destiny. They are cast off from Russia and from that understanding of
life that Russia breathes. They go to be the most unfortunate class in
America, the simplest and therefore the most exploited; they go to do
work fitted better to black slaves; their young women, though they do
not know it, are often already sold into infamy whilst they breathe the
“air of freedom” on the steamer; and often the men, contracted in gangs
to the Argentine and Brazil to work on railways and plantations, are
simply living merchandise for which the labour agent who engages them
receives a substantial premium. They go to work as Russians never worked
before, and to receive double the wages they would get in Russia, and
then to realise that money buys little or no extra happiness. Or they go
to settle on the land and form a Russian community, as the Dukhobors
have done in Canada, the Molokans in California, the Adventists in the
Dakotas and in the backwoods of America, to forget that they are not in
Russia, to be as much in debt to the agricultural machine manufacturers
as they were in arrears in the payment of rent and taxes in the old
country, to perish of starvation in lean years, to be persecuted by
educational and sanitary officials, and to be spurred on once more to
seek a happier country. Others are destined to enter the choir-dance of
the races with Jew and German and English and Irish, marrying the
foreigner and merging the European in the new type—the coming American.
At Odessa, the southern gate of Russia, the pilgrims are embarking for
Mount Athos and Palestine a thousand at a time, an unexpected delivery
of bowed and aged men and women out of the depths of Russia. There you
may see another of the continual movements of the people of Russia, an
astonishing procession this to those who are absorbed in the commercial
life of Russia, to those Jews and exiled Russians who write to the
English papers that the outward signs of Russian religion are “the
mummery of the Holy Synod.” At Odessa, and indeed on all the roads of
Russia, there are many thousands of pious Russians, pack on back, staff
in hand, on their way to the monasteries and holy places, to the
sepulchre, to Kief, to the Hermitage of Father Seraphim, to New Athos,
to many a little wayside shrine and monastery that only has its ten
pilgrims where the great ones have their hundreds and their housefuls.
It has been said that with an Englishman the conversation always, sooner
or later, turns to sport, with a Frenchman to woman, and with a Russian
to the subject of Russia.
This is true of the educated classes of society; but the peasants do not
talk of these things so much—the peasants’ talk nearly always turns to
God and religion. The Russians are always _en route_ for some place
where they may find out something about God, and if there is a
particularly animated conversation in the hostelry of a monastery, a
third-class carriage, or a tea-shop or Russian public-house (_traktir_),
it is almost always sure to be about religion.
The modern evangelical movement may almost be said to have had its birth
in the famous but filthy public house, “Yama,” where originally over
vodka and beer, and later more commonly over tea, the question of
salvation was continually mooted. In the third-class carriage you will
occasionally come across an old man who reads an antique Bible through
iron-rimmed spectacles. He has heard that a new sect has been formed by
some peasants in some remote village, and is off to discover “whether
they have found anything.”
Then what of those who march in chains from prison to prison on the
road? Often I have stopped my writing on a bright summer morning to
listen to an appalling sound—the clank, clank, clank of fifty or sixty
men in fetters—and I have looked out at a procession of unfortunate
Russians, dust from head to foot, the sun flashing on the bright steel
links on their legs and their bodies. They also belonged to the road.
They move us to the depths of sorrow or to hoarse anarchy; but they are
of the road. Their vague shuffled footmarks are the writing of the
finger in the dust. They are symbolical. We also walk as they. Listen
with “the third ear,” and you will hear the clangour of our chains as we
tramp—
having unearthly souls,
Yet fettered and forged to the earth!
The world is like a theatre, is it not? The theatre should reflect the
world and touch man to a remembrance of his mystery. He comes into it to
be stirred by pity and fear, not simply to be amused between dinner and
sleep. He comes into it as to a Communion Service, not merely to
receive, but to partake. Such a theatre is the world, with its marches
and processions, its lively and its heavy measures, its sacrifices, its
words of ancient wisdom from the lips of priests, words of prophecy from
oracles, the joyful choruses and jubilations, its sympathies and
choruses of sadness, its ramified manifold movements and
counter-movements. Most moving of all is the procession to the altar and
the songs we sing carrying our emblems.
