Natasha's Dance

5

overleaf:

Natalia Goncharova: backdrop design

for The Firebird (1926)

The monastery of Optina Pustyn nestles peacefully between the pine forests and the meadows of the Zhizdra river near the town of Kozelsk in Kaluga province, 200 kilometres or so south of Moscow. The whitewashed walls of the monastery and the intense blue of its cupolas, with their golden crosses sparkling in the sun, can be seen for miles against the dark green background of the trees. The monastery was cut off from the modern world, inaccessible by railway or by road in the nineteenth century, and pilgrims who approached the holy shrine, by river boat or foot, or by crawling on their knees, were often overcome by the sensation of travelling back in time. Optina Pustyn was the last great refuge of the hermitic tradition that connected Russia with Byzantium, and it came to be regarded as the spiritual centre of the national consciousness. All the greatest writers of the nineteenth century - Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy among them - came here in their search for the 'Russian soul'.

The monastery was founded in the fourteenth century. But it did not become well known until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was at the forefront of a revival in the medieval hermitic tradition and a hermitage, or skete, was built within its walls. The building of the skete was a radical departure from the Spiritual Regulations of the Holy Synod, which had banned such hermitages since 1721. The Spiritual Regulations were a sort of constitution of the Church. They were anything but spiritual. It was the Regulations which established the subordination of the Church to the Imperial state. The Church was governed by the Holy Synod, a body of laymen and clergy appointed by the Tsar to replace the Patriarchate, which was abolished in 1721. The duty of the clergy, as set out in the Regulations, was to uphold and enforce the Tsar's authority, to read out state decrees from the pulpit, to carry out administrative duties for the state, and inform the police about all dissent and criminality, even if such information had been obtained through the confessional. The Church, for the most part, was a faithful tool in the hands of the Tsar. It was not in its interests to rock the boat. During the eighteenth century a large proportion of its lands had been taken from it by the

state, so the Church was dependent on the state's finances to support the parish clergy and their families.* Impoverished and venal, badly educated and proverbially fat, the parish priest was no advertisement for the established Church. As its spiritual life declined, people broke away from the official Church to join the Old Believers or the diverse sects which flourished from the eighteenth century by offering a more obviously religious way of life.

Within the Church, meanwhile, there was a growing movement of revivalists who looked to the traditions of the ancient monasteries like Optina for a spiritual rebirth. Church and state authorities alike were wary of this revivalist movement in the monasteries. If the monastic clergy were allowed to set up their own communities of Christian brotherhood, with their own pilgrim followings and sources of income, they could become a source of spiritual dissent from the established doctrines of Church and state. There would be no control on the social influence or moral teaching of the monasteries. At Optina, for example, there was a strong commitment to give alms and spiritual comfort to the poor which attracted a mass following. None the less, certain sections of the senior clergy displayed a growing interest in the mystical ideas of Russia's ancient hermits. The ascetic principles of Father Paissy, who led this Church revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, were in essence a return to the hesychastic path of Russia's most revered medieval monks.

Hesychasm has its roots in the Orthodox conception of divine grace. In contrast to the Western view that grace is conferred on the virtuous or on those whom God has so ordained, the Orthodox religion regards grace as a natural state, implied in the act of creation itself, and therefore potentially available to any human being merely by virtue of having been created by the Lord. In this view the way the believer approaches God is through the consciousness of his own spiritual personality and by studying the example of Christ in order to cope better with the dangers that await him on his journey through life. The hesychastic monks believed that they could find a way to God in their own hearts - by practising a life of poverty and prayer with the spiritual

* Unlike their Catholic counterpart!, Russian Orthodox priests were allowed to marry. Only the monastic clergy were not.

guidance of a 'holy man' or 'elder' who was in touch with the 'energies' of God. The great flowering of this doctrine came in the late fifteenth century, when the monk Nil Sorsky denounced the Church for owning land and serfs. He left his monastery to become a hermit in the wilderness of the Volga's forest lands. His example was an inspiration to thousands of hermits and schismatics. Fearful that Sorsky's doctrine of poverty might provide the basis for a social revolution, the Church suppressed the hesychastic movement. But Sorsky's ideas re-emerged in the eighteenth century, when clergymen like Paissy began to look again for a more spiritual church.

