THE CONFESSION
_A NOVEL_
BY
MAXIM GORKY
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
ROSE STRUNSKY
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1916
INTRODUCTION
To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so
fashionable for young Russia to mourn.
"Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art,"
they say and shake their heads, "We can get all the doctrines we
want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the
theorists of the Social Revolutionaries--why go to Gorky? Or if it is
a philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is
greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write again
a _Foma Gordyeeff_, or an _Orloff and His Wife_, or a _Konovaloff_!"
I re-read _Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff_ and so on,
and read also _Mother, The Spy, In Prison_, and the little fables with
a purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky
writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the
road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years of
his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passed
through deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky first
published his immortal story of _Makar Chudra_, to her present moment
of titanic struggle in the World War--the beginning of the year 1916.
Russia's changes were Gorky's changes. He first flung his type of hero,
the people from the lowest of the low--water-rats, tramps, petty
thieves--into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia. It was
a Russia that had almost decided that there were no more people, that
they were without courage, that the misery and degradation in which
they lived was there because of their own inefficiency, their lack of
idealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea and to strike and fight for
it.
The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened from
its torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost learned
to scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding ideas, with
deep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that had settled back
in bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the Revolutionary
movement of the eighties.
Like an eddying pool, the generations in Russia have risen to the
surface, made their protest against the anachronism of autocracy and
despotism, and then subsided back again into the still and inert
waters of the nation. But each rising generation has made a wider and
wider eddy, coming ever from a greater depth. Thus in 1825 it was
merely a small group of military officers, who having learned from the
Napoleonic campaigns that there were such things as constitutional law
and order, that liberty and freedom were truths to fight for, broke out
in revolt in Petrograd in December of that year only to be immediately
crushed. Five of the leaders were hanged, and the rest, intellectuals
and writers among them, were sent to Siberia.
The loss of the élite of Russia, despite the names of Pushkin and
Lermontoff which graced that period, made great inroads in the
intellectual life of the country. But in the fifties and sixties the
seeming quiet was broken into by a new restlessness. This time the
student youth, the young sons and daughters of the landlords and the
nobles, became inspired by a passion for learning, for new conceptions
of education, for new liberties of the people, for the abolition of
serfdom and for a Pan-Slavism that would be democratic. It was then
that the women left their homes to seek higher education and to enter
new fields of work. They had to break with family tyranny which was
fostered by tradition and the State, their men comrades standing
valiantly by, helping them to make escapes, going through the forms of
mock marriage, and conducting them safely to that Mecca of learning for
the Russian youth--the medical school of Geneva. It was in this way
that Sonya Kovalevsky, who later became the famous mathematician in the
University of Stockholm, made her escape into the world, and the untold
other heroines of Russia who were soon to return educated, free, and
fired with a zeal to spread their new-found freedom to the people.
The abolition of serfdom in '61 brought with it great discontent, for
the peasants had been led to believe that they would be liberated
together with the land, since Russian serfdom, unlike the Western,
was based on the theory that the peasant was attached to the land and
that the landlord's hold on it came through his ownership of the serf.
Consequently it was argued, when the Russian serf was liberated and
the ancient communal village form maintained, that all the land the
serfs had owned would go to them. Of course, that was very far from
what really happened. It is true that the serfs were liberated and the
ancient communal form kept, but the land allotted to the village was
poor and meager, the plots were scattered, and the tax on them for
repayment to the landlords was so great that it took over fifty years
to pay.
The peasants foresaw exactly the future that awaited them; the dearth
in land, none too much to begin with, and the consequential lessening
at each redistribution as the village increased in "souls," the needed
"renting" from the landlord at exorbitant rates, the inability to
pay and the resultant "paying in his own labor," and the eventual
reestablishment of a virtual serfdom. Insurrections took place all
over the country, the peasants believing firmly that the Government
had treated them more kindly but that the landlords were deceiving
them. However, the Government came only too gladly to the aid of the
landlords, having got used to blood-baths in its drastic quenching of
the Polish insurrection of '63.