“Having been at home in many realms of the spirit,” it is good to
realise this theatre in the heart. Having a personal knowledge of the
road to Jerusalem and to America, and of the pilgrims and tramps on the
various roads of Russia, having even been marched six days along the
road under arrest on one occasion, it is good to realise all that is
happening at one and the same time in Russia—the flocking to Jerusalem
and to America, the trickling into Siberia and Mongolia and Turkestan
and Persia, the tramping to the monasteries to find God, the tramping to
cities and factories to get work, the third-class carriages of the
trains crammed with people, the uproarious taverns where is all manner
of exchange of rude ideas, the beautiful churches alight with candles
and paintings, the little theatres and cinema shows as crammed as the
churches, the bazaars and fairs, the prisons, the poor prisoners on the
road clanking their chains.
Every common sight is charged with significance. This is the source of
the Russian spirit and the genius of Russian literature and fine art.
Thus, for instance, when you mention “smoke” to a Westerner he at once
thinks of factory smoke and that which pains the eyes or darkens heaven.
But to the Russian smoke is always
That which comes forth out of the censer,
the smoke of the sacrifice, the smoke of our lives—the sighs and regrets
and fears and aspirations of men and women, our crooked smokes, which,
in the language of Shakespeare, mount upwards to the gods.
In such an atmosphere Russians can forget personal anger when looking at
the chains on their convicts, and they can see in those chains emblems
of human destiny. There is in Russia a whole beautiful sad literature
about chains and fetters. Hermits and holy men have even taken to
wearing chains voluntarily as one of their rites of world-negation.
Dostoieffsky could find Siberia, after personal experience, to be the
supreme place for the understanding of the world.
We are encompassed about by mystery. Every common sight is a rune, a
letter of the Divine alphabet written upon all earthly things. Man’s
heart is a temple with many altars, and it is dark to start with, and
strange. But it is possible with every ordinary impression of life to
light a candle in that church till it is ablaze with lights like the
sky. That is the functions of ordinary sights—to be candles.
So the night of ignorance is lit up with countless stars. It is not less
night but more, more beautiful—
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings.
At those places on the road where springs gush from the rocks the
peasants have chalked the face of Jesus, so that the water seems to pour
from His mouth. At these springs stop the pilgrims, the emigrants, the
wayfarers, even the poor prisoners and their guards. That is one of the
visions of Holy Russia.
VI
LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN
MOSCOW, _March 1914_.
In a sense the tavern is also a theatre or a church. It is a place of
life.
“I am glad you’ve come,” said a friend to me. “Keep your ears open; this
is the very bottom; everything springs from here. This is the
changing-house of the ideas of the common people.”
There is no “bar,” in the English sense. On the long wooden counter are
bottles and glasses, and plates of sausage and ham. But you do not
lounge there and gossip over your glass. The Russian public-house is all
tables and chairs, like the accommodation for a smoking concert. But
such dirty chairs and tables!
You sit down; you are attended by a waiter. There is an army of waiters
serving for 30s. a month and no tips. They are in white blouses, white
trousers, and white aprons, and they look as if they had strayed into
the filthy hall in their night attire. On one wall is a square
candle-lantern with the word TRAKTIR printed on it in decayed brown; on
another wall is an immense gilt ikon. The doors creak heavily to and
fro, admitting customers unreadily—how unlike the little swing doors of
the American saloons, so easy to open that you may slip in as it were by
accident. At almost all the tables are working-men and women drinking
tea, vodka, or beer, talking loudly.[4] There are many cabmen in their
round fur hats and voluminous blue cloaks; many market-women in their
cottons, with soiled coloured kerchiefs on their heads. You see twenty
people drinking tea to one drinking vodka—they pour the tea into the
saucers, hold the saucers to their hairy mouths, and guzzle at the
gratifying golden drink. But if you look about you will notice
vodka-drinkers, some asleep, with their unkempt heads on the table
(looking like tramps asleep in a free library); you see also men with
red cheeks and fiery eyes not yet overcome by liquor, but ready to bawl
and make a scandal at the least provocation. The atmosphere is heavy
with the smoke of the vilest tobacco in the world (_makhorka_). A blind
musician is playing the concertina, several people are singing, hawkers
with pies, with Bibles, with shirts, with pencils, with old clothes, are
going from table to table offering their wares. There is tremendous
bargaining and long-drawn-out haggling on the part of people who, it
would seem, do not really intend to buy, even at the last. There are
beggars, cripples, blind men, dwarfs, asking for alms in the name of
Christ. There are drunken hooligans trying to get drinks for nothing.