Paissy's ideas were gradually embraced in the early decades of the nineteenth century by clergy who saw them as a general return to 'ancient Russian principles'. In 1822, just over one hundred years after it had been imposed, the ban on sketes was lifted and a hermitage was built at Optina Pustyn, where Father Paissy's ideas had their greatest influence. The skete was the key to the renaissance of the monastery in the nineteenth century. Here was its inner sanctuary where up to thirty hermits lived in individual cells, in silent contemplation and in strict obedience to the elder, or starets, of the monastery.¹ Three great elders, each a disciple of Father Paissy and each in turn renowned for his devout ways, made Optina famous in its golden age: Father Leonid was the elder of the monastery from 1829; Father Makary from 1841; and Father Amvrosy from 1860 to 1891. It was the charisma of these elders that made the monastery so extraordinary - a sort of 'clinic for the soul' - drawing monks and other pilgrims in their thousands from all over Russia every year. Some came to the elder for spiritual guidance, to confess their doubts and seek advice; others for his blessing or a cure. There was even a separate settlement, just outside the walls of the monastery, where people came to live so that they could see the elder every day.² The Church was wary of the elders' popularity. It was fearful of the saint-like status they enjoyed among their followers, and it did not know enough about their spiritual teachings, especially their cult of poverty and their broadly social vision of a Christian brotherhood, to say for sure that they were not a challenge to the established Church. Leonid met with something close to persecution in his early years. The diocesan authorities tried to stop the crowds of pilgrims from visiting the elder in the monastery. They put

20. Hermits at a monastery in northern Russia. Those standing have taken

the vows of the schema (skhima), the strictest monastic rules in the

Orthodox Church. Their habits show the instruments of the martyrdom of

Christ and a text in Church Slavonic from Luke 9:24

up Father Vassian, an old monk at Optina (and the model for Father Ferrapont in The Brothers Karamazov), to denounce Leonid in several published tracts.³ Yet the elders were to survive as an institution. They were held in high esteem by the common people, and they gradually took root in Russia's monasteries, albeit as a spiritual force that spilled outside the walls of the official Church.

It was only natural that the nineteenth-century search for a true Russian faith should look back to the mysticism of medieval monks. Here was a form of religious consciousness that seemed to touch a chord in the Russian people, a form of consciousness that was somehow more essential and emotionally charged than the formalistic religion of the official Church. Here, moreover, was a faith in sympathy with the Romantic sensibility. Slavophiles like Kireevsky, who began the pilgrimage of intellectuals to Optina, discovered a reflection of their own Romantic aversion to abstract reason in the anti-rational approach to the divine mystery which they believed to be the vital feature of the Russian Church and preserved at its purest in the monasteries. They saw the monastery as a religious version of their own striving for community - a sacred microcosm of their ideal Russia - and on that basis they defined the Church as a spiritual union of the Orthodox, the true community of Christian love that was only to be found in the Russian Church. This was a Slavophile mythology, of course, but there was a core of mysticism in the Russian Church. Unlike the Western Churches, whose theology is based on a reasoned understanding of divinity, the Russian Church believes that God cannot be grasped by the human mind (for anything we can know is inferior to Him) and that even to discuss God in such human categories is to reduce the Divine Mystery of His revelation. The only way to approach the Russian God is through the spiritual transcendence of this world.⁴

This emphasis on the mystical experience of the Divinity was associated with two important features of the Russian Church. One was the creed of resignation and withdrawal from life. The Russian monasteries were totally devoted to the contemplative life and, unlike their counterparts in western Europe, they played no active part in public life or scholarship. Orthodoxy preached humility and, more than any other Church, it made a cult of passive suffering (the first saints of the Russian Church, the medieval princes Boris and Gleb, were canonized

because they let themselves be slaughtered without resistance). The second consequence of this mystical approach was the burden that it placed on ritual and art, on the emotional experience of the liturgy, as a spiritual entry to the divine realm. The beauty of the church - the most striking outward feature of the Orthodox religion - was its fundamental argument as well. According to a story in the Primary Chronicle, the first recorded history of Kievan Rus', compiled by monks in the eleventh century, the Russians were converted to Byzantine Christianity by the appearance of the churches in Constantinople. Vladimir, the pagan prince of Kievan Rus' in the tenth century, sent his emissaries to visit various countries in search of the True Faith. They went first to the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but found no joy or virtue in their religion. They went to Rome and Germany, but thought their churches plain. But in Constantinople, the emissaries reported, 'we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth'.⁵

