Among the Russians(24)

The pre-Christian goddess lent a deeply fatalistic character to the society which she imbued—a fatalism personified in the rod, the ancestral clan. After his earthly life a man expected no personal resurrection. He was merely a link in the divine continuum of the rod—a fleeting moment in eternal time. Drowned in the ubiquity of mother earth and in the authority of the departed, his own personality was still-born. Even late Byzantine writers observed the passive conformity of the Slavic people.

The rod found a back door into Christianity in the spring feasts of the dead (still celebrated in graveyards with occasional orgiastic outbursts) and in liturgical echoes of the pagan funeral banquet. It is not surprising, then, that Russian Christians came to conceive of themselves as a vast rod whose father was the czar. Here, perhaps, lie the deeply regressive roots of Soviet collectivism, of the recurrent yearning to regard their leaders as divine elders—‘Papa Lenin’, ‘Uncle Stalin’. In this land of surviving patronymics, perfect strangers may still be addressed as ‘brother’ or ‘uncle’, as if the whole Russian world were tender with the intercourse of relatives, or fraught with an orphan’s fear.



That evening, as these heresies ramified through my mind, I turned north towards the little town of Suzdal. The suburbs of Vladimir vanished in unexpected factories and flat-blocks; but Suzdal, where no building over two storeys high is permitted, showed nothing in the darkness but cottages and the silhouettes of crotchety windmills.

For a few years early in the twelfth century, Suzdal succeeded Kiev as Russia’s foremost city, then succumbed to the power of Vladimir. Morning showed it furled along the banks of the Kamenka river, a town untroubled by any later pretensions to greatness. Its early, wooden basilicas and palaces have long ago burnt down or rotted away, but all through its streets, and scattered in its fields, seventeenth and eighteenth century churches stand in pairs—a low one for winter worship, a tall one for summer. Ambling south along the river, I passed one of these architectural marriages almost at once. Beside the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, a voluminous octagon built for summer, his barn-like wife, the Bogolubskaya, stretched her long, winter body, capped by a curious dome. These Russian domes are not the all-embracing canopies of western Europe of Byzantium, but little more than the finials of decorative towers—small announcements, as it were, of something important beneath. Nestled under this demure hat, Bogolubskaya sat smugly beside Cosmas on their mound, he with a green roof, she with a brown.

After days of wandering the sterile geometry of Moscow, I plunged along the marshy coils of river in boisterous spirits. Grasses and dew-soaked clover lapped against my shins and drenched my feet. Sometimes I stopped to luxuriate in a hazy sun, while all about me a myriad frogs in green battledress plopped and spatted among reed-filled pools. The Kamenka river, in the strange Russian fashion, had gouged its banks steep in the west but smoothed its eastern shores into shoals. I followed it with indolent delight. High on one bank the wooden cottages were waking to the morning. Framed in their elaborately-carved windows, old people stared out with the quiet plenitude of icons. Misted in lace curtains or cut off arbitrarily by a bank of potted plants, their dreaming faces scarcely noticed me. Theirs seemed a slow and trusting world, where dogs never bothered to bark and tortoiseshell cats sauntered up to rub themselves against the legs of strangers. No traffic sounded; only lisping rain, desultory birdsong. Sometimes, when a door was left ajar, I peered into the scenario of a nineteenth century novel or folk-tale: wood-fenced courtyards stacked with winter logs and crowded by white chickens and roosters, while rooms beyond gave disconnected glimpses of shawls and samovars.

I made my way along paths muddy from storm, by ramshackle orchards and gardens of phlox, hollyhocks, stinging nettles. Steep above the river the faded defences of the Spaso-Yerfimievsky Monastery loomed in creaking brick ramparts and wonky towers whose roofs were gaping now. A tide of moss poured over the crenellations and dribbled through the loopholes. For quarter of a mile, towers and walls tottered along the river bank together in grim senility, while beneath them the bed of the Kamenka river was half-abandoned and sown with vegetables. On its far side the green domes and fortified walls of other monasteries cluttered the banks and distant meadows until their onion spires died out in mist. Here, almost alone in Russia, the old relationship persists between church and dwellings. No tenements obliterate the sky. The towers and belfries lift in consecrated tyranny above all else. The land is like a dream of Holy Russia before the time of Lenin or even of Peter the Great—a God-haunted, mystical, enclosed, poor country, which gazes on itself in tended gardens and domes—beautiful, charmed and unjust, spread along its river in a feudal sleep.

Into this peace, on the eastern bank, the fourteenth century Pokrovsky Monastery strikes a warning bell. Here many a repudiated Russian princess was forced to take the veil by her bored husband, including the consort of Ivan the Terrible and the first wife of Peter the Great. Early in the sixteenth century, the childless tsaritsa Solomoniya, repudiated by her husband Vasily III, was incarcerated here when he married the Polish princess Helen Glinskaya. But no sooner had Solomoniya assumed nun’s habit than she gave birth to a son. To this day nobody knows what became of the child, heir to the empire of All Russia; but his mother, fearing for his life, was said to have smuggled him from the convent, proclaimed him dead and staged his funeral. For four centuries the matter rested. Then, during excavations in 1934, a tiny sarcophagus was found beside Solomoniya’s tomb. Instead of a corpse it contained a pearl-embroidered silk shirt, which was wrapped around the rudimentary dummy of a baby.