Our friend the abbess frequently came to pay us a visit. She was always accompanied by one or two nuns, who treated her with extreme respect: they waited on her with great attention, and supported her as she walked to and from the carriage as if they were servants. I was told that she was a very strict disciplinarian in her convent, but, with two hundred women to govern and to keep on the road to heaven, some severity was perhaps necessary. If all the stories that I used to hear told of their backslidings were true, she had no sinecure of it, poor old lady!
I had many acquaintances among the clergy in the provinces, especially in Twer. I remember once I went to a fête given by the archbishop, and a very pleasant evening I passed. There was no dancing, of course, but we were entertained with singing and agreeable conversation. The young choristers and monks possessed beautiful voices; they stood among the thick shrubs and sang at intervals their charming national airs like so many nightingales, whilst the brothers of the monastery handed round refreshments of all kinds. Among the company were our friend the abbess and the superior of another convent at some versts distance: they were really very pleasant people. Our entertainer was a very reverend personage; his appearance well befitted his sacred position; his long snowy hair and beard, his benevolent countenance, and his stately figure, habited in the flowing robes of his order, gave him a truly apostolic look, and made us almost wish that the English clergy would adopt so becoming a costume. His conversation was lively and interesting; he spoke several modern languages, including Greek and Turkish, and amused us greatly with anecdotes of his travels through different countries. I remember that, in speaking of the monasteries near the Black Sea and in other distant provinces, he informed us that many of them contained valuable ancient manuscripts in Greek, Chaldaic, &c., which are most jealously guarded by the monks under whose care they are, although the holy men are ordinarily so ignorant that they cannot read them. He seemed to think that many works now supposed to be lost may at some future time be discovered in those unknown collections. On my inquiring in what way the monks had obtained possession of them, he told us that at the siege of Byzantium, and at the destruction of the library of Alexandria, many persons fled into the remoter districts for safety, and carried with them the manuscripts of valuable ancient writings, which in the dark ages gradually became lost to the learned men of the West. Whether the venerable archbishop was right in his conjectures, still, I believe, remains to be proved.
On our taking leave, he bestowed his benediction on us all, but not before he had made us partake of some excellent champagne, and I really quitted the palace with much greater respect for the Greek clergy than I had entertained before.
Among other estimable members of the priesthood may be mentioned the archimandrite of a very large monastery in the same province, to whom I frequently paid a visit. In this monastery Alexis, Peter the Great’s son, was confined for a considerable time. I saw the apartments that were appropriated to him: they had thickly-barred windows and strong doors, well suited to a prison; the furniture was in the same state as when he resided there, and consisted of a few tables and chairs clumsily made of deal, ornamented with green and red streaks on the unpainted wood. I could not help feeling compassion for the unfortunate prince, who, whatever his faults might have been, was certainly unnaturally treated and cruelly deceived by his father. I thought, as I stood in those small, close rooms, how many weary hours he must have passed, and how bitter must his reflections have been as, day after day, he gazed from those grated windows on the never-changing scene outside.
A description of this monastery will serve to give an idea of those buildings in general.
In form it was nearly square, and was surrounded by a high whitewashed wall deeply dovetailed, having at each corner a small circular tower with a pointed roof, furnished with numerous loopholes. A gallery ran along the whole length inside, from which, in the time of the Tartar wars, the men could shoot their arrows on the besiegers. The gateway was surmounted by portraits of the Virgin and Child and those of other saints, before which a lamp was always kept burning. On entering I found a well-kept grass-plot, on two sides of which were buildings three stories high, containing the cells of the monks, the superior’s apartments, and the domestic offices. The lower range was partly devoted to a kind of monastic prison, in which disobedient monks and those convicted of bigamy were confined; for, in Russia, the punishment for men guilty of that crime is imprisonment for life in some religious establishment: the female convicts are, of course, sent to the nunneries. At the time of my first visit there were three criminals confined in the monastery: one for having had three wives; another who had killed a man in self-defence, and who, according to the law, was sent there for one year to atone by repentance and prayer for the blood he had shed. One of the monks informed me that the prisoner in question was quite a youth, being only nineteen; that he was crossing the river very late one night on a hired sledge, when, on arriving at a very solitary spot, the driver suddenly turned and attempted to strangle him. He found means to draw his sword, with which he gave a mortal wound to his assailant, who fell dead instantly. He remained for a few minutes horror-stricken at what he had done and uncertain as to the measures he ought to take. At last he lifted the lifeless body on the sledge, drove back to the town, and presented himself at the police-station. He was arrested, but, as there was every probability that he had committed the act in self-defence, his punishment was the being sent to the monastery. The third prisoner was a monk accused of great immorality, who was shortly to be exiled to Siberia, but, as the final decision of the superior courts had not arrived, he was detained here in the mean time.