The Russian Church is contained entirely in its liturgy, and to understand it there is no point reading books: one has to go and see the Church at prayer. The Russian Orthodox service is an emotional experience. The entire spirit of the Russian people, and much of their best art and music, has been poured into the Church, and at times of national crisis, under the Mongols or the Communists, they have always turned to it for support and hope. The liturgy has never become the preserve of scholars or the clergy, as happened in the medieval West. This is a people's liturgy. There are no pews, no social hierarchies, in a Russian church. Worshippers are free to move around - as they do constantly to prostrate and cross themselves before the various icons - and this makes for an atmosphere that is not unlike a busy market square. Chekhov describes it in his story 'Easter Night' (1886):

Nowhere could the excitement and commotion be felt as keenly as in the church. At the door there was a relentless wrestle going on between the ebb and flow. Some people were coming in, and others were going out, but then they were soon coming back again, just to stand for a while before leaving again. There were people scuttling from one place to another, and then hanging about as it they were looking for something. Waves started at the door and rippled through the church, disturbing even the front rows where

there were serious worthy people standing. There could be no question of any concentrated praying. There was no praying at all in fact, just a kind of sheer, irrepressible childlike joy looking for a pretext to burst forth and be expressed in some kind of movement, even if it was only the shameless moving about and the crowding together.

You are struck by the same same kind of extraordinary sense of motion in the Easter service itself. The heavenly gates stand wide open in all the side-altars, dense clouds of smoky incense hang in the air around the candelabra; wherever you look there are lights, brightness and candles spluttering everywhere. There are no readings planned; the energetic, joyful singing does not stop until the end; after each song in the canon the clergy change their vestments and walk around with the censor, and this is repeated every ten minutes almost.⁶

Anyone who goes to a Russian church service is bound to be impressed by the beauty of its chants and choral song. The entire liturgy is sung - the sonorous bass voice of the deacon's prayers interspersed with canticles from the choir. Orthodoxy's ban on instrumental music encouraged a remarkable development of colour and variety in vocal writing for the Church. The polyphonic harmonies of folk song were assimilated to the znamenny plainchants - so called because they were written down by special signs (znameni) instead of Western notes - which gave them their distinctive Russian sound and feel. As in Russian folk song, too, there was a constant repetition of the melody, which over several hours (the Orthodox service can be interminably long) could have the effect of inducing a trance-like state of religious ecstasy. Churches famous for their deacons and their choirs drew huge congregations - Russians being drawn to the spiritual impact of liturgical music, above all. Part of this, however, may have been explained by the fact that the Church had a monopoly on the composition of sacred music - Tchaikovsky was the first to challenge it when he wrote the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1878 - so that it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that the public could hear sacred music in a concert hall. Rachmaninov's Vespers, or All Night Vigil (1915), was intended to be used as a part of the liturgy. The summation of Rachmaninov's religious faith, it was based on a detailed study of the ancient chants and in this sense it can

stand not simply as a work of sacred art but also as the synthesis of an entire culture of religious life.

Russians pray with their eyes open - their gaze fixed on an icon. For contemplating the icon is itself perceived as a form of prayer. The icon is a gateway to the holy sphere, not a decoration or instruction for the poor, as sacred images became in western Europe from medieval times. In contrast to the Catholics, the Orthodox confess, not to a priest, but to the icon of Christ with a priest in attendance as a spiritual guide. The icon is the focal point of the believer's religious emotion -it links him to the saints and the Holy Trinity - and for this reason it is widely seen by Russians as a sacred object in itself. Even an 'outsider' like Kireevsky, who had been a convert to the Roman Church, felt himself attracted to the icon's 'marvellous power'. As he told Herzen:

