Of his extraordinary life during this period I learned much, when I was in Broussa, from the tales of a certain friend of mine, a Turkish dervish who had often met Bogachevsky. Before this time I had received another letter from him, again sent through my uncle. In addition to the few words of blessing, there were enclosed a small photograph of him in the dress of a Greek monk and several views of holy places in the environs of Jerusalem.
When he was in Kars, still only a candidate for the priesthood, Bogachevsky had very original views on morality. He then said and taught me that on earth there are two moralities: one objective, established by life in the course of thousands of years, and the other subjective, pertaining to individuals as well as to whole nations, kingdoms, families, groups of people and so forth.
‘Objective morality,’ he said, ‘is established by life and by the commandments given us by the Lord God Himself through His prophets, and it gradually becomes the basis for the formation in man of what is called conscience. And it is by this conscience that objective morality, in its turn, is maintained. Objective morality never changes, it can only broaden in the course of time. As for subjective morality, it is invented by man and is therefore a relative conception, differing for different people and different places and depending upon the particular understanding of good and evil prevailing in the given period.
‘For example, here in Transcaucasia,’ said Bogachevsky, ‘if a woman does not cover her face and if she speaks with a guest, everyone will regard her as immoral, spoiled and badly brought up. But in Russia, on the contrary, if a woman does cover her face and if she does not welcome a guest and entertain him with conversation, everyone will consider her badly brought up, rude, disagreeable and so forth.
‘Another example: if a man here in Kars does not go once a week, or at least once in two weeks, to the Turkish bath, everyone round him will dislike him and be disgusted by him, and even find that he has a bad odour, which he may not have at all. But in St. Petersburg it is just the opposite: if a man even mentions going to the baths, he is considered uneducated, unintelligent, boorish and so on; and if by chance he should actually go, he will hide the fact from others so that such a low taste should not be attributed to him.
‘As a very good illustration of the relative understanding of so-called morality or honour,’ continued Bogachevsky, ‘let us take the two incidents which occurred here in Kars last week among the officers and which made a great stir.
‘The first was the trial of Lieutenant K and the second the suicide of Lieutenant Makarov.
‘Lieutenant K was tried by the military court for having struck a shoemaker, Ivanov, in the face so brutally that he lost an eye. The court acquitted him, after having found out on investigation that the shoemaker had caused Lieutenant K much annoyance and had spread insulting rumours about him.
‘Having become very interested in this case, I decided, disregarding the evidence of the court, to question the family and acquaintances of the unfortunate shoemaker, so as to ascertain for myself the real reasons for the conduct of Lieutenant K.
‘This lieutenant, as I learned, had ordered first one pair and then two more pairs of boots from the shoemaker Ivanov and had promised to send him the money on the twentieth of the month, when he would receive his pay. When the lieutenant did not send the money on the twentieth, Ivanov went to his house to ask for what was due to him. The officer promised to pay the next day, but the next day he again put him off till the next, and in short, fed him for a long time, as is said, on “tomorrows”. Ivanov, however, went to him time after time to ask for the money, as it represented for him a very large sum. It was almost all he possessed—consisting of the entire savings of his wife, a laundress, who for many years had put it away kopek by kopek, and had given it to her husband to buy material for the lieutenant’s boots. Besides, Ivanov kept coming for his money because he had six small children to feed.
‘At last Lieutenant K grew annoyed at Ivanov’s insistence and told his orderly to say he was not at home; then he simply had him driven off, and threatened to have him sent to prison. Finally the lieutenant told his orderly to give Ivanov a good thrashing if he came again.
‘The orderly, a kindly man, did not beat Ivanov, as his master had ordered, but, wanting to persuade him in a friendly way not to annoy the lieutenant with his repeated visits, invited him into the kitchen to talk. Ivanov sat down on a stool, and the orderly began to pluck a goose for roasting. Seeing this, Ivanov remarked: “Sol Our lords and masters eat roast goose every day and do not pay their debts, and meanwhile my children go hungry!”
‘At this moment Lieutenant K happened to come into the kitchen and, overhearing what Ivanov had said, grew so furious that he took a large beetroot from the table and struck Ivanov in the face so hard that he knocked his eye out.
‘The second incident,’ continued Bogachevsky, ‘was, so to speak, the reverse of the first one: a certain Lieutenant Makarov could not pay his debt to a certain Captain Mashvelov, and so he shot himself.
‘It must be said that this Mashvelov was an inveterate gambler and also a great card-sharper. Not a day passed without his fleecing someone; it was obvious to all that he played a crooked game.
‘A short time ago Lieutenant Makarov was playing cards with some officers, among them Mashvelov, and he lost not only all his own money, but also a sum borrowed from this Mashvelov on the promise to return it to him in three days. As the sum was a large one, Lieutenant Makarov could not raise it in three days, and, being unable to keep his word, decided to shoot himself rather than stain his honour as an officer.