There are antediluvian pilgrims hundreds of miles from home, not going
to a shrine, but collecting coppers throughout all Russia for the
building of a new church in their far-away native villages. You may even
see upon occasion a peasant carrying a great church bell. You ask him
why. He tells you the church of his village was by the will of God
destroyed by a fire, and that only the bell remains, and he is
collecting alms to build a new church and hang up the bell again.
Throughout the whole tavern all day and almost all night is a clamour of
talking and an animated scene of gesticulating, unwashed, ragged men and
women. Almost all the small business of hawkers, stall-keepers, and
little traders is accomplished over vodka or tea in the _traktir_, but
indeed the successful, even the millionaire, peasant merchant will step
without a ruffle of dignity into the most miserable tavern of the city,
and not be too proud to answer the taunts or questions of ragamuffins.
That is part of Russia’s strength.
Then, the home is not all-absorbing in Russia, and even the poorest
people like to spend the whole evening in the tavern drinking tea,
talking, talking, talking. No one would reproach a Russian for lingering
thus away from his wife and little ones. Not much money is spent, man
for man. In three or four hours it often happens that a man spends no
more than five copecks (a penny farthing), and has only purchased a
little teapot of tea and a big teapot of hot water, the tavern’s
substitute for the samovar.
* * * * *
Kuprin tells the tale of a tavern in Odessa famous for one of its ragged
musicians, Sasha. He filled the public-house with the strains of the
violin, and every night the place was packed with men and women. Every
table was occupied, there was tea or beer or vodka everywhere, all the
men were smoking _makhorka_, the windows were all shut, and the air was
of that warm, dense, suffocating character that the Russian people like.
A din as of Babel pervaded the hall, and no one except those near the
music could hear Sasha’s tunes, yet every one felt that they were
hearing.
Sasha would come in in the early hours of the evening, when people were
few, would take his first mug of beer and then begin to play,
mournfully, melancholily. His were sad, heart-aching tunes, full, as it
were, of a world’s sorrow. He sat in his accustomed place and brooded
over his violin, seemingly uninterested in everything but the soul of
music.
The windows of the tavern were crusted with ice or clouded with steam,
and the shadows of men and women passed incessantly, some lingering,
some hurrying. But Sasha did not heed them, nor notice how many came in
at the dark and dirty doorway from the street. Only when there got to be
a crowd he began to put aside his own repertory of songs, and take up
those that were suggested by the customers, that were shouted in his
ear—
“Sasha, play _Maroosia_.”
“Sasha, play _The Nightingale_, play _Spring has passed by_.”
Then, till the small hours of the morning, he would play what people
wanted him to—sad songs, gay songs, marches, dances, country
measures—dances, dances, dances, every dance in Russia he played, and
the tables were crushed back and a space made and the people danced.
Every night, every week, every month Sasha was there, and the crowd and
the music and the air thick with _makhorka_ smoke. Not that the nights
were always the same. Events in the town, in Russia, had their echoes
there. In the time of the South African War Sasha played twenty times a
night the _March of the Boers_. During the festivities of the
Franco-Russian Alliance he played the _Marseillaise_, which was
fearfully popular with the dock-labourers. When the Japanese War broke
out he played all those sad tunes about far Manchuria and fighting in a
strange land.
Alas, the Japanese War made a great change in the tavern. Sasha was
taken for a soldier and disappeared from ken. For a year and a half no
word was heard from him or of him. He was given up for dead, and the
tavern lost its old attraction. At last, however, one night in came
Sasha, the same as ever, unhurt, untouched. He had been captured by the
Japanese and held a year as a prisoner at Nagasaki. He had learned
Japanese music. Not that anybody wanted it.
“Play us the old tunes, Sasha; play _Maroosia_, play _To Odessa we
sailed on the sea_.” Sasha played that night all the old tunes.
The tavern became as of old.
But there was storm in the air. Every one was talking of revolution.
Sasha began to play the _Marseillaise_ again, and now with a different
note from that in which he had played when friendship with France was
being honoured. In came the police and stopped him. They forbade the
playing of any Anthems whatsoever.
There was a _pogrom_ in the town; hired ruffians appeared in the streets
inciting the population to the murder of the Jews. Not once or twice
Sasha himself was taken for a Jew and attacked.