I once stood at a shrine and gazed at a wonder-working icon of the Mother of God, thinking of the childlike faith of the people praying before it; some women and infirm old men knelt, crossing themselves and bowing down to the earth. With ardent hope I gazed at the holy features, and little by little the secret of their marvellous power began to grow clear to me. Yes, this was not just a painted board - for centuries it had absorbed these passions and these hopes, the prayers of the afflicted and unhappy; it was filled with the energy of all these prayers. It had become a living organism, a meeting place between the Lord and men. Thinking of this, I looked once more at the old men, at the women and the children prostrate in the dust, and at the holy icon - and then I too saw the animated features of the Mother of God, and I saw how she looked with love and mercy at these simple folk, and I sank on my knees and meekly prayed to her.⁷

Icons came to Russia from Byzantium in the tenth century, and for the first two hundred years or so they were dominated by the Greek style. But the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century cut off Russia from Byzantium; and the monasteries, which were largely left alone and even flourished at this time, began to develop their own style. The Russian icon came to be distinguished by qualities that guided the worshipper at prayer: a simple harmony of line and colour and a captivating use of 'inverse perspective' (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer into the picture

space and to symbolize the fact, in the words of Russia's greatest icon scholar Leonid Ouspensky, that 'the action taking place before our eyes is outside the laws of earthly existence'.⁸ That style reached its supreme heights in Andrei Rublev's icons of the early fifteenth century - an era coinciding with Russia's triumph over Tatar rule, so that this flowering of sacred art became a cherished part of national identity. Rublev's icons came to represent the nation's spiritual unity. What defined the Russians - at this crucial moment when they were without a state - was their Christianity. Readers may recall the last, symbolic scene of Andrei Tar-kovsky's film about the icon painter, Andrei Rublev (1966), when a group of craftsmen cast a giant bell for the ransacked church of Vladimir. It is an unforgettable image - a symbol of the way in which the Russians have endured through their spiritual strength and creativity. Not surprising, then, that the film was suppressed in the Brezhnev years.

It is hard to overstress the importance of the fact that Russia received its Christianity from Byzantium and not from the West. It was in the spirit of the Byzantine tradition that the Russian Empire came to see itself as a theocracy, a truly Christian realm where Church and state were united. The god-like status of the Tsar was a legacy of this tradition.⁹ After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the Russian Church proclaimed Moscow to be the Third Rome - the direct heir to Byzantium and the last remaining seat of the Orthodox religion, with a messianic role to save the Christian world. This Byzantine inheritance was strengthened by the marriage of Ivan III to Sofia Paleologue, the niece of Byzantium's last Emperor, Constantine, in 1472. The ruling princes of Muscovy adopted the title 'Tsar' and invented for themselves a legendary descent from the Byzantine and Roman emperors. 'Holy Russia' thus emerged as the providential land of salvation - a messianic consciousness that became reinforced by its isolation from the West.

With Byzantium's decline, Russia was cut off from the mainstream of Christian civilization and, by the end of the fifteenth century, it was the only major kingdom still espousing Eastern Christianity. As a consequence, the Russian Church grew introspective and withdrawn, more intolerant of other faiths, and more protective of its national rituals. It became a state and national Church. Culturally the roots of this went deep into the history of Byzantium itself. Unlike the Western Church, Byzantium had no papacy to give it supranational cohesion.

It had no lingua franca like Latin - the Russian clergy, for example, being mostly ignorant of Greek - and it was unable to impose a common liturgy or canon law. So from the start the Orthodox community was inclined to break down into independent Churches along national lines (Greek, Russian, Serbian, etc.) - with the result that religion reinforced, and often became synonymous with, national iden-tity. To say 'Russian' was to say 'Orthodox'.

The rituals of the Church were the basis of these national differences. There was one essential doctrine - set long ago by the Church Fathers - but each national Church had its own tradition of rituals as a community of worshippers. For the Western reader, accustomed to conceive of religious differences in terms of doctrine and moral atti-tudes, it may be difficult to understand how rituals can define a national group. But rituals are essential to the Orthodox religion - indeed, the very meaning of the concept 'Orthodox' is rooted in the idea of the 'correct rituals'. This explains why Orthodoxy is so fundamentally conservative - for purity of ritual is a matter of the utmost importance to the Church - and why indeed its dissenting movements have generally opposed any innovations in the liturgy, the Old Believers being the most obvious case in point.