The general disappointment among the youth in the Government's attitude
towards both Polish liberty and peasant rights led to a stronger and
more revolutionary stand on their part. Unlike the reaction that set
in during the long and tyrannical reign of Nicholas I, after the
outburst of the Decembrists, or the reaction that was to follow those
thirty years of effort when the notes of Gorky were to sound like a
clarion call to a renewed faith, the decade of the seventies rose
to one of extreme and intense idealism. The generation which had
gone out of Russia to gain for itself new liberties had now returned
and was spread throughout the length and breadth of the vast land,
making converts by the thousands where formerly there were but few.
The "fathers" and "sons" though not understanding each other very
fully, were nevertheless following a pretty equal tendency. Where the
former had sought for new general liberties in politics and social
life through education, the latter, feeling that a great deal had
already been won, had decided upon propaganda of action. The movement
changed from a freeing of one's self to a freeing of the people. "To
the people" became the watchword of the hour. The youth of the better
classes went to live among the peasants, taught them, organized them
into secret revolutionary groups for "land and liberty," made several
abortive attempts at peasant revolution, and finally, the Government
growing more and more reactionary, ended in the wielding of a personal
"terror" against the Government representatives, which culminated in
the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, in 1882.
The reprisals that set in, the wholesale exiling of the youth to
Siberia, the internment for life in the fortresses of Peter and Paul
and in Schlüsselberg for participation in the Party of the Will of the
People, and the general opinion that however reactionary Alexander
II was he was still much more ready for reforms than his successor
Alexander III, gave rise to a fundamental disillusionment. The
sacrifices of the youth had been too much. They had led themselves
to be hanged and tortured only to bring in an era of still greater
darkness. The people were not ready for reforms, they did not wish
them. They would not have understood what to do with liberties could
they have had them. There was nothing to do but sit back on one's
estate, exploit the peasants as did the grandfathers and say, "We are
powerless and the peasants unworthy."
This period was the more painful because it came fast upon one which
was full of idealism and hope. The men who lived on in inertia,
drinking tea and discussing vacuously the futility of life, had known
a time when they had hoped and thought and planned otherwise. They had
almost cynically to repudiate their former selves.
The writer who brought out most acutely the great anguish of this
period was Anton Chekhov. He is now being recognized as the greatest
artist of his time, who followed naturally the trend of the years he
lived in. His humor, at first gentle and sorrowful, became later coarse
and gross as the darkness around him deepened. His characters are
inert, some eaten up by unfulfilled desires, others incapable even of
recalling the faint echo of a former hope. A "Chekhov Sorrow" became a
well-known definite phrase in Russian life.
It was before this Russia that Gorky made his appearance. Himself one
of the people, he showed them again the face of the people. It had
beauty and courage, it had qualities of strength long since forgotten.
The effect was electrical. Gorky was hailed as one upon whom the cloak
of Tolstoi was to fall, for better than Tolstoi, he did not appear as
a leader of the people, but as one who disclosed the people _en masse_.
Gorky's appearance in the cultured and literary world of Russia
suffering from the "Chekhov Sorrow" has an analogy in my mind to the
sudden appearance of Peter Karpovitch in the fortress of Schlüsselberg.
There sat the men and women for almost twenty years, cut off from all
outside communication, wondering when and how their work would be
carried on. One by one they had died off and only a handful remained
to question if the youth would ever awake to strong purposes again.
Then suddenly, in the year 1902, the big gates opened, and the student
Peter Karpovitch entered. Without connection with any revolutionary
group, by an instinctive feeling of the pulse of the time, he made
his strike against the increasing reaction, shooting the Minister of
Education, Bogolyepov, in February, 1901, for the wholesale exiling of
the students into the military on the lines employed by Nicholas I.
