You Must Go and Win: Essays

by Alina Simone

  It was a mindless goal I’d developed after reading the Skoptsy were highly musical, their religious ceremonies filled with fervent hymn-singing. I couldn’t help fantasizing about the vanished Skopets choirs, even picturing myself joining in on a hymn or two. The lyrics to their songs had survived, but the music itself was gone, and it was only the marriage of the two that I believed would create a perfect window into the Skopets soul, a companion guide to their punishing quest for purity. Perhaps there was still some chance, though—all I really needed was one, last, Google-searchable Skopets to form a duo. If there were any Skoptsy still left out there, I figured, they were sure to have an email address, a blog, at the very least, a book agent. But “Eunuch” did not turn up on anybody’s Facebook profile; there were no Skoptsy Meetups in my neighborhood. Searching @skoptsy yielded nothing on Twitter. My quest was dragging on and I was no closer to singing with a Skopets than I was to becoming one myself. Strangely, it was then, just as I was about to concede and rejoin the twenty-first century, that I came across an intriguing piece of new information.

  The Skoptsy traced their origins back to an early spiritual Christian prophet by the name of Danila Filippovich. He was a peasant from Kostroma, a mystic wanderer and committed pacifist who fled the Russian army in 1654. While Filippovich was on the lam, he experienced a religious revelation and declared himself a “living god.” Despite the fact he preached a radical gospel of self-denial, his following grew rapidly. Of course the tsarist regime eventually took notice of Filippovich’s popularity and exiled him to Siberia. Filippovich’s teachings ended up forming the core of Skoptsy theology, but he also influenced a number of other sectarians, including some who eschewed the harsh asceticism in favor of his more huggable practices: nonviolence, honesty, brotherly love, vegetarianism, and song-based worship. There was one such group in particular that caught my interest. They were called the Doukhobors, and unlike the Skoptsy and many other religious dissenters, they avoided being stamped out by the Soviets. Despite torture, exile, and dispossession, the Doukhobors managed to survive. But I was even more intrigued when I learned why.

  It was because they were here. In Canada.

  I discovered that aside from a shared love of singing, the Doukhobors, the Skoptsy, and I all had another thing in common, and that thing was Kharkov—a place we all once called home and that we all left in exile. Apparently the Ukrainian province where I was born had a long history of forcing the independent-minded to flee. My parents tell me that part of the reason we ended up leaving the Soviet Union as political refugees was that the Kharkov branch of the KGB was particularly nasty. I asked my father once why he thought that was and he replied, because they are assholes. It was like he had identified the Kharkov KGB on some Douchebag Table of Elements. “Because they are carbon,” he might well have said.

  Kharkov gave both the Doukhobors and the Skoptsy their own endless share of trouble. Mass arrests in a major Skopets settlement in Kharkov Province resulted in a famous trial, news of which even made it into The New York Times. “Skoptsy Members on Trial,” read the headline on October 13, 1910: “Russia Trying Hard to Suppress an Extraordinary Sect.” Noting Russia as “a country of strange religious associations,” the article described the trial of “141 adherents of the eunuch sect, including 67 women …” Remarkably, many of these Skoptsy were eventually acquitted, for while there was no physical doubt the defendants may have been a few fries short of a Happy Meal, there was little proof as to the cause of their disfigurement. Most simply denied membership in the sect and blamed their missing genitalia on … something else. One swore his injury was caused by a horse. Another claimed he’d accidentally blundered into a scythe. A third insisted a knife-wielding weirdo attacked him while he was guarding a melon field. (You know, those thieves who start out hankering for some fresh melons, but spontaneously decide a detached penis might do just as well.) The defendants used fire, childbirth, and war as fig leaves for their injuries. A few even opted for a hey-these-things-happen approach, claiming they had no idea where their privates had ambled off to. Eventually, a handful of unrepentant Skoptsy were found guilty and exiled to Siberia, the Haight-Ashbury of the Russian empire.