On the other sides of the square were the church, the cemetery, and the garden. The church was ancient, and contained various extraordinary old paintings of saints. Several monks were at their devotions when we entered; their long black garments and silent demeanour, their frequent prostrations, and the burning lamps, almost led me to imagine them to be disciples of Zoroaster offering their adoration to the sacred fire, whilst the darkness of the building gave an air of sombre mystery to the scene.
The burying-ground was extensive, and I remarked some curious sarcophagi of great antiquity.
After we had examined all that we thought interesting, we were shown into the garden; it contained a great many fruit-trees and shrubs suitable to the climate, such as apples, pears, currants, gooseberries, and raspberries, a large bed of sun-flowers, and about twenty beehives, for whose benefit the sun-flowers had, I imagine, been planted. On our return to the superior’s apartments we passed through the large room in which all the servants of the establishment, as well as the peasants from the neighbouring village belonging to the monastic estate, were at dinner. Their repast consisted of large bowls of buckwheat, with oil, black bread, and salt, the whole washed down with quass, a kind of sour drink made of fermented meal—a dinner not according to our taste, perhaps, but nevertheless well relished by these poor people, who had acquired a good appetite by making hay in the fields outside of the walls.
But to return from this long digression. The archimandrite was a dignified-looking man of about fifty, and had lost his wife six years previously, when, according to the custom, he had embraced the monastic life. He had two sons, government employés, who resided with him in the establishment. He was a man of great erudition, and had views on religious points much too enlightened for his nation, as I was informed that he had been imprisoned some time before on account of opinions he had expressed concerning modern miracles, &c., but, in consideration of his high character for learning and moral excellence, extreme severity had not been resorted to. He always seemed much pleased at our visits, and received us with kindness and hospitality. My Russian friends had known him for many years, and respected him greatly. I was fortunate, certainly, in being acquainted with so many worthy people belonging to the Greek priesthood, and am glad to be able to speak well of a class of men of whom favourable opinions are not generally entertained by foreigners; but I believe that many speak ill of them upon false reports, and judge lightly of the merits of the many from the disgraceful conduct of a few, or from those ignorant, debased members of the profession who are to be found in the remote villages and almost barbarous districts of the interior. I remember accompanying a friend once on a visit to one of her estates at about seven hundred versts from St. Petersburg; the peasants came as usual to pay their respects to their proprietor. I was not astonished at any display of slavish servility on their part, as a long residence in different parts of Russia had too much accustomed me to such conduct, but I was greatly shocked and disgusted to see the priest descend to such meanness as to prostrate himself to the earth, and kiss the lady’s feet: in fact he seemed not a whit superior to the degraded boors amongst whom he lived. A Russo-French gentleman, who had travelled over nearly every part of the empire, even to the interior of Siberia, informed me that the state of the clergy in the remote country places was inconceivably bad; that they were ignorant, slavish, vicious, and drunken in almost an equal degree with the debased peasantry; that, although it is strictly forbidden for a priest to be seen to enter a whisky-shop, yet they are not ashamed to send one of their flock to fetch spirits, nor do they blush to be seen intoxicated in the miserable villages of which they are the pastors; that their wives and children are ragged and filthy, and are scarcely as respectable as those of the serfs. In what state of morality can the peasants be whose teachers are thus degraded?