Russia in 1916

by Stephen Graham

“Father Yevgeny!” I cried.

I showed him his portrait in my book, and translated aloud the chapter written there about him. He seemed to be extremely pleased. We considered the portraits of the other pilgrims in turn. Abraham, who had been twenty times to Jerusalem, was of a Cossack family. The man carrying the lantern designed for the holy fire was now dead. The priest standing beside the dead pilgrim in the picture was now at Troitskaya Lavra. I made Father Yevgeny a present of the volume, and he bade me write in it in Russian, “To the hermit Yevgeny of Mount Athos.”

“How is it you come to be in Moscow and not at Mount Athos?” I asked.

“The war prevented me. I had come back to Russia to visit my native village before I died, and whilst I was here the war broke out. I was hastening back, but our Moscow Metropolite put his hand on my head one Sunday after morning service and said, ‘Thou art thinking of going to Afon—wait, do not go.’ Then war with Turkey commenced, and the way was stopped. Good Father Philaret of the Bogoyavlensky Monastery gave me shelter, and that is where I am living now.”

He recounted how, when the war broke out, he had a vision. He looked up into the sky, and it was filled with little white clouds hurrying southward. He was mistaken in thinking them clouds; he saw later that they were in fact the hosts of the angels ranging themselves on the side of Serbia to save her from the Austrians.

Yevgeny and I spent the whole day together. In the evening I had to leave Moscow, and he saw me off at the station. He talked a great deal about his visions. For instance, he had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. One sunny afternoon in the monastery yard he fell into a trance, and in the trance he saw what he had wanted to see all his life—a vision of the Kingdom. “There are really four heavens,” said he. “The first is so splendid, so full of light, that it is almost impossible to look at it; and in the midst of the light sit the Holy Trinity. Round and round them all the while and for ever the cherubs keep moving and they sing oi-oi-oi-ei-ei-ei-ai-ai-ai ... and never cease for a moment. In the second heaven I saw the apostles and the prophets. In the third heaven were the holy ugodniki, and in the fourth were a great crowd of all sorts and conditions of men and women all in white. There were many, many of our Russians there—I was so glad, so full of joy that I went. And then suddenly it all vanished, and I found myself in the monastery yard and on my knees, and my hands were on the white head of an old, old pilgrim woman. I asked her if she had seen anything, but she had seen nothing.”

I asked Father Yevgeny about the Mount Athos heresy, and the Name-of-Godites, as the heretics were irreverently called. I had a faint suspicion that Yevgeny might be one of them. But he was very robustly against them. “It all sprang from one man who was himself illiterate,” said he. “He held that as the Three were One, therefore Jesus and God were one and the same, and that in the beginning Jesus made the heavens and the earth. And he got a great following among the Russian monks. But he was altogether in the wrong, and if he had read he would have understood that Jesus the Son of God was born in the fulness of time, and the Name of God must therefore have priority. Ah! now they have all confessed they were wrong, and have been pardoned.”

We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed. “The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a cross—so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the wind.

I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God. Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier, and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided by visions and inspirations rather than by reason.

In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles. The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly, and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle blew, and the train slowly ran out—leaving Yevgeny at the far end of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train, momentarily increasing.