As I noted, Voronov undoubtedly had some troubles with the police and this forced my mother to request that I stop corresponding with him. But then my time came. When I was in the eighth year [final year of the gimnazium] and eighteen years old, my father received a summons to the Okhrana [secret police]. He was invited there for a discussion along with me. This was not much of a surprise for either him or me. I did not hide my political convictions from my family and my parents knew that I was growing up a revolutionary. Totally uninterested in politics themselves, they were very tolerant in this matter. Sometimes we even conversed on the issues, though very rarely, and even argued. But both mother and father were respectful of my views.
As I and my father were walking to the Okhrana department (this was February 1899), he coughed a few times ( which was a sign of worry) and said: “Of course, I don’t know what they’ll be talking to us about. You must have gotten into some mischief. So don’t be offended if I yell at you a little bit for propriety’s sake!” I promised that I wouldn’t.
A captain of the gendarmes greeted us at the Okhrana. This was my first encounter with the “blue uniform” which I already despised. “Young man,” the captain said to me triumphantly, “we are aware of all your contacts with the revolutionaries who are abroad. I consider it necessary to forewarn you that if you continue these contacts in the future, you risk serious consequences.” Turning to my father he said, “And I would ask you to pay more attention to your son’s upbringing and behavior.” Evidently, this upset my father who, instead of scolding me as he had intended, suddenly said: “I don’t know what you are talking about, but I must say that I am proud of my son.” This was a complete surprise for me as well. “You and I don’t know,” the captain replied, “but he (tossing his head in my direction) knows very well!” This was said in such a manner that I involuntarily looked closely into the captain’s eyes—in them I read anger and hatred.
As we were returning home, father said with irritation: “Of course, from their point of view it would be better if you were involved in debauchery and drunkenness! Scoundrels!”
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I was very pleased. I cannot but observe now that at that time even the “blue uniforms” were humane compared to many of our contemporary heroes who cloak themselves in a humanitarian mantle. They certainty had material evidence of my “criminal” contacts with revolutionaries abroad (intercepted letters from and to me) but they did not wish to destroy a youth. Later this became even more clearly apparent.
It was the spring of 1899. I was taking final examinations. I did not break off my foreign contacts; I just became more careful while my political convictions continued developing along the same lines. I already had a small collection of forbidden books: Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System, Kautsky’s Erfurt Program, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Bebel’s Women and Socialism—all in German. I gave them to my father for safekeeping and he kept them for me at one of his storage facilities (he definitely knew from me what he was hiding). I asked him to bring them home to me the next day. He promised to do so. This was the 19th of May, on the eve of my Russian language exam. I slept peacefully before a dangerous and difficult ordeal.
In our apartment, my room was the last one. It could only be reached by going through my brother Mikhail’s room. For some reason, I had always locked my door. Suddenly in my sleep I clearly heard the sound of spurs and then a loud knocking on the door. I immediately guessed what the matter was and managed to take Voronov’s last letter from the table, crinkle it up and shove it into my mouth. Then I opened the door. Standing on the threshold was the same captain who had talked to my father and me at the Okhrana. Behind him was a suspicious looking character who turned out to be a detective in the Okhrana, and our caretaker Egor, a close friend of mine who had been invited along as a “witness.”
“We have an injunction for a search and seizure here,” the captain told me politely. And he showed me a written order signed by the director of the Okhrana. “Please.” Both drawers of my desk were opened and all my letters taken. My large bookcase drew careful attention but nothing incriminating was found. Renan’s book Life of Jesus, which I had received from abroad, went unnoticed, and this made me gloat. The night visitors went through my things for no less than three hours. Finally, they placed the seized items into a large packet and sealed it with wax. They then wrote a report of the search and forced me and Egor, the caretaker, to sign it. He wrote an X instead of a signature.
When we were passing through the dining room we found our whole family there in their nightclothes. My mother was in her nightgown. The captain and the detective walked ceremoniously through the room and, in parting, the captain said to my father: “It doesn’t appear that we have found anything incriminating in your son’s possession, but I do direct your attention to the ten-
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dentiousness of his book selections.” My father did not answer and merely escorted him out of the apartment with an unfriendly look. Afterwards, neither my parents, sister, or brothers said anything to me, but I read no disapproval in their faces. What would have happened if I had asked my father to bring me my revolutionary collection a day earlier and it had been discovered during the search?
I could sleep no more that night. I doubt that my parents slept either. I went to the gimnazium in the morning for I had a difficult exam to take. I went to the examination that spring morning with a special feeling, a consciousness of the significance of what had occurred that night, and with a heightened sense of respect for myself. I did not, of course, say anything to any of my friends but, I must admit, I looked at them with a certain sense of superiority.
The exam went well. I had to write on the topic of “Positive Characters in the Works of Pushkin” (this was the so-called “Pushkin Year”—the centennial of his birth). I passed the exam. And I also passed all of the other exams. I graduated from the gimnazium and attained the diploma. For this I was obliged, after all, to the “blue uniforms” who allowed me to graduate from the gimnazium.