The whole of Russian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was permeated with religious rituals. At birth the Russian child would be baptized and given a saint's name. The annual celebration of a person's saint's day was even more important than that of their birth-day. Every major event in a Russian's life - entry into school and university, joining the army or civil service, purchasing an estate or house, marriage and death - received some form of blessing from a priest. Russia had more religious holidays than any other Christian country. But no other Church was so hard on the stomach. There were five weeks of fasting during May and June, two weeks in August, six weeks leading up to Christmas Eve, and seven weeks during Lent. The Lenten fast, which was the one fast kept by all classes of society, began after Shrovetide, the most colourful of the Russian holidays, when everybody gorged themselves on pancakes and went for sleigh rides or tobogganing. Anna Lelong, who grew up on a medium-sized estate in Riazan province in the 1840s, recalled the Shrovetide holiday as a moment of communion between lord and serf.

At around 2 p.m. on the Sunday of Shrovetide, horses would be harnessed up to two or three sleighs and a barrel would be put on the driver's seat of one of them. Old Vissarion would stand on it, dressed up in a cape made of matting and a hat decorated with bast leaves. He would drive the first sleigh and behind him would be other sleighs on which our servants crowded, singing songs. They would ride round the whole village and mummers from other villages would join them on their sleighs. A huge convoy would build up and the whole procession lasted until dusk. At around seven our main room would fill with people. The peasants had come to 'bid farewell' before the Lenten journey. Each one had a bundle in his hands with various offerings, such as rolls or long white loaves, and sometimes we children were given spiced cakes or dark honey loaves. We would exchange kisses with the peasants and wish each other well for the Lenten period. The offerings were put in a large basket and the peasants were given vodka and salted fish. On Sunday only our own Kartsevo peasants came to say goodbye, and peasants from other nearby villages would come on the Saturday. When the peasants left, the room would have to be sealed tightly as it smelt of sheepskin coats and mud. Our last meal before Lent began with special pancakes called 'tuzhiki'. We had fish soup, and cooked fish which was also given to the servants.¹⁰

In Moscow there would be skating on the ice of the Moscow river, where a famous fairground with circuses and puppet shows, acrobats and jugglers would draw huge crowds of revellers. But the aspect of the city would change dramatically on the first day of Lent. 'The endless ringing of bells called everyone to prayer', recalled Mikhail Zernov. 'Forbidden food was banished from all houses and a mushroom market started up on the banks of the Moscow river, where one could buy everything one needed to survive the fast - mushrooms, pickled cabbage, gherkins, frozen apples and rowanberries, all kinds of bread made with Lenten butter, and a special type of sugar with the blessing of the Church.'¹¹ During Lent there were daily services. With every passing day the religious tension mounted, until its release in Easter week, recalled Zernov.

On the eve of Easter Moscow broke out of its ordered services and a screaming, raving market opened on Red Square. Ancient pagan Rus' was greeting the arrival of warm days and throwing down the gauntlet to orderly Orthodox

piety. We went every year to take part in this traditional Moscow celebration with our father. Even from far away, as you approached Red Square, you could hear the sounds of whistles, pipes and other kinds of homemade instruments. The whole square was full of people. We moved among the puppet booths, the tents and stalls that had appeared overnight. Our religious justifi-cation was buying willow branches for the All Night Vigil to mark Jesus's entry into Jerusalem. But we preferred the other stalls which sold all kinds of weird and useless things, such as 'sea dwellers' living in glass tubes filled with coloured liquid, or monkeys made from wool. It was difficult to see how they connected with Palm Sunday. There were colourful balloons with wonderful designs, and Russian sweets and cakes which we were not allowed. Nor could we go to see the woman with moustaches, or the real mermaids, or the calves with a double head.¹²

