took root in the West. Where the Catholic tradition stressed Mary’s purity, the Russian Church emphasized her divine motherhood - the
bogoroditsa
- which practically assumed the status of the Trinity in the Russian religious consciousness. This cult of motherhood can easily be seen in the way that Russian icons tend to show the Madonna’s face pressed maternally against her infant’s head. It was, it seems, a conscious plan on the part of the Church to appropriate the pagan cult of Rozhanitsa, the goddess of fertility, and the ancient Slavic cult of the damp Mother Earth, or the goddess known as Mokosh, from which the myth of ‘Mother Russia’ was conceived.
50
In its oldest peasant form, the Russian religion was a religion of the soil.
Russia’s Christian rituals and ornaments were similarly influenced by pagan practices. From the sixteenth century, for example, the procession of the Cross in the Russian Church moved in clockwise circles with the sun (as it did in the Western Church). In the Russian case it has been suggested that this was in imitation of the pagan circle dance
(kborovod)
which moved in the direction of the sun to summon up its magic influence (as late as the nineteenth century there were peasant proverbs advising on the wisdom of ploughing in the direction of the sun’s movement).
51
The onion dome of the Russian church was also modelled on the sun. Its inner ‘sky’, or ceiling, usually depicted the Holy Trinity at the centre of a sun that radiated twelve apostolic rays.
52
Medieval Russian churches and religious manuscripts were often decorated with plant motifs and other ornaments, such as rosettes, rhomboids, swastikas and petals, crescent moons and trees, that were derived from pagan animistic cults. No doubt most of these symbols had long lost their original iconographic significance, but the frequency with which they reappeared in the folk designs of the nineteenth century, in wooden carvings and embroidery, suggests that they continued to serve in the peasant consciousness as a gateway to the supernatural sphere.
Embroidered towels and belts had a sacred function in peasant culture - they were often draped around the icon in the ‘holy corner’ of the peasant hut - and individual patterns, colours and motifs had
symbolic meanings in various rituals. The twisting threaded pattern, for example, symbolized the creation of the world (‘the earth began to twist and it appeared’, the peasants said).
53
The colour red had a special magic power: it was reserved for belts and towels that were used in sacred rituals. In Russian the word for ‘red’
(krasnyi)
is connected with the word for ‘beautiful’
(krasivyi)
- which explains, among many other things, the naming of Red Square. It was equally the colour of fertility - which was regarded as a sacred gift. There were different belts for every stage of life. Newborn babies were tied up with a belt. Boys were given a red ‘virgin belt’. Bridal couples girded themselves with embroidered linen towels. And by custom a pregnant woman stepped on a red belt before giving birth.
54
It was important for a dead man to be buried with a belt, ideally the one that he was given at his birth, to symbolize the end of the life cycle and the return of his soul to the spirit world.
55
According to folklore, the Devil was afraid of a man with a belt; not to wear a belt was regarded as a sign of belonging to the underworld. Hence Russian demons and mermaids were always portrayed beltless. A sorcerer would remove his belt when he entered into conversation with the spirit world.
These old pagan rituals were by no means confined to the peasantry. Many of them had become a part of national custom and were even found among the upper classes, who prided themselves on their modern attitudes. The Larin family in Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
were typical in this respect:
Amid this peaceful life they cherished, They held all ancient customs dear; At Shrovetide feasts their table flourished With Russian pancakes, Russian cheer; Twice yearly too they did their fasting; Were fond of songs for fortune-casting, Of choral dances, garden swings. At Trinity, when service brings The people, yawning, in for prayer, They’d shed a tender tear or two Upon their buttercups of rue.
56
It was not unusual for a gentry family to observe all the strictest rituals of the Church and, without any sense of contradiction, to hold simultaneously to pagan superstitions and beliefs that any European would have dismissed as the nonsense of serfs. Fortune-telling games and rituals were almost universal among the aristocracy. Some families would employ a sorcerer to divine the future by interpreting their dreams. Others relied on their maids to read the signs from the tea-leaves.
57
Yuletide fortune-telling was a serious affair and, as Anna Lelong remembered, its rituals were a part of the all-night vigil on New Year’s Eve:
There was always an all-night vigil and prayers on New Year’s Eve. Dinner was at nine, and afterwards there would be fortune-telling in the dining room, twelve cups would be made by hollowing out onions - one for every month - and salt would be sprinkled in them. Then they would be put in a circle on the table marking a different month on each. We children would be given two glasses - we would pour water into them and then drop egg white into them. We would then get up on New Year’s morning very early and go into the dining-room, which stank of onion. We would look into our glasses and see fantastic shapes that had been made by the egg-white - churches, towers or castles. Then we would try to create some kind of pleasant meaning out of them. The grown-ups looked at the onion cups and worked out which month would be particularly rainy or snowy depending on whether the salt in the onion was dry or not. People took all this very seriously and we would make a note of what resulted. We also predicted whether the harvesting of grain would be wet or not. There was an order then to clear everything away and the stoves were heated, all the windows opened, and some kind of powder burned which gave off a nice smell. We were not taken to church that morning. We would spend it playing with our puppets, with bits of food for their banquet given to us by the servants in the kitchen.
58
Peasant superstitions were also widely found among the aristocracy, even among those who would shudder at the thought of sharing any other customs with the peasantry. Stravinsky, for example, who was the perfect European gentleman, always kept a talisman that had been given to him at his birth. Diaghilev was full of superstitions which he had inherited from his peasant nanny. He did not like being
photographed; he would become alarmed if someone placed his hat on the table (which meant that he would lose money) or on the bed (which meant that he would become ill); the sight of a black cat, even on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, filled him with horror.