This advance guard of the Russian Revolution was tall and handsome,
with the traditional heroic, figure of the Little Russian. He came
to the men of the past in all his strength and beauty as a symbol of
the new era. Upon his footsteps followed fast Bolmashev, the executor
of Sipiagin, who this time committed his act under the direction of
an organized group, the Social Revolutionaries. In two years Russia
was aflame. The Governor General of Finland, Bobrikoff, was shot in
June, 1904. This was followed in a few weeks by the assassination of
Von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, by general labor strikes, by
the demonstration in Petrograd in front of the Winter Palace which
led to the terrible massacre of Bloody Sunday on January 22, 1905,
by the mutinies in the Black Sea fleet and in Kronstadt, and by the
nation-wide general strike in every branch of industry and life in
October, 1905. Finally a Constitution and the Duma were granted to the
people. The herald of the new order to the old was the tall handsome
youth whose strange footsteps were heard suddenly and unexpectedly one
March morning treading the hitherto silent corridors of the fortress.
Thus, as Karpovitch to the prisoners in Schlüsselberg, came Gorky to
Russia at large.
He was marvelously fitted to dispel the disappointment that was
felt about the people. Himself one of the people, he had merely to
disclose himself to prove again their courage and nobility. The life
of Gorky has been particularly tragic and particularly Russian. He
was born in a dyer's shop in Nizhni-Novgorad in 1869. His real name
is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and it is significant that when he came
to write he signed himself "Maxim Gorky"--"Maxim, the Bitter." His
father died when he was four and he was totally orphaned at seven.
His childhood was spent in the care of his maternal grandfather, who
was extremely religious and a miser. The foundation of the bitterness
he was to feel was thus laid early, for the life of the lonely child
with the harsh, unsympathetic old man, can be well imagined, though
the peculiarly Russian setting can be had only by reading his recent
book, _My Childhood_. At the death of his mother he was apprenticed to
a shoemaker, and at eleven he decided that he had had enough of home
ties and left Nizhni-Novgorad for good. He started tramping and after
various vicissitudes found himself a helper to a cook on one of the
Volga boats. This man had been at one time a noncommissioned officer
and he carried his past culture with him in the form of a trunk full
of books. It was a queer assortment, from Gogol to school manuals and
popular novels, and Gorky dipped liberally into it. The result was
that a craving for real learning arose in him, which would have come
no doubt to the imaginative youth at this age even without the aid
of that haphazard library. He left the Volga steamer and tramped to
the University of Kazan, thinking that learning would be free to any
one who wished it. He was bitterly disappointed, for the University
demanded fees, and so instead of registering as a student he was forced
to take a job as a bakery helper. This work he did for two years and it
seems to have made a deep impression upon him, for there is scarcely a
story of his where the hero does not spend two years baking bread in
some filthy cellar among flour dust and general filth.
He left the bakeshop to wander with those tramps and "ex-men" whose
poet he was later to be. The life held suffering which ate deep into
the vitals of his being--hunger, privations, nights with the police
for vagabondage; and finally so great became this conflict between the
beauty and goodness for which his nature craved and the constant evil
around him, that in 1889 at the age of twenty-one he sent a bullet
through his chest. Like many of the Russian youth, whose passionate
natures make impossible the compromise between their inherent idealism
and the sordidness and brutality of actual existence, he had decided
to be done with the mockery. Fortunately the bullet did not kill and
he took up his life of vagabondage again. In 1892 he is once more in
Nizhni-Novgorad, actually holding the respectable post of a lawyer's
clerk. The lawyer, a man called Lanin, seems to have taken a great
interest in the intelligent young man who discussed "cursed" questions
and had a "live and energetic soul." He threw opportunities for study
in his way, but Gorky's free and untamed youth, coupled with the taste
of the "mother earth" he grew to love so, made it impossible for
him to lead the well-ordered life of a professional clerk, and in a
city, at that. He left Lanin, for he did not "feel at home with these
intelligent people," he said, and tramped to the Caucasus, making
a detour on the way from the Volga, through the Don district, into
Bessarabia and Southern Crimea.
Coming to the Caucasus he found work in a railroad yard in Tiflis. His
mind had already begun to digest the types of those tramps, Tartars
and gipsies he met in his wanderings, for as early as 1890 his first
story _Makar Chudra_ made its appearance in the little paper _Kafhas_
in Tiflis. It is a story of two thieves, written with great simplicity
and naturalness. There is no doubt that Gorky had met them and had been
true to the incidents related. It showed them strong, sensitive as
women, with a subtle capacity of understanding each other's emotions.