‘Both these events occurred on account of debts. In one case, the creditor has his eye knocked out by the debtor, and in the other case, the debtor shoots himself. Why? Simply because everyone round Makarov would have severely condemned him for not paying his debt to the sharper Mashvelov, whereas in the case of Ivanov, the shoemaker, even if all his children were to starve to death—that would be quite in the order of things, for the code of honour of an officer is not concerned with the payment of his debts to a shoemaker.
‘And in general, I repeat, acts of this kind occur simply because people stuff their children, while the future man is still being formed in them, with all sorts of conventions, and so prevent Nature herself from developing in them that conscience which has taken form over thousands of years of struggle by our ancestors against just such conventions.’
Bogachevsky often urged me not to adopt any conventions, either those of my immediate circle or those of any other people.
He said: ‘From the conventions with which one is stuffed subjective morality is formed, but for real life objective morality is needed, which comes only from conscience.
‘Conscience is everywhere the same. As it is here, so it is in St. Petersburg, America, Kamchatka, and in the Solomon Islands. Today you happen to be here, but tomorrow you may be in America; if you have a real conscience and live according to it, it will always be well with you wherever you may be.
‘You are still quite young; you have not yet begun life. Everybody here may now call you badly brought up; you may not know how to bow correctly, or to say the right thing in the proper manner, but this does not matter if only when you grow up and begin to live you have in yourself a real conscience, that is, the foundation of objective morality.
‘Subjective morality is a relative conception, and if you are filled with relative conceptions, then when you are grown up you will always and everywhere act and judge other people according to the conventional views and notions you have acquired. You must learn not what people round you consider good or bad, but to act in life as your conscience bids you. An untrammelled conscience will always know more than all the books and teachers put together. But for the present, until your own conscience is formed, live according to the commandment of our Teacher Jesus Christ: “Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.” ’
Father Evlissi, who is now an aged man, happened to become one of
the first persons on earth who has been able to live as our Divine Teacher Jesus Christ wished for us all.
May his prayers be an aid to all those who wish to be able to live according to the Truth!
V
MR. X OR CAPTAIN POGOSSIAN
SARKIS POGOSSIAN, or as he is now called, Mr. X, is at the present time the owner of several ocean steamers, one of which, cruising among his favourite places, between the Sunda and Solomon Islands, he commands himself.
By race an Armenian, he was born in Turkey, but spent his childhood in Transcaucasia, in the town of Kars.
I met Pogossian and became friends with him when he was still a young man, finishing his studies at the Theological Seminary of Echmiadzin and preparing for the priesthood.
Before I met him I had already heard about him through his parents, who lived in Kars not far from our house and often came to see my father. I knew that they had an only son who had formerly studied at the ‘Temagan Dprotz’ or Theological Seminary of Erivan, and was now at the Theological Seminary of Echmiadzin.
Pogossian’s parents were natives of Turkey, from the town of Erzerum and had moved to Kars soon after it was taken by the Russians. His father was by profession a poïadji7 and his mother an embroideress in gold, specializing in breast-pieces and belts for djuppays.8Living very simply themselves, they spent all they had to give their son a good education.
Sarkis Pogossian rarely came to see his parents and I never had an opportunity to see him in Kars. My first meeting with him took place the first time I was in Echmiazdin. Before going there I returned to Kars for a short time to see my father, and the parents of Pogossian, learning that I would soon be leaving for Echmiadzin, asked me to take their son a small parcel of linen.
I was going to Echmiadzin for the purpose—as always—of seeking an answer to the question of supernatural phenomena, in which my interest not only had not diminished but had grown even stronger.
I must say here, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, that having become extremely interested in supernatural phenomena, I had plunged into books and also applied to men of science for explanations of these phenomena. But failing to find answers that satisfied me either in books or from the people I turned to, I began to seek them in religion. I visited various monasteries and went to see men about whose piety I had heard, read the Holy Scriptures and the Lives of the Saints, and was even for three months an acolyte of the famous Father Yevlampios in the monastery of Sanaine; and I also made pilgrimages to most of the holy places of the many different faiths in Transcaucasia.
During this period I happened again to witness a whole series of phenomena which were unquestionably real, but which I could in no way explain. This left me more bewildered than ever.
For example, once when I went with a company of pilgrims from Alexandropol for a religious festival to a place on Mount Djadjur, known among the Armenians by the name of Amena-Pretz, I witnessed the following incident:
A sick man, a paralytic, from the small village of Paldevan was being taken there on a cart, and on the road we fell into conversation with the relatives who were accompanying the invalid and talked with them as we went along.
This paralytic, who was barely thirty years old, had been ill for the past six years, but before that he had been in perfect health and had even done military service. He had fallen ill after his return home from service, just before his wedding, and had lost all use of the left side of his body. In spite of various treatments by doctors and healers, nothing helped. He had even been specially taken for treatment to Mineralne Vodi in the Caucasus, and now his relatives were bringing him here, to Amena-Pretz, hoping against hope that the saint would help him and alleviate his sufferings.