59
The peasant nanny was without a doubt the main source of these superstitions, and such was her importance in the nobleman’s upbringing that they often loomed much larger in his consciousness than all the teachings of the Church. Pushkin’s upbringing, for example, was Orthodox but only in a superficial way. He was taught to pray, and he went to church; but otherwise he was a Voltairean who held firmly to the secular beliefs of the Enlightenment throughout his life.
60
However, from his nanny he inherited superstitions that had their origins in the medieval age. He was struck down by foreboding when a fortune-teller told him that he would be killed by a tall blond man (true, as it turned out), and he was notoriously superstitious about hares (a fact that may have saved his life in 1825 when a hare crossed his path on his estate near Pskov and made him superstitious about travelling to Petersburg to join the Decembrists on Senate Square).
61
Superstitions about death were particularly common in the aristocracy. Gogol never used the word ‘death’ in his letters, fearing it might bring about his own. This was, in fact, a widely held belief. It may perhaps explain why Tolstoy gave the nameless pronoun ‘it’ to the idea of death in those brilliant passages where he explores the experience of dying in
The Death of Ivan Ilich
and in the scene of Andrei’s death in
War and Peace
.
61
Tchaikovsky, who was terrified of death (a fact often overlooked by those who claim that he committed suicide to cover up a homosexual affair), shared this common phobia. The composer’s friends were careful not to mention words like ‘cemetery’ or ‘funeral’ in his presence, knowing that they threw him into a panic.
63
Orthodox and pagan - yet a rationalist: an educated Russian could be all these things. It was part of the Russian condition to master such conflicting strands within oneself and fashion out of them a sensibility, ways of living, of looking at the world that were perfectly at ease with each other. Stravinsky, for example, though more chameleon-like than most, found an intellectual home in French Catholicism in the 1920s. Yet at the same time he became more emotionally attached than ever to the rituals of the Russian Church. He attended services at the
Orthodox Church in Paris on a regular basis from 1926; he collected Russian icons for his home in Paris and faithfully observed the Russian rituals in his private worship there; he even planned to build a Russian chapel at his house. There was no contradiction in this combination -at least not one that Stravinsky ever felt. Indeed, it was quite common for the cosmopolitan elites into which Stravinsky had been born to live in several different faiths. Some were drawn to the Roman Church, particularly those (like Zinaida Volkonsky when she moved to Italy in the 1830s) who found its internationalism more in keeping with their own world view than the ethnocentric Russian Church. Others were more drawn to Lutheranism, particularly if, like many of the aristocracy, they were of Russian-German parentage. It is difficult to say what was more important in the evolution of this complex religious sensibility, the relatively superficial nature of the aristocracy’s religious upbringing which allowed space for other beliefs or the multinational influences on that class, but either way it made for a culture that was far more complex than the type we might imagine from the mythic image of the ‘Russian soul’.
4
In 1878 Dostoevsky made the first of several trips to Optina Pustyn. It was a time of profound grief in the writer’s life. His favourite child Aleksei (Alyosha) had just died of epilepsy, an illness he had inherited from his father, and, on the urging of his wife, Dostoevsky visited the monastery for spiritual comfort and guidance. The writer was working on the last of his great novels,
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880), which at that time he was planning as a novel about children and childhood.
64
Many of the scenes he witnessed at Optina would reappear in it, and the long discourse of the elder Zosima on the social ideal of the Church, which really should be read as Dostoevsky’s own
profession de foi,
was borrowed from the writings of the monastery, with long parts lifted almost word for word from
The Life of the Elder Leonid
(1876) by Father Zedergolm.
65
The character of Zosima was mainly based on the elder Amvrosy, whom Dostoevsky saw on three occasions, once, most memorably, with a crowd of pilgrims who had come to see him
at the monastery.
66
The novelist was struck by the charismatic power of the elder and, in one of the novel’s early chapters, ‘Devout Peasant Women’, he re-creates a scene which takes us to the heart of the Russian faith. Zosima gives comfort to a desperate peasant woman who is also grieving for a little son:
’And here’s one from a long way off,’ he said, pointing to a woman who was still quite young, but thin and worn out, with a face that was not so much sunburnt as blackened. She was kneeling and staring motionless at the elder. There was almost a frenzied look in her eyes.
’From a long way off, Father, from a long way off,’ the woman said in a sing-song voice… ‘Two hundred miles from here - a long way, Father, a long way.’
She spoke as though she were keening. There is among the peasants a silent and long-enduring sorrow. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is also a sorrow that has reached the limit of endurance: it will then burst into tears and from that moment break out into keening. This is especially so with women. But it is not easier to bear than a silent sorrow. The keening soothes it only by embittering and lacerating the heart still more. Such sorrow does not desire consolation and feeds upon the sense of its hopelessness. The keening is merely an expression of the constant need to reopen the wound…
’What is it you’re weeping for?’
’I’m sorry for my little boy, Father. He was three years old - three years in another three months he would have been, I’m grieving for my little boy, Father, for my little boy - the last I had left. We had four, Nikita and I, four children, but not one of them is alive, Father, not one of them, not one. I buried the first three, I wasn’t very sorry for them, I wasn’t, but this last one I buried and I can’t forget him. He seems to be standing before me now - he never leaves me. He has dried up my soul. I keep looking at his little things, his little shirt or his little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that’s left of him, every little thing. I look at them and wail. I say to my husband, to Nikita, let me go, husband, I’d like to go on a pilgrimage. He’s a driver, Father. We’re not poor people, Father. We’re our own masters. It’s all our own, the horses and the carriage. But what do we want it all for now? My Nikita has taken to drinking without me, I’m sure he has, he used to before: I had only to turn my back, and he’d weaken. But now I’m no longer thinking of him. It’s over two months since I left home. I’ve forgotten everything, I have, and I don’t want to