  The Doukhobors were similarly scorned and driven out of Kharkov. They first appeared in the province sometime in the 1730s and endured persecution, then exile, throughout the latter half of the 1700s, until Alexander I issued an edict pardoning them. Alas, the tsar’s gesture did nothing to change the attitudes of the Doukhobors’ neighbors in Kharkov. When the first group of exiles returned, the villagers at the way station of Saltovo-Ternovo refused to let them into their homes. Their long-awaited homecoming consisted of being forced to stand in a field for more than twenty-four hours. The harassment only continued from there—landlords refused to rent to them, villagers accused them of heresy, and the district authorities persisted in interrogating and imprisoning them. Eventually, the tsar forcibly relocated the dissenters to a patch of land in the fancifully named Milky Waters region at the outskirts of the Sea of Azov. And like my family, once removed from Kharkov, the Doukhobors thrived. They cultivated the land, lived communally, and built a parish center that was given the prophetic name Patience. It was their golden era. But just because the Doukhobors had managed to create some measure of stability and order in their lives did not mean that anyone else found them either stable or orderly. The spring of 1819 marked a new chapter for the Doukhobors—the beginning of their complicated relationship with the West.

  The Doukhobors were often referred to as “Russian Quakers” because of their pacifist beliefs. So it was no great surprise when two bona fide members of the Society of Friends made their way to the village of Patience. One was William Allen, a well-to-do English scientist and philanthropist. The other was the French missionary Stephen Grillet. But despite their shared commitment to nonviolence, the Doukhobors differed from the Quakers in almost every respect. Allen and Grillet both found the Doukhobors guilty of extreme vagueness. According to Allen’s diary, the trouble began when they asked the Doukhobors to explain their religious practices:

  [W]e wished to know from themselves what were their religious principles. It soon appeared, however, that they have no fixed principles; there was a studied evasion in their answers, and though they readily quoted texts, it is plain they do not acknowledge the authority of scripture, and have some very erroneous notions … My spirit was greatly affected, and I came away from them much depressed.

  Grillet was similarly dismayed:

  They however stated unequivocally, that they do not believe in the authority of the Scriptures. They look upon Jesus Christ in no other light than that of a good man. We inquired about their mode of worship. They said they met together to sing some of the Psalms of David … an old woman … began by singing what they call a Psalm; the other women joined in it; then the men … each bowed down very low to one another … then the old woman, in a fluent manner, uttered what they called a prayer, and their worship concluded; but no seriousness appeared over them at any time … We left them with heavy hearts and returned to Altona.

  Before leaving, though, Allen and Grillet begged the Doukhobors to recognize the sanctity of the scriptures and the divinity of Jesus. This entreaty was met with blank stares. The Doukhobors believed that the spirit of God already existed within all living things, which is why they abhorred violence and saw no need for icons or church hierarchies. To the straitlaced Quakers, the Doukhobors’ religious ceremonies resembled a tailgate party; to the Doukhobors, the practice of psalm singing was regarded as deeply spiritual—the commingling of voices a means of purification and communing with God. The Quakers left Russia confused and disappointed by the Doukhobors. The Doukhobors remembered the Quakers’ visit fondly for decades.

  And yet years later, when the Doukhobors were once again subject to torture and exile—this time for disobeying tsarist military orders to take up arms against the neighboring Armenians—the Quakers would be instrumental in helping them
leave Russia. In the late 1890s the revered author Leo Tolstoy, also well known as a devout Christian and pacifist, learned of the Doukhobors’ plight. He was so deeply moved that he donated all the profits from the publication of his novel Resurrection to helping them emigrate to Canada. Much of the remainder of their passage was funded by the Quakers.

  I was also moved by the Doukhobors, who believed many of the same things I did, but were ever so much better at it. Was I not also a singing vegetarian originally from Kharkov Province? Yet when confronted with a moral decision no weightier than a hot bowl of tom yum kung with a tasty piece of shrimp floating in it, my lofty convictions quickly melted away. Without a dorsal nerve cord or a cerebral cortex, can this decapod crustacean really feel pain? I would ask myself, the first steaming spoonful already halfway to my mouth. And while I could never quite fully commit my life to music, the Doukhobors sang with the full-throated passion of true conviction. They sang as they prayed. They sang as they toiled in the fields. They sang as they burned their guns in protest. They even sang as they were buried in pits up to their necks and tortured to death. They may not have believed in churches or priests or sacraments of any kind, but they did believe in singing. One of the earliest known Doukhobor psalms reads like a manifesto for a musical revolution: “Singing of Psalms is an adornment to our souls … It is like the grace of the saints; it adds to one’s faith, hope, and love; it covers one with light like the sun. It cleanses one with the water, it burns one’s sins like fire, it covers one with holy oil. It puts the devil in one to shame and makes one aware of God.”