On the way to this holy place we made a special stop, as all pilgrims usually do, at the village of Diskiant to pray at the miraculous icon of Our Saviour, which was in the house of a certain Armenian family. As the invalid also wished to pray, he was taken into the house, I myself helping to carry the poor man in.
Soon afterwards we came to the foot of Mount Djadjur, on the slopes of which the little church with the miraculous tomb of the saint is situated. We halted at the place where the pilgrims usually leave their carts, wagons and vans, at the end of the carriage road. From there the further ascent of a quarter of a mile must be made on foot, and many walk barefoot, according to the custom there, while others even do this distance on their knees or in some other special way.
When the paralytic was lifted from the cart to be carried to the top, he suddenly resisted, wishing to try to crawl up by himself as best he could. He was put on the ground and he started dragging himself along on his healthy side. He did this with such difficulty that it was pitiable to watch him; but he still refused all help. Resting often on the way, he finally, after three hours, reached the top, crawled to the tomb of the saint, which was in the centre of the church, and having kissed the tombstone, immediately lost consciousness.
His relatives, with the help of the priests and myself, tried to revive him. We poured water into his mouth and bathed his head. And it was just as he came to himself that a miracle occurred. His paralysis was gone.
At first the man was stupefied; but when he realized that he could move all his limbs, he sprang up and almost began to dance; then, all of a sudden recollecting himself, with a loud cry he flung himself prone and began to pray.
All the people there, with the priest at their head, immediately fell on their knees and began to pray also. Then the priest stood up, and amidst the kneeling worshippers, held a service of thanks-giving to the saint.
Another incident, which puzzled me no less, took place in Kars. That year there was terrible heat and drought in the whole province of Kars; almost all the crops had been scorched; a famine threatened, and the people were becoming agitated.
That same summer there arrived in Russia from the patriarchate of Antioch an archimandrite with a miraculous icon—I do not remember whether of St. Nicholas the Miracle-worker or of the Virgin-to collect money for the relief of the Greeks who suffered in the Cretan War. He travelled with this icon chiefly to places in Russia with a Greek population, and he also came to Kars.
I do not know whether politics or religion was at the bottom of it all, but the Russian authorities in Kars, as elsewhere, took part in organizing an impressive welcome and in according him all kinds of honours.
When the archimandrite arrived in any town, the icon was carried from church to church, and the clergy, coming to meet it with banners, welcomed it with great solemnity.
The day after the archimandrite arrived in Kars, the rumour spread that a special service for rain would be held before this icon, by all the clergy, at a place outside the town. And indeed, just after twelve o’clock on that same day, processions set out from all the churches, with banners and icons, to join in the ceremony at the appointed place.
In this ceremony there took part the clergy of the old Greek church, of the recently rebuilt Greek cathedral, the military cathedral, the church of the Kuban regiment, and also of the Armenian church.
It was a day of particularly intense heat. In the presence of almost the entire population, the clergy, with the archimandrite at their head, held a solemn service, after which the whole procession marched back towards the town.
And then something occurred to which the explanations of contemporary people are absolutely inapplicable. Suddenly the sky became covered with clouds, and before the people had time to reach the town there was such a downpour that everyone was drenched to the skin.
In explanation of this phenomenon, as of others similar to it, one might of course use the stereotyped word ‘coincidence’, which is such a favourite word among our so-called thinking people; but it cannot be denied that this coincidence was almost too remarkable.
The third incident occurred in Alexandropol, when my family had returned there for a short period and we were living again in our old house. Next door to us was my aunt’s house. One of the lodgings
in her house had been let to a Tartar who worked for the local district government either as a clerk or a secretary. He lived with his old mother and his little sister and had recently married a handsome girl, a Tartar from the neighbouring village of Karadagh.
Everything went well at first. Forty days after her marriage the young wife, according to the Tartar custom, went to visit her parents. But there, either she caught cold or something else happened to her, for when she returned she did not feel well, had to go to bed, and gradually became very ill.
They gave her the best of care, but in spite of being treated by several doctors, among whom, I remember, were the town doctor, Resnik, and the former army doctor Keeltchevsky, the condition of the sick woman went from bad to worse. An acquaintance of mine, a doctor’s assistant, went every morning, by order of Dr. Resnik, to give her an injection. This doctor’s assistant, whose name I do not remember—I only remember that he was unbelievably tall—often dropped in to see us when I was at home.
One morning he came in while my mother and I were drinking tea. We invited him to join us at the table and in the course of the conversation I asked him, among other things, how our neighbour was getting on.
‘She is very sick,’ he replied. ‘It is a case of galloping consumption and doubtless it will soon be “all over” with her.’
While he was still sitting there, an old woman, the mother-in-law of the sick woman, came in and asked my mother’s permission to gather some rose-hips in our little garden. In tears she told us how Mariam Ana—as the Tartars call the Virgin—had appeared that night to the sick woman in a dream and bade her gather rose-hips, boil them in milk, and drink; and in order to calm her the old woman wished to do this. Hearing this, the doctor’s assistant could not help laughing.
Meetings With Remarkable Men Page 9