Who was this Tichon?
Tichon was the only son, the last offspring of the once noble family of the princes Zapólsky, long since fallen into disgrace and poverty. His mother died at his birth, his father, a leader of the Streltsy, took part in the mutiny against Peter, supporting the Miloslavskis, ancient Russia and the old faith. During the terrible trial of 1698 he was sentenced, tortured in Preobrazhensky torture chamber, and then executed on the Red Square in the Kremlin. All his other relatives and friends were also executed or banished. The orphaned Tichon, but eight years old, remained in the charge of his attendant, Yemelian Pahómitch. The child was weak and puny, and suffered from fits like one “possessed.” He loved his father with passionate tenderness. Anxious for the boy’s health, Pahómitch kept from him the knowledge of his father’s death, by telling Tichon that his father had gone away on business to his distant patrimony in the Sarátoff government. But the child cried and pined, and glided like a shadow about the large empty house, his heart foreboding some calamity. At last he could bear it no longer. One day, having again vainly sought to learn the truth, he ran out of the house by himself, hoping to reach the Kremlin where an uncle of his lived, and to ask him about his father. The uncle was, however, no longer alive; he had been executed at the same time as Tichon’s father.
At the Spasski gate the boy met large carts laden with corpses of the executed Streltsy, thrown together anyhow, half naked. Like slaughtered cattle, fresh from the slaughterhouse, they were taken to a common grave, the refuse pit, and there buried together with filth and carrion, by the express order of the Tsar. Beams stuck out from the walls of the Kremlin, on which numerous bodies hung like “Polti,” a salt Astrachan fish which is hung in bundles to dry in the sun.
The people all day long silently crowded the Red Square, not daring to come near the place of execution, but looking on from afar. Making his way through the crowd, Tichon perceived near the Lóbnoye place some long thick logs surrounded by pools of congealed blood. These served for the executioners’ blocks. The victims crowding against one another, as many as thirty men at once, would lay their heads on the logs in rows. While the Tsar was drinking in a hall with windows overlooking the square, his boyars, fools and favourites were chopping off heads. Once the Tsar, dissatisfied with the way they did their work—the hands of the inexperienced headsmen were trembling—ordered twenty of the victims to be brought to his banqueting table, and there slew them with his own hands to the accompaniment of jeers and music. He drank a glass of wine, chopped off a head; glass after glass, head after head. Wine and blood flowed together.
Tichon saw the gallows erected in the shape of a cross for the mutinous Streltsy priests. The hangman was Nikíta Zotoff, the mock patriarch. A great number of wheels with the mutilated bodies still hanging to them; iron spikes and stakes with half putrefied heads. The Tsar’s command forbade their being taken off till they had completely rotted. The air was one awful stench. Crows hovered over the place in large flocks.
The boy fixed his eyes on one of the heads. It stood out black against the transparent azure of the sky, all strewn with cloudlets of delicate rose and golden hue; while further off, the domes of the Kremlin churches glowed like living embers. The evening bell rang out in the still air. Suddenly Tichon felt the sky, the domes, the very earth go from under his feet, while he himself was falling into some bottomless abyss: he had recognised his father’s face in that head with black sockets for eyes.
The drum rolled, a division of the Preobrazhensky regiment came round the corner; it accompanied carts with fresh victims. The condemned sat in white shirts with calm faces, holding lighted tapers in their hands. A tall man on horseback rode in front of them. His face too was calm, yet terrible. This was Peter. Tichon had never seen him before, but he at once recognised him, and it seemed to the child that the dead head of his father with its blank eye-sockets was looking straight into the Tsar’s eyes. The next moment he swooned. The crowd falling back in terror would have crushed the boy, had not an old man noticed him. This man, an old friend of Pahómitch, a certain Gregory of Talitsa, lifted him up and carried him home. In the night Tichon had a fit such as he never had before. It was a wonder he survived.
This Gregory of Talitsa, a poor unknown scribe, who lived by copying books and manuscripts, was one of the first to prove that Tsar Peter was the Antichrist. This was the charge brought against him at his trial, “that prompted by too great a zeal against Antichrist, and a doubtful heretic fear, he began to spread among the people evil words of blame and slander against the Tsar.” Having compiled booklets about the “coming of Antichrist,” and “the end of the world,” he thought of printing and freely distributing them among the people, in order to rouse them against the Tsar. Gregory often used to visit Pahómitch and talk with him about the Tsar, the Antichrist, and the last days. The monk Cornelius, who was living in Moscow at that time, took part in these conversations. Young Tichon used to listen to these old men, who, like three illboding crows, would collect at dusk in the empty house and caw: “the end of the world is drawing nigh; hard times, evil years have come; true faith, the stone wall, the strong pillar of Christ, has disappeared—Christianity has perished. Antichrist will come at the consummation of time; the whole world will be set on fire and burn sixty ells deep into its crust, because of our great transgressions.” And then they would relate a vision of “some vile serpent, which creeps and wriggles about, hanging down from the archdeacon’s shoulder instead of the holy stole during the service in a Niconian church; or at night, coiling round the walls of the Tsar’s dwelling, slips its head inside, and whispers into the Tsar’s ear.” These melancholy conversations would pass into still more melancholy songs:
Christ, the heaven’s eternal King,
Whose glory through the world doth ring,