The Easter service is the most important service, and the most beautiful, in the Russian Church. As Gogol once remarked, the Rus-sians have a special interest in celebrating Easter - for theirs is a faith based on hope. Shortly before midnight every member of the congregation lights a candle and, to the subdued singing of the choir, leaves the church in a procession with icons and banners. There is an atmosphere of rising expectation, suddenly released at the stroke of midnight, when the church doors open and the priest appears to proclaim in his deep bass voice 'Christ is risen!' - to which he receives the response from the thronging worshippers: 'He is risen indeed!' Then, as the choir chants the Resurrection Chant, the members of the congregation greet one another with a three-fold kiss and the words 'Christ is risen!' Easter was a truly national moment - a moment of communion between the classes. The landowner Maria Nikoleva recalled Easter with her serfs:

The peasants would come directly from church to exchange Easter greetings. There would be at least 500 of them. We would kiss them on the cheek and give them each a piece of kulicb [Easter cake] and an egg. Everyone had the right to wander all over our house on that day and I do not remember anything going missing or even being touched. Our father would be in the front room, where he received the most important and respected peasants, old men and elders. He would give them wine, pie, cooked meat and in the maid's room

our nanny would give out beer or homebrew. We received so many kisses from faces with beards that were not always very clean that we had to wash quickly so we wouldn't get a rash.¹³

The procession of the icons on the Easter Monday, in which icons were brought to every house for a blessing, was another ritual of communion. Vera Kharuzina, the first woman to become a professor of ethnography in Russia, has left us with a wonderful description of an icon being received in a wealthy merchant household in Moscow during the 1870s:

There were so many people who wanted to receive the Icon of the Heavenly Virgin and the Martyr that a list was always made up and an order given out to set the route of the procession round the city. My father always went to work early, so he preferred to invite the icon and the relics either early in the morning or late at night. The icon and the relics came separately and almost never coincided. But their visits left a deep impression. The adults in the house would not go to bed all night. Mother would just lie down for a while on the sofa. My father and my aunt would not eat anything from the previous evening onwards so as to be able to drink the holy water on an empty stomach. We children were put to bed early, and got up a long time before the arrival. The plants would be moved from the corner in the front room and a wooden divan put in their place, on which the icon could rest. A table would be placed in front of the divan and on it a snow white table cloth. A bowl of water would be placed on it for blessing, a dish with an empty glass, ready for the priest to pour holy water into it, candles and incense. The whole house would be tense with expectation. My father and my aunt would pace from window to window, waiting to see the carriage arrive. The icon and the relics would be transported about the city in a special carriage, which was extremely solid and cumbersome. The housekeeper would be standing in the hall, surrounded by her servants, who were ready to carry out her requests. The doorman would be looking out for the guests and we knew he would run to the front door as soon as he saw the carriage in the lane and knock hard in order to warn us of its arrival. Then we would hear the thunder of six strong horses approaching the gates. A young boy as postilion would sit at the front and a sturdy man would be posted at the back. Despite the severe frost at that time of year, both would travel with their heads uncovered. A cluster of people led

by our housekeeper would take the heavy icon and carry it up the front steps with difficulty. Our whole family would greet the icon in the doorway, genuflecting before it. A stream of frosty air would blow in from outside through the open doors, which we found bracing. The service of prayer would begin and the servants, accompanied by their relatives sometimes, would crowd at the door. Aunt would take the glass of holy water standing in the dish from the priest. She would take the glass to everyone to sip from, and they would also dip their fingers in the water in the dish and touch their faces with it. Our housekeeper would follow the priest around the room with the aspergillum and the bowl of holy water. Meanwhile everyone would go up to touch the icon - at first father and mother, then our aunt, and then we children. After us came the servants and those with them. We would take holy cotton wool from bags attached to the icon and wipe our eyes with it. After the prayers, the icon would be taken through the other rooms and outside again into the courtyard. Some people would prostrate themselves before it. The people carrying the icon would step over them. The icon would be taken straight out into the street and passers-by would be waiting to touch it. That moment of common brief prayer would join us to those people - people we did not even know and would probably never see again. Everyone would stand and cross themselves and bow as the icon was put back in the carriage. We would stand at the front door with our fur coats over our shoulders, then we would rush back into the house so as not to catch cold. There was still a festive mood in the house. In the dining room everything would be ready for tea, and aunt would sit by the samovar with a joyful expression.¹⁴