  Dimly I recalled that transcendent time when singing was something that lifted me out of my body, saving me from the grim march of calendar pages and the dark thoughts that come at you in those lonely little anterooms where the mail is collected. In high school, I remember skipping lunch every week to sneak off to empty classrooms so that I could sing by myself. I was always singing back then; in elevators, on subways, walking down the street. But how long ago had that been? Long before I started giving public performances for strangers in exchange for sixty dollars and a pair of drink tickets. Before I learned the countless superficial reasons not to sing, reasons like “this monitor is crackly” or “I’m afraid your cheap microphone has given my mouth an unpleasant little shock for the last time.” I wasn’t always singing now. I was on the internet. I was spending a lot of time in cars, trying to avoid death-by-Italian. Reading about the Doukhobors singing, I felt more than a twinge of guilt. And jealousy. I performed regularly, and yet somehow they made me miss singing.

  Perched on the second floor of a nondescript apartment just a stone’s throw away from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I retreated ever further from the outside world and deeper into my Doukhobor scholarship. In the space of a few months, idle curiosity had clearly given way to something more scary that involved the analysis of hospital registers, census results, and burial records from cemeteries no longer on any map. Cobbling together my sixty-page time line of Doukhobor history was a fun time-waster, but all the nights curled up with tomes such as Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 left me longing for more of a human connection with my chosen subject of study. So one day, I wrote to the Doukhobor Discovery Center in Castlegar, British Columbia, and ordered a double album of Doukhobor music on vinyl, Write it unto thine heart, Herald it with thine lips. At the same time, I also discovered an extensive library of Doukhobor recordings online, and suddenly I was off, like a delirious child caught in a rainstorm, stomping through the puddles of the Doukhobor song archive. Hits like “We Shall Use Shovels to Work the Land Instead of Taking Up Arms” and “It Was in the Caucasus Mountains That a Great Event Took Place” quickly became the new soundtrack to my morning routine.

  I have to say there was a great relief in this. A dozen important music websites were out there, pulsating softly on the internet, promising to give me all the new news and teach me how I might love all the music other people loved. But secretly, they only made me anxious. It was as though a thousand tiny voices were screaming at once: Loud guitars are good! But only if you play them through a bass amp! Never mind, keyboards are good! Or glockenspiels? Have you considered exchanging your drummer for an MC-505? Have you considered dressing exclusively in gold lamé tracksuits? It was exhausting. I felt better here, among this group of matronly women striding across a muddy field on the cover of Write it unto thine heart, Herald it with thine lips. Each was dressed in the traditional Doukhobor costume of Georgia and each was carrying a cheap plastic bag—I could even make out the clear outline of a pie tin in one of them. When I looked into their eyes, people who had never heard of a Roland 505 Groovebox looked back at me.

  Without quite noticing it, I began to absorb the lilting melodies of the Doukhobors’ mournful music, to unconsciously slip into Doukhobor song myself. Like one day during a companionable stroll with Josh down Clinton Street in Brooklyn, when I began softly keening:

  “Volya dukhobortsev, vooolya deeeeket leeeeeyt.”

  “What is that?” asked Josh, a distinct note of alarm sounding in his voice.

  “What? Oh that! That’s the Doukhobor ‘Hymn of Hardship.’ Quite an earworm, isn’t it?” And I started up again.

  “Volya dukhobortsev, vooolya deeeeket leeeeeyt.”

  “Well, sing the whole song then,” Josh said. “You can’t just go on repeating the same line.”

  This was quite a sensible request, but I’d had a hard time making out all the words in the Doukhobor dialect and managed to learn only the beginning of the chorus. So instead I launched into an English number that the Kootenay Doukhobor Youth Choir had presented to the United Nations in 1988.

  “Tooooooooooil and peeeeeeeeacefoool liiiiiiiiiiife,” I hollered.

  “Oh my God, what is that!!!” Josh stopped and stared at me. A woman walking her dog in front of us had turned to look around. Even the brownstones looked dismayed.

  “It’s called ‘Toil and Peaceful Life.’”I had to admit the song sounded much worse without the four-part harmony. “That’s the Doukhobor motto!”