Now the doors of the university were open to me. But during the winter just passed, a different decision was coming to fruition within me. In some newspapers, and then in Mikhailovskii’s Russkoe Bogatstvo, I read that a new socialist university had opened in Brussels. There classes were taught not only by leading Belgian and French scholars, but also by leaders of the workers’ and socialist movements. So this intention entered my soul, to bypass a Russian university and go to Europe, to the sources of science, socialism, and revolution! When I approached my parents with this project, I was surprised that there were no particular objections. The decisive argument turned out to be my supposition that I would not be able to study at a Russian university anyway, because of the recurrent student disturbances—they were occurring yearly. My parents could not but agree with the logic of my arguments. My educational career was decided: I was allowed to go to Brussels.
Chapter Eight
Vasilii Nikiforov-Volgin, Presanctified Gifts
Vasilii Nikiforov-Volgin was born in 1900. Originally from the Volga region, his family moved to Russia’s Baltic coast in search of a better life. When he started writing, Nikiforov used the pseudonym “Volgin” in honor of his original homeland. The son of a poor cobbler, he obtained his principal education in the Orthodox Church. His vignettes, two books of which were published during his lifetime, often dealt with the Soviet persecution of religion. After the USSR annexed the Baltic nations, Nikiforov-Volgin was arrested in May 1941 and executed six months later. Taken from Vasilii Nikiforov-Volgin, Zemlia imeninnitsa [The Earth’s Nameday]. Tallinn, n.d.
After a lengthy reading of the Hours and prayers on bent knee, the choir in the apse began to sing in a solemn, grieving tone:
In thy kingdom remember us, O Lord, When thou comest into thy kingdom.
The liturgy with the majestic and mysterious name of “Presanctified” began in a manner that
was unusual. The altar and the amvon1 were in the bright light of the March sun. According to the calendar, spring was to set in tomorrow.
Joyfully, like a prayer I kept repeating the word, stretching it: spri-i-ing! I went up to the amvon, lowered my hands into the sun’s rays, bent my head to the side and watched the “sunspots” dance on my hands. I tried to catch them, but they wouldn’t give in. The sexton, who happened by, tapped me on the arm and said, “Quit playing.” I was taken aback, and began crossing myself.
After the reading of the first Exclamation the royal doors were opened. Everyone got on their knees with their heads bowed to the very ground. Into
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the noiseless silence stepped a priest carrying a lit taper and the censer. With the holy flame he made the sign of the cross over the bowed congregation and proclaimed: “Wisdom, O believers! The light of Christ illumineth all.” My friend Vit’ka [Vitalii] came up and whispered barely audibly: “Kol’ka [Nikolai] is going to sing now . . . listen, it will be terrific.”
Kol’ka lives in our court-yard. He’s only nine but he already sings in the choir. Everyone praises him, and we kids envy him but treat him with respect. Now three boys came on to the amvon, with Kol’ka among them. They’re all in sky-blue robes with gold crosses and remind us of the three adolescent martyrs stepping into the fiery furnace to suffer in the name of the Lord. It became very, very quiet in the church and only the silver censer trembled in the hand of the priest. The three boys sang in pure voices, fragile as crystal: “Let my prayer arise in thy sight as incense . . . Receive the voice of my prayer . . . Let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice.”
Kol’ka’s voice soars higher and higher like a bird and may drop at any moment, like a spring icicle, to shatter into minuscule crystals. I listen and think: “I ought to join the choir myself. They’ll put a dressy robe on me as well and have me sing . . . I’ll walk out into the center of the church and the priest will cense in my direction and everyone will look and say to themselves: ‘Way to go, Vasia! What a great kid!’” And father and mother will be glad that they have such a clever son.
They sing; the priest first censes the altar, then the table of oblation; the whole church in the smoke of the censer seems to be amidst the clouds.
Even Vit’ka, the foremost rowdy in our yard, has grown quiet. With mouth wide-open he is staring at the sky-blue boys, and his hair is lit by a ray of light.
“You have golden hair,” I tell him. He didn’t hear me right and said:
“Yes, my voice isn’t bad, but it’s a little husky, otherwise I’d be singing.” [In Russian the words for “voice” and “hair” are similar, “golos” and “vo-los.”] An old woman came up to us and said, “Quiet, you rowdies.”
During the [procession called the] Great Entrance, instead of the usual “Cherubic Hymn” the choir sang: “Now the powers of heaven with us invisibly do minister. For lo! The King of Glory entereth now. Behold the mystical sacrifice, all accomplished, is ushered in.”
Very, very quietly, in the most soundless silence, the priest carried the Sacred Gifts from the table of oblation to the altar table while everyone stood on bent knee with heads bowed, even the choir.
And when the Sacred Gifts had been brought over, the choir movingly sang: “Let us with faith and love draw near, that we may become partakers of life everlasting.”
The royal doors were then closed and the sanctuary curtain was drawn only half way which struck Vit’ka and myself as especially odd.
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Vit’ka whispered to me: “Go tell the sexton that the curtain isn’t drawn right.”