Religious rituals were at the heart of the Russian faith and national consciousness. They were also the main cause of a schism in the Orthodox community that split the Russian nation into two. In the 1660s the Russian Church adopted a series of reforms to bring its rituals closer to the Greek. It was thought that over time there had been deviations in the Russian liturgy which needed to be brought back into line. But the Old Believers argued that the Russian rituals were in fact holier than those of the Greek Church, which had fallen from grace by merging with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439. In the Old Believers' view the Greeks had been punished for this act of apostasy by the loss of Constantinople in 1453, when the centre of Orthodoxy had passed to Moscow. To the Western reader the schism

may appear to be about some obscure points of ritual (the most contentious reform altered the manner of making the sign of the cross from two to three fingers) that pale into insignificance when compared with the great doctrinal disputes of Western Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in Russia, where faith and ritual and national consciousness were so closely associated, the schism assumed eschatological proportions. As the Old Believers saw it, the reforms were the work of the Antichrist, and a sign that the end of the world was near. During the last decades of the seventeenth century dozens of communities of Old Believers rose up in rebellion: as the forces of the state approached they shut themselves inside their wooden churches and burned themselves to death rather than defile themselves before Judgement Day by coming into contact with the Antichrist. Many others followed the example of the hermits and fled to the remote lakes and forests of the north, to the Volga borderlands, to the Don Cossack regions in the south, or to the forests of Siberia. In places like the shores of the White Sea they set up their own Utopian communities, where they hoped to live in a truly Christian realm of piety and virtue untouched by the evil of the Russian Church and state. Elsewhere, as in Moscow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they tended to remain in particular neighbourhoods like the Zamosk-voreche. The Old Believers were a broad social movement of religious and political dissent. Their numbers grew as the spiritual life of the established Church declined and it became subordinated to the state in the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century their numbers peaked at an estimated 20 million, though their continued persecution by Church and state makes it difficult to say with any certainty that there were not still more in the wilderness.¹⁵

In many ways the Old Believers remained more faithful than the established Church to the spiritual ideals of the common people, from which they drew their democratic strength. The nineteenth-century historian Pogodin once remarked that, if the ban on the Old Belief was lifted by the state, half the Russian peasants would convert to it.¹⁶ Against the emerging Tsarist doctrine of an autocratic Christian state the Old Believers held up the ideal of a Christian nation which seemed to strike a chord with those who felt alienated from the secular and Westernizing state. Old Believer communities were strictly regulated

by the rituals of their faith and the patriarchal customs of medieval Muscovy. They were simple farming communities, in which the honest virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety were rigidly enforced and indoctrinated in the young. Many of the country's most successful peasant farmers, merchants and industrialists were brought up in the Old Belief.

Persecuted by the government for much of their history, the Old Believers had a strong libertarian tradition which acted as a magnet for the discontented and the dispossessed, for oppressed and marginalized groups, and above all for the Cossacks and members of the peasantry who resented the encroachments of the state against their customs and their liberties. The Old Believers refused to shave off their beards or put on Western clothes, as Peter the Great had demanded in the 1700s. They played a major role in the Cossack rebellions of the 1670s (led by Stenka Razin) and the 1770s (led by Emelian Pugachev). There was a strong anarchistic and egalitarian element in the Old Believer communities -especially in those which worshipped without priests (the bezpoptsy) on the reasoning that all priestly hierarchies were a corruption of the Church. At the heart of these communities was the ancient Russian quest for a truly spiritual kingdom on this earth. It had its roots in the popular belief, which was itself an early form of the national consciousness, that such a sacred kingdom might be found in 'Holy Rus''.

This Utopian search was equally pursued by diverse peasant sects and religious wanderers, which also rejected the established Church and state: the 'Flagellants' or Khlysty (probably a corruption of Khristy, meaning 'Christs'), who believed that Christ had entered into living individuals - usually peasants who were seized by some mysterious spirit and wandered round the villages attracting followers (Rasputin was a member of this sect); the 'Fighters for the Spirit' (Dhikbobortsy), who espoused a vague anarchism based on Christian principles and evaded all state taxes and military dues; the 'Wanderers' (Stranniki), who believed in severing all their ties with the existing state and society, seeing them as the realm of the Antichrist, and wandered as free spirits across the Russian land; the 'Milk-drinkers' (Molokane), who were convinced that Christ would reappear in the form of a simple peasant man; and, most exotic of them all, the Sell castrators' (Skoptsy), who believed that salvation came only with the excision of the instruments of sin.

