“Five copecks, aluminium wonder lights, cold fire without smoke, without smell.”
“Five copecks, warm socks to put inside boots or goloshes.”
In the Jewish old-clothes market of the Podol there are tremendous crowds, and much business is being done. The mood of Jewry is happy in the Christmas orgy of trade. All is calm after the ritual trial, and the fear of persecution is all gone in the reality of good business. All Kief seems to be in the streets buying; and the tram-cars tinkling their alarm bells are crowded to the last inch of the step-boards.
But somewhere there is another Kief, a quiet radiant city, silent but for the footfalls of monks or pilgrims on the snow—the sanctuaries, monasteries, ruins, shops, hostelries of the Petcherskaya Lavra. This Kief stands high on those cliffs of the Dnieper whence the Russians sent tumbling down their old god Peroun; it looks upon the river to which King Vladimir at the dawning of Russian faith stepped down with his whole army to be baptized. Yellow walls, half a mile long, twenty feet high, go down, alongside steep, snowy, rutty, over-drifted roads, from church to church. Peasant men and women in chestnut-coloured sheepskins, fur-edged and embroidered, are plodding up and down with bundles on their shoulders. Bright gilded domes of churches glitter above white walls, and from many kolokolnyas come antique-sounding chimes. As you look down from a tower you see beyond the thirty-five churches of the beautiful Lavra the blue and white Dnieper, half frozen and snowed over, half free as yet from winter’s grip—you see beyond all the far snowy steppes and forests of Little Russia.
Here, in a historical sense, is Holy Russia, for the whole cliff on which the monasteries are built is holy ground. The foundations are honeycombed with cells of the primeval hermits and saints of Russia. You enter dark and narrow passages in the rock, places in which you cannot stand erect, and you wander candle in hand from shrine to shrine in the depths of the earth. An old monk with black cloak, grey hair, and yellow five-times broken twisted candle, leads you from skeleton to skeleton wrapped in purple pall; shows you now and then a skull, a dried-up hand; points out the picture of the likeness of the saint whose remains you salute, indicating the nickname the hermit bore in the days when he was upon the world, thus: the industrious, the silent, the bookless, the faster, the healer, the herbalist, and so on; thrusting the glimmer of his torch into the intense darkness of the cell which the father had occupied when alive. All day long the peasants wander from sepulchre to sepulchre in this unlocked cemetery or dungeon of the dead, kissing the coffins, laying personal ikons upon the relics in order that they may receive special sanctification, dropping their farthings on the palls, listening to services in remote underground churches, gathering unusual impressions of death, tasting the sweet emotions of religion.
In the hostelries, where are accommodated upon occasion as many as 20,000 pilgrims, you may wander at will and see peasant Russia sprawling on sheepskins and reading holy books, or making tea. You may go into the refectories and see 500 pilgrims sit down together to a free monastery dinner of cabbage soup and porridge and kvass, or you may sit with them yourself and eat. On this Christmas Eve just past I sat with such a party in the twilight waiting for the first star to come out, the signal to make the holy meal of Sotchelnik. It was a different Russia from Katia’s, this of the 500 uncouth, shaggy-headed men and women at long dark tables, waiting in front of huge Russian basins full of soup, as the shades of night came down, and the lamp before the Virgin and Child grew brighter and brighter.
You tread with gentle steps across the giving snow and enter one of the churches, and find yourself in an irregularly grouped crowd of antique, hairy, patriarchal-looking men in sheepskins and birch-bark boots. There are no pews or seats, there is no electric light, but there is the gloom and effulgence of much gold and of many half-illuminated paintings and frescoes. You stand with peasant Russia on a stone floor in the glimmer and shadow of an immense candle-lit temple. You pass through with a candle to the front, to the altar-rail lit by scores of steady silver flames, the votive tapers of the pilgrims; you find yourself in the presence of a radiant line of calm, attentive, singing faces. This is Holy Russia independent of historical association. The music you hear in Russian churches robs you of the sense of time. On Christmas Eve in Russia you hear the music of the herald-angels, and see at the same time, in the likeness of the listening Russian peasants, the shepherds who heard the angels sing. You veritably escape from “the world” and from “to-day,” and are so potently reminded of the beauty and mystery of man’s life that you shake off all dull cares and the reproach of failure or success, the soil and stain of circumstance, and know that what is you is something utterly beautiful before God.
Kief has been called many names—the Canterbury of Russia, the Russian Jerusalem, the Font of Russia—but it may most truly be called the Russian Bethlehem, the place where Christ was born in Russia, adored by rude shepherds, sought by the noble and the wise.
III
PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN
Moscow, February 1914.