Into the tavern came the same ruffians, and tried to stir up the
drunkards to pillage and violence. Sasha was playing a tune of his own
fancy when suddenly one of them, a converted Jew, jumped up and cried:
“The National Anthem! Brothers, the National Anthem in honour of our
adored monarch. The National Anthem!”
“Anthem, Anthem,” cried his mates.
“No Anthems whatsoever,” said Sasha, repeating the words of the
police-officer.
“What do you mean, you don’t obey, you filthy Jew?” answered the man.
“And you?” said Sasha.
“I? What do you mean?”
“I’m a filthy Jew. All right, what are you?”
“I’m Orthodox.”
“Orthodox! And for how much?”
The whole tavern laughed.
“Brothers,” said the ruffian, “shall we stand the blasphemy of this Jew
against Throne and Church any longer?...”
There was a rush at Sasha. But he jumped up, and lifting his fiddle in a
rage, smashed it on the head of the first who came up to him.
So Sasha was arrested as a revolutionary, and once more he disappeared.
This time every one thought he had gone for ever. It would have seemed
proper to wear mourning for him. The tavern changed in atmosphere. In
Sasha’s place came another musician, one of those who had sat and
listened to him in the old days and learned of him. One night, however,
when they were playing the old tunes and the violin was gently crooning
the song _Expectancy_, a voice from somewhere cried out nervously:
“Brothers, Sasha!”
All turned, and there stood the twice-raised Sasha, bearded, gaunt, and
pallid. The people flocked around him and cried to him and called on him
to play. But the same nervous, frightened voice cried out again:—
“His arm!”
All grew silent. Sasha’s left arm hung broken and twisted and nerveless
from his shoulder.
“What is it, brother?” asked one.
“Muscle dried up, that’s all,” he answered.
“So—o.”
“Then that’s an end to _Chaban_,” said one of the crowd, referring to
one of the most popular dances that Sasha played.
But Sasha took out of his pocket with his right hand a queer black
wooden instrument which he had either made in prison or had had given to
him, and he put it to his lips and began to play.
Then every one began to dance, and Sasha sat in his place, and all was
as before. As Kuprin says at the conclusion of his tale, “Man is for
Life, but Art is For Ever.”[5]
* * * * *
Such is the orgy unrehearsed. So a tavern can be a popular theatre. It
can also be a church, a place of searching after God. In England you sit
down in church but stand in the public-house; in Russia you stand in the
church but sit in the tavern; it humanises it, makes it more like a
home, makes it possible for the tavern to be upon occasion a kind of
church.
It is a great national assembly-place.
In Russia you are not allowed to hold a public meeting without the
special authorisation of the police and the presence of a
police-officer. But in the tavern is a great informal accidental
meeting; and a great deal is enacted there that the police have no power
to stop. Thus, for instance, in recent years several sects have used the
tavern as the place for their prayer meetings, and have had something
equivalent to a Salvation Army gathering, not “round the corner,” but
actually inside the public-house itself. The religious conspirators have
come as it were accidentally, one by one, have ordered their tea, and
have started an animated conversation into which, sooner or later, the
whole houseful was drawn.
The most famous public-house in Moscow is the “_Yama_” (The Pit), in the
street called Rozhdestvensky, a public-house which Tolstoy much wanted
to visit, a tavern frequented not only by the common people but by
scholars and seekers, especially by those who style themselves
_Bogoiskateli_, seekers after God. Here appeared at times such
well-known Russians as Solovyov, Bulgakof, Chertkof, Velikanof—it was
the last who asked me to the “_Yama_,” and through whom I was able to
hear a multifarious collection of the common people discuss religion and
Russia and ghosts and the eternal questions.
From the “_Yama_” have sprung several interesting sects, for example,
the _Bezsmertniki_, or deathless ones. Their doctrines, promulgated by a
wretched consumptive who had both feet in the grave, was that it was
possible to escape death. He held that health was faith in life, and
that disease was faith in death. Death came simply from lack of faith.
There were people living eternally but we did not know where to find
them. The _Bezsmertniki_ make pilgrimages to the East to seek those who
have been living for ages. Alas! the founder died before the eyes of his
followers. “He lacked faith,” said they, and the new religion continued.
One of the most ardent of them is a frequent visitor of the “_Yama_,”
Alexey Yegorovitch, a stocking-hawker.
So much trouble came from the discussions in the “_Yama_” that the
public-house was closed by the Government. But as in the case of Sasha,
so in the case of the “_Yama_” and the God-seekers. You can kill or
mutilate the body, but you cannot kill the soul, the thing in itself.