I obeyed Vit’ka and went up to the sexton who was removing candle-ends from candlesticks. “Uncle Maxim,” I said, “the curtain’s all wrong.”
The sexton looked at me from beneath his shaggy brows and snapped angrily, “You’re the one person they should have asked! It’s supposed to be that way.”
After the liturgy was over, Vit’ka cajoled me into going to the grove. “There’s snowdrops there, millions of them,” he said in a high voice.
The grove was outside of town, near the river. We went through the perfumed early spring air, through glistening puddles and sun-gilded mud and sang off key but at full blast the prayer which had just echoed in church: “Let my prayer arise . . .” and almost had a fight over whose voice was better.
But then in the grove, which hummed in a special spring-like manner, we discovered the quiet, pale blue baubles of snowdrops, and for some unknown reason embraced each other, and then the whole grove resounded with our shouting and laughter. What it was we shouted and why we shouted we didn’t know.
After that we walked home with little bouquets of snowdrops dreaming how good it would be to join the church choir, to don a sky-blue robe and sing, “Let my prayer arise.”
A RADIANT EASTER SERVICE
The song from the day’s liturgy was ebbing: “All human flesh is silenced as it awaits with fear and trembling.”
The evening land was growing quiet. At home the glass doors of the icon cases were being opened. I asked father: “What is that for?”
“It is a sign. It signifies that at Easter the gates of heaven are opened.”
Father and I wanted to get some sleep before the midnight service but couldn’t. We lay side by side on the bed as he told me how once as a boy he happened to celebrate Easter in Moscow.
“A Moscow Easter, my boy, is a mighty event. Who has seen it once shall remember it to his grave. The huge bell from Ivan the Great [the name of a belfry] gives its first thunderclap at midnight and it seems that heaven with all its stars falls to the earth. And the bell, my boy, was six thousand poods [216,000 lbs.], and it took twelve men to get it swinging. The first clap would be timed to the striking of the clock in the Spasskii Tower.”
Father rose up in bed and talked of Moscow in a trembling voice: “Yes . . . the Spasskii Tower clock . . . It would strike twelve and immediately a rocket
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would soar toward the heavens . . . and then the firing of the old cannons on Tainitskii Tower would commence: a hundred and one rounds.
“The ringing from Ivan the Great would spread like a sea over Moscow and the other forty-forties2 would do second part harmony, like so many rivers in spring flood. Such a powerful force would flow over the ancient city that you weren’t walking but bobbing on the waves like a small chip of wood. A mighty night it was, resembling God’s thunder. Oh, my son, words can’t describe Moscow at Easter.”
Father grew quiet and closed his eyes.
“Are you asleep?”
“No. I’m looking at Moscow.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here before my eyes. As if alive.”
“Tell me something else about Easter.”
“I also had the chance to celebrate Easter in a monastery. In its simplicity and sacred beauty it was even better than Moscow. The monastery itself was extraordinary, surrounded by a virgin forest with only the paths of various beasts, and by the monastery gates, the splashing of a small river. The trees of the taiga forest peered into it. The church was built of stout logs redolent of pitch. A great multitude of the faithful from surrounding villages would gather there for the radiant celebration. A most rare tradition was practiced there. After the service, maidens carrying candles would stream toward the river singing, “Christ has risen from the dead . . .” They would bow to the river waters, then affix the candles to wooden roundlets of wood and float them down the river one after another. A portent was anticipated: if the candle remained alight, the maiden would marry; if it went out, she’d spend her years in bitter loneliness.
“Just imagine what a wonder that was: a hundred flames floating on the water in the middle of the night, the bells joyously ringing, and the forest sighing.”
&nbs
p; “Enough reminiscing, you two,” mother broke in, “you’d better get some rest or you’ll be standing in church like sleepyheads.”
But I couldn’t sleep. My soul was gripped by a presentiment of something inexpressibly grand resembling either Moscow or the hundred candles floating along a forest river. I got out of bed and began pacing the floor, disturbing my mother’s work in the kitchen, constantly asking whether it was time for church.
“Will you quit buzzing around like an out-of-joint spinning wheel,” she gently chastised me. “If you can’t wait, then go, but behave yourself over there.”
It was two hours till the service but the courtyard around the church was full of kids. There wasn’t a single cloud, no wind, and the night was frightening in
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its unusualness and grandeur. Tall Easter cakes covered with white napkins floated down the dark street; only they were visible; people seemed not to exist. In the dusky church, near the Plashchanitsa [a cloth representation of Christ’s funeral shroud] stood a line of people desirous of reading the Acts of the Apostles. I joined the group and was asked: “Do you know how to read?”
“I do.”
“Well, start reading then.”
I went up to the lectern and began pronouncing the syllables3 but stumbled over “Theophilios.” I just couldn’t get it out. I lost my confidence, stopped reading, and lowered my head in embarrassment. Someone came up to me and said: “If you can’t read, you have no business here.”
“I wanted to try it.”
“You’re better off trying Easter cakes,” and they moved me aside.
The Russian Century Page 14