Among the Russians(35)
‘I?’ He looked quite angry. ‘Do you take me for a fool? I wouldn’t touch them. Nobody buys or reads them.’ He dismissed the subject with an admonitory flourish of the champagne bottle. ‘No, I’m reading something else, published in samizdat—underground literature, you know. It’s called Animal Farm, by a man named Orwell….’
The last of the champagne splashed into our glasses, easing us into drowsiness. Lucia was giggling to herself at the thought of Anatoly reading Brezhnev. ‘Guess who it was,’ he said, ‘who wrote that a censored press corrupts its government and forces the people into living private lives?’ He puffed up a cynical cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Marx.’
Next Sunday I went through deserted streets to morning liturgy at the Monastery of Alexander Nevsky, Leningrad’s oldest religious foundation, whose eleven churches and four cemeteries lift in a baroque fanfare at the end of Nevsky Prospect. Along the winding paths old women were begging alms from churchgoers, or wandered under the trees to gather herbs, crossing themselves from time to time to exorcise their theft. A faint smell of incense clung about the graves and lingered in the sky. Tchaikovsky was buried here under the maple trees, and Borodin and Mussorgsky side by side; Rimsky-Korsakov lies under a fat, Celtic-looking cross, and Dostoevsky beneath a bed of crimson begonias.
Incense billowed through the cathedral doors and drifted in the cavernous nave like the breath of God. Everything inside glittered and swam in a miasma of intensified colour, where priests and acolytes and the limned saints of a hundred icons inhabited the same universe of mystery and hope. I felt as if I had strayed into the illuminated pages of a mediaeval psalter, or as if a trapdoor had opened in the plain, material world to which Russia had condemned itself, and dropped me into this other, secret stratum of its soul.
The congregation packed rank on rank against the railings before the iconostasis. It must have numbered over a thousand. Most of the people were old women, some minute in size, all cowled in headscarves. But I saw groups of young men too, and girls on their mothers’ arms. Beside me a bearded student was bowing with the fervour of a desert anchorite; not far away stood three army officers and an airman.
But nothing seemed farther from the ancient religious roots of Russia than the eighteenth century glamour of this cathedral. The saints did not stare from their panels with the grave stillness of Byzantium, nor lurk behind their candles in flickering zones of fire, blackened by the kisses of the faithful. Instead, the nave unfolded about the congregation in an elegant counterpoint of pilasters and fluted columns. The painted prophets and apostles postured in gilded frames or processed across the iconostasis with archangels of Renaissance beauty and earthliness, while high above, a Pantheon-like dome surmounted the chancel in a coronation of light. But this aura of religious theatre is half appropriate. The Orthodox rite itself is like a rambling and timeless mystery-play. For more than thirteen hundred years scarcely a syllable of its liturgy has changed. It proceeds with a leisurely pomp which is infused by the victory of a resurrected God rather than by the guilt and tension of alienated men. Its mood of intimate sorcery was all about me now. Through the fog of incense and filtered sunlight the sturdy priests, lapped in a flood of black beards and dalmatics, came and went with the glitter and solemnity of wizards, while from a gallery behind us the dying tones of the choir filled the nave with their antiphonal sadness.
In a side-aisle, lying in an open coffin, an old woman awaited burial, her feet couched in flowers. Dressed in embroidered peasant gown and scarf, she seemed comfortably ensconced among the congregation, many of whom were as pale as she. All through the liturgy they crossed and recrossed themselves in rippling commotion. Then they would move about the aisles as if at home, buying candles, chewing bread, kissing favourite icons, their frames, their feet. They would gossip in corners, then assemble with old friends to murmur condolence around the coffin, saying how nice she looked. A familiar and easy-going reverence embalmed every act and enrolled the whole congregation—living and dead—into the household of God. Sometimes an old woman, bent double in her shabby overcoat, would creep among the gleaming priests to perform some cherished office: the placing of a lectern or a stool. Then, at one of those points of unruffled climax which pulse like waves through the liturgy—the Triple Great Blessing, the Entrance of the Book or of the Host—half the congregation would stumble to the floor, touching their foreheads to its stone.
This deep, communal spirit of the Orthodox Church is not exclusive to Russia. Its essence can be felt at any country liturgy of Greeks or Christian Arabs. But it serves and prolongs the ancient Russian instinct for sobornost, ‘togetherness’, and was inherited in the tenth century with all the calm of a completed journey. For Orthodoxy arrived in Russia with its theology already petrified. Intellectual strife had faded from it. It was a family, a tradition, a womb—far removed from the vigorous dialectic of the Latin West. To the Orthodox, confession and redemption were collective, and the endless liturgical plea ‘O Lord, forgive me!’ was gradually to lose its urgency and become the gentle talismanic password of today, like a hand outstretched against the Evil Eye.
The Russian need of sobornost seems to hark back to that old Slavic assembly, the Mir, which acted as the heart and conscience of a village. Its decisions, like those of Party conferences, had always to be unanimous. Any dissenter was a heretic, a threat. The collective was an end in itself, within which the individual lost—or attained—his meaning. To conceive of an allegiance beyond it required a leap of the imagination too immense for thought. ‘The Mir cannot be judged,’ they said. And to those who fell momentarily outside its pale, it contained absolute powers of forgiveness and redemption. The parallels with the Communist Party, as well as with the Church, are abundant.