It happened more than once that I met a man who seemed deep in serious thought and had a good, clean light in his eyes. If I met him once or twice, he was the same; but at the third or fourth meeting I would see that he was bad or drunk, and that he was no longer modest, but shameless, vulgar and blasphemed God, and I could not understand why the man was spoiled or what had broken him. All seemed blind to me, and to fall easily by the way-side.
I seldom heard an exalted word. Too frequently men spoke strange words out of habit, not understanding the benefit nor the harm which was locked up in their thoughts. They gathered together the speeches of the pious monks or the prophecies of the hermits and the anchorites, and divided them among each other, like children playing with broken pieces of china. In fact, I did not see the man, but fragments of broken lives, dirty human dust, which swept over the earth and was blown by various winds onto the steps of churches.
The people circled in vast numbers around the relics of the saints or the miracle-making ikons, or bathed in the holy streams, and sought only self-forgetfulness. The church processions were painful to me. Even as a child the miraculous ikons had lost their significance for me, and my life in the monastery had destroyed any vestige of respect that was left. At times I felt that man was a gigantic worm, crawling in the dust of the roads, and that men urged each other on by a force which I could not see, calling to each other, "Forward! Hurry!"
And above them, forcing their heads to the ground, floated the ikon like a yellow bird, and it seemed to me that its weight was far too heavy for them.
Those possessed fell in heaps in the dust and mud under the feet of the crowd, and they struggled like fish in the water, and their wild cries were heard. But the crowds passed over these palpitating bodies, stamped them and kicked them under foot, and cried out to the image of the Virgin, "Rejoice, Thou queen of heaven!"
Their faces were distorted and wild with straining, damp with sweat and black with dirt; and this whole procession of man, singing a joyless song with weary voices and marching with hollow steps, insulted the earth and darkened the heavens.
The beggars sat or reclined on the sides of the road, under the trees and stretched themselves out like two gay ribbons—the sick, the crippled, the wounded, the armless, the legless and the blind. Their worn bodies crept over the earth, their mutilated arms and legs trembled in the air and pushed themselves before people to excite their pity. The beggars moaned and wailed, their wounds burned in the sun, while they asked and begged a kopeck for themselves, in the name of God. Many of them were eyeless, while in others the eyes burned like coals and pain gnawed the flesh without respite, and they resembled some horrible growth.
I saw man persecuted. The force which drove him into the dust and the dirt seemed hostile to me. Whither did it drive them? No; that is not the right!
Once I was in the exquisite city of Kiev, and I was struck by the beauty and the grandeur of this ancient nest of the Russians. There I had an interview with a monk who was supposed to be very wise. I said to him:
"I cannot understand the laws upon which the life of a man is based."