Russia was a breeding ground for Christian anarchists and Utopians. The mystical foundation of the Russian faith and the messianic basis of its national consciousness combined to produce in the common people a spiritual striving for the perfect Kingdom of God in the 'Holy Russian land'. Dostoevsky once maintained that 'this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth', was the basis of 'our Russian socialism'.¹⁷ And there was a sense in which this spiritual quest lay at the heart of the popular conception of an ideal Russian state where truth and justice (pravda) were administered. It was no coincidence, for example, that the Old Believers and sectarians were commonly involved in social protests - the Razin and Pugachev revolts, or the peasant demonstrations of 1861, when many former serfs, disappointed by the limited provisions of the emancipation, refused to believe that the Decree had been passed by the 'truly holy Tsar'. Religious dissent and social protest were bound to be connected in a country such as Russia, where popular belief in the god-like status of the Tsar played such a mighty and oppressive role. The peasantry believed in a Kingdom of God on this earth. Many of them conceived of heaven as an actual place in some remote corner of the world, where the rivers flowed with milk and the grass was always green.¹⁸ This conviction inspired dozens of popular legends about a real Kingdom of God hidden somewhere in the Russian land. There were legends of the Distant Lands, of the Golden Islands, of the Kingdom of Opona, and the Land of Chud, a sacred kingdom underneath the ground where the 'White Tsar' ruled according to the 'ancient and truly just ideals' of the peasantry.¹⁹

The oldest of these folk myths was the legend of Kitezh - a sacred city that was hidden underneath the lake of Svetloyar (in Nizhegorod province) and was only visible to the true believers of the Russian faith. Holy monks and hermits were said to be able to hear its ancient churches' distant bells. The earliest oral versions of the legend went back to the days of Mongol rule. Kitezh was attacked by the infidels and at the crucial moment of the siege it magically disappeared into the lake, causing the Tatars to be drowned.

Over the centuries the legend became mixed with other stories about towns and monasteries concealed underground, magic realms and buried treasure under the sea, and legends of the folk hero Ilia Muro-

mets. But in the early eighteenth century the Old Believers wrote the legend down, and it was in this form that it was disseminated in the nineteenth century. In the Old Believers' version, for instance, the Kitezh tale became a parable of the truly Christian Russia that was concealed from the Russia of the Antichrist. However, among the peasantry it became a vehicle for dissident beliefs that looked towards a spiritual community beyond the walls of the established Church. Throughout the nineteenth century pilgrims came to Svetloyar in their thousands to set up shrines and pray in hopeful expectation of a resurrection from the lake. The height of the season was the summer solstice, the old pagan festival of Kupala, when thousands of pilgrims would populate the forests all around the lake. The writer Zinaida Gippius, who visited the scene in 1903, described it as a kind of 'natural church' with little groups of worshippers, their icons posted to the trees, singing ancient chants by candlelight.²⁰

Another of these Utopian beliefs, no less tenacious in the popular religious consciousness, was the legend of Belovode, a community of Christian brotherhood, equality and freedom, said to be located in an archipelago between Russia and Japan. The story had its roots in a real community that had been established by a group of serfs who had fled to the mountainous Altai region of Siberia in the eighteenth century. When they did not return, the rumour spread that they had found the Promised Land. It was taken up, in particular, by the Wanderers, who believed in the existence of a divine realm somewhere at the edge of the existing world, and parties of the sect would journey to Siberia in search of it.²¹ The legend grew in status after 1807, when a guidebook to Belovode was published by a monk who claimed to have been there and, although his directions on how to get there were extremely vague, hundreds of peasants set off each year by horse and cart or riverboat to find the legendary realm. The last recorded journeys, in the 1900s, seem to have been prompted by a rumour that Tolstoy had been to Belovode (a group of Cossacks visited the writer to see if this was true).²² But long after this, Belovode remained in the people's dreams. The painter Roerich, who took an interest in the legend and visited the Altai in the 1920s, claimed to have met peasants there who still believed in the magic land.