The “_Yama_,” crushed in one tavern, broke out in another.
I visited the “_Yama_” one Sunday. It was resuscitated in the “Bay”
public-house in Malo-Golovinskaya by the Candlemas Gate. We sat down in
the tavern at 12 o’clock, and over two glasses of tea talked for six
hours and a half—our only other sustenance being occasional hot cabbage
pies brought to us in trayfuls by a little serving-boy from the kitchen.
The tavern swarmed with religious characters, home missionaries,
propagandists, Bible-hawkers. There was a strong detachment of Old
Believers; an old Baptist hawker of women’s hose; many stall-keepers
from Sukareva Market; Velikanof, a friend of Pereplotchikof; Victor
Karlovitch, greasy and fat, who believes in evil spirits and feels
attracted to Theosophy.
The talk went on evil spirits and was enlivened by many stories. A mad
woman had been taken to the New Jerusalem monastery near Moscow, and had
had a fit in church. After the fit she was found to be in her right
mind, and it was said that the unclean spirit had been caught as it came
out of her, and was now preserved in a jar of spirit and exhibited to
pilgrims as one of the sights of the monastery. Were there evil spirits
or were there not? Was it not said that they passed out of Legion into
the swine? Did not the devils cry from the bodies of the insane, giving
witness to Christ as He passed them by?
Velikanof told an amusing story of two peasants and a steam-engine. One
of them held that it was an unclean spirit that made the engine go
foward; the other said it was just steam, no more, he knew.
“It is an unclean spirit,” the former repeated; “I’ll bet it is an
unclean spirit.”
“How will you prove that it is?”
“I’ll bet you a quarter the engine won’t be able to pass the ikon of
Mikhail the _Ugodnik_.”
“Very well; done!”
The ikon was brought to the railway lines. Presently thrum, thrum,
thrum, the post-train left the village railway station. The first
peasant stood himself on the lines and held the ikon in front of him
with both hands. The other stood by and watched. The train came on, but
when the engine-driver saw the peasant barring the way and apparently
flagging the train, he brought his machine to a standstill and cried out
to know what was the matter.
“You see,” said the peasant, “the engine dare not pass the ikon. The
quarter is mine; let’s go and have a drink.”
Another visitor to the tavern told a sort of Ingoldsby legend of a
ten-pound black cat whose favourite way of entering a house was by
coming down the chimney. Another, a peasant workman, made the
astonishing statement that if you make a candle from human fat and light
it you can see _all_.
A long discussion was started on the difference between a man and an
animal. The sole criterion set by Christ was, “By your fruits are ye
known.” A man is he who can sacrifice his life to an ideal. An animal
hungers and at once looks about to satisfy his hunger. But upon occasion
a man says to his hunger, “No, I shall fast.” A man feels blessed when
he suffers for conscience sake, but no animal feels blessed through
suffering.
A contrast was drawn between Napoleon and Christ. Christ was offered the
empire and crown of the world and knew that in Himself He had the power
to take it, but He preferred to deny the world. In that He showed
Himself the highest type of man. They of the world nailed Him upon the
Cross and cried up to Him, “Save yourself.” He could have saved Himself,
but He did not. He preferred to deny life. But Napoleon on the mountain
fell down and worshipped Satan, and took for his portion the empire of
the world. Napoleon was an animal taking what his stomach whispered to
him.
The conversation went on—Russia’s great destiny was to carry the banner
of the ideal, to sacrifice the material ends of life for the mystical.
“Directly you make a step nearer to God you become aware of
contradictions in terms in the life you see about you; when you get
really near to God you enter into such a maze of contradictions and
paradoxes that it is almost too much for the human brain,” said
Velikanof, quoting from a book that was being widely discussed in
Russia, _The Pillar and the Foundation of Truth_, by the priest
Florensky. “It is for Russia to explore these contradictions and
paradoxes.”
“Russia has long dwelt in these paradoxes,” said another. Russia offers
to the world glorious paradoxes:—
“As a substitute for success it offers failure.
“As a substitute for fine clothes it offers rags; and for fine mansions
it offers taverns and log-cabins.
“As a substitute for rich men it offers beggars.
“Instead of the march music of Progress it offers the choir dance of the
Mystery.
“Instead of Progress itself it offers Communion.”