  “I would settle for toil and peaceful wife,” Josh muttered.

  And yet, a few weeks later, when he began making arrangements to give a talk in Vancouver, home to the world’s largest Doukhobor research archive, Josh was happy to learn I had a good excuse to come along. I had fondled the holdings of the University of British Columbia Doukhobor Research Collection electronically from afar, downloading soil-classification maps of Doukhobor lands and theses on the generative phonology of Doukhobor conjugation, and was dying for a chance to peruse primary source materials in person. Then a few weeks later, as I was lounging around one evening, enjoying the Kootenay Men’s Choir’s version of “You Have Fallen as Martyrs in Your Heroic Struggle,” I felt a mental tug, my forgotten dream to hear the Skoptsy sing surfacing like some distant Oz on the horizon. And then came the epiphany: the Skopsty may be gone, but the Doukhobors were still alive. And they were still singing. Through the Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ website, I dug up contact information for the Kootenay Men’s Choir and fired off a message. A few days later, a friendly reply came from a man named Elmer Verigin, who offered to arrange a meeting with some fellow choir members. Could it be possible that I was actually going to meet a direct descendant of Peter “Lordly” Verigin, the famous Doukhobor leader who’d inspired Tolstoy and helped the Doukhobors reach Canada? No, Elmer replied. My grandfather was the seventh son of Wasyl Slastukin in Georgia. He became an orphan after his father was kicked by a horse and died. My surname is an adopted one.

  But by the time I received his reply it didn’t matter—I had already booked my flight.

  The UBC archives turned out to be a two-and-a-half-hour walk from my hotel, but I didn’t know that yet when I crossed the Burrard Street Bridge and stopped for a breather at Kitsilano Beach to enjoy the view of the North Shore Mountains, Vancouver shimmering across the
bay. I was heading back to the road when an odd little plaque tacked to a wooden pole caught my attention. It featured a black-and-white photograph of a man in a bathing suit, jumping into a swimming pool while clutching what appeared to be a giant propeller. The text below the photo was taken from an interview with a former lifeguard of Kitsilano Pool, Ted Luckett, who in March of 1944 was offered two dollars by a local inventor to test his latest invention, the Gyrochute. The Gyrochute looked like a desiccated daisy, three long blades jutting from the top of a skinny pole. It was designed to help people jump to safety from the upper floors of burning buildings, because the fire truck ladders of the day couldn’t reach high enough. But as the photograph attested, the experiment failed. Luckett did not miraculously glide across the waves; he fell like a bucket of concrete, Gyrochute in tow.

  As I resumed my endless walk to the Doukhobor archive, the story of the Gyrochute weighed heavily upon me. It seemed like a metaphor for so many things, perhaps even life itself. We all have our burning buildings, I mused, and we all create our own Gyrochutes in hopes of escaping them, often only to find ourselves driven downward ever deeper and faster instead. The question kept gnawing at me: Were the Doukhobors my Gyrochute? By clinging to them, what kind of Little Odessa was I hoping to parachute into? Was I hoping to find some piece of home out there in Castlegar, a kind of Russian oasis? Not like the real Russia—my grandmother’s Russia with its uneven stairs and gallows humor, its kitchens decked in floral wallpaper reeking of fried meat. Or today’s Russia, with its mirrored everything, throbbing casinos, and bruised self-esteem. But rather some Goldilocks version—a Russia that was “just right.” Perhaps unwittingly, I was imagining Castlegar as a place where the Doukhobors had filtered out all the things I didn’t like about the other, more complicated Russias. Better still, it would be filled with people like me, people who liked to sing. People whose Russian was heavily accented and grammatically creative. People who had absorbed enough North American friendliness to not finger a person’s arm flab upon first being introduced. In Castlegar the Doukhobors would never make soup broth the way my grandmother had, by boiling a giant chicken leg for hours, then saving the bones to suck out the marrow. No, they had long ago ditched the greasy, starchy, meat-heavy cuisine of the old country and replaced it with light dill-and-mushroom-laced alternatives. Perhaps the Doukhobors themselves would turn out to be light dill-and-mushroom-laced alternatives to the dark, intimidating Russian intellectuals I’d known as a child! Or to my own self, for that matter.