In a typically Russian scene, one thief unburdens his heart to the
other, telling him how he had wanted to kill him and how he had nearly
done so. The other listens, sympathetic, understanding fully how that
state of mind came to him, and they part in great tenderness! These
are no weaklings, they are personalities held by iron chains in a
Greek fatalism, and the fatality is life--Russian life. Gorky had not
yet come to the point where he could lay his hand on the social enemy
and say "here it is." He saw only a great misery and natures torn in
anguish, but not ruined as the generation before had supposed. Though
this story itself, appearing, as it did, in a provincial paper, made
no immediate name for him, his later stories, in which both canvas and
treatment are exactly the same, brought him recognition forthwith.
Gorky left Tiflis and wandered back to the Volga and there, by
happy chance, met the Little Russian writer, Korolenko, the author
of _Makar's Dream_ and _The Blind Musician_. As editor of _The
Contemporary_, Korolenko introduced him to "great" literature, as he
put it, and in a flash he was made known to all of Russia. He continued
writing in the same vein he introduced in _Makar Chudra_, using the
strong, outcast, rebel types in _Emilian Pibgai_ and _Chalkash_,
which were published in 1895 under Korolenko's editorship, and in
_Konovaloff,_ _Malva_, _Foma Gordyeeff_ his first long novel, and in
the innumerable other works which preceded the supposed "change" in
Gorky's manner. He showed his heroes to Russia as one shows a scene by
pulling back a curtain: "this is what exists; here are men who do not
conform to your laws, not because you have made outcasts of them, but
because they despise you and all your smug respectability."
But he did not say so in so many words, he merely showed this canvas.
The change in Gorky is the change in Russia, which grew from a silent
and brooding mood to one of talk and action. As the Russian people
became more self-conscious so did he, changing from a man torn hither
and thither by circumstances to one who was able to analyze life and
know cause and effect. His very sudden success so early in his life
made it impossible for him to keep on writing and re-writing the same
themes in the same manner as he had begun. He was too great and dynamic
a genius for that. To him as to most Russians the art itself is not the
thing, but the self-expression and the truth. Thus when Gorky swung
out from the life of tramps and wanderers into the intellectual life
of Russia, he found a nation organized into various groups, analyzing
the cause of Russian social and political misery, finding an economic
and materialistic reason for it, and setting about to remedy it. Gorky
joined one of these groups, the Social Democratic Party, was one of
the signers of the petition to the Czar which demanded with an amusing
Russian naïveté that the Czar grant not only economic justice to the
strikers in the steel works of Petrograd, but also a constitutional
assembly, universal suffrage, a direct and secret ballot, and free
speech, free press and freedom of religion! For these demands and the
subsequent demonstration in front of the Winter Palace which resulted
in the notorious massacre of Bloody Sunday, Gorky was imprisoned in the
fortress of Peter and Paul. His prominence and the fact that he was
subject to tuberculosis caused a universal demand for his release. He
was freed after a month and was allowed to stay in Finland and even in
Petrograd for a while during the so-called days of freedom.
By this time Gorky had thrown himself entirely into the cause of the
Majority Faction of the Social Democratic Party, an organization not
strictly Marxian, in the sense that they did not wait for an economic
development to bring about the cooperative commonwealth but believed
that by mass action and general strike Russia could bring about a
revolution on socialistic lines without the necessity of intermediary
steps. In 1905 he left Russia and came to America, hoping to collect
money for the Revolutionary cause, but his work failed entirely because
of the fact that the charming and brilliant lady who came with him
to America and registered as his wife was not legally so. The men of
prominence, Mark Twain among them, who formed committees to help raise
the funds, resigned, and Gorky's plans failed entirely. Not only was
no money for the "cause" raised, but he was received nowhere, the very
hotel he stayed in asking him to leave at midnight. It was supposed
that agents of the Russian Government, fearing Gorky's too great
success in America, sprung the trap and thus discredited him. At any
rate, Gorky naturally left the shores of America in great disgust, and
the dark days of Russian reaction having already set in, went to live
in practical exile on the island of Capri, in Italy. Leonid Andreyeff,
the Russian writer, and many revolutionary refugees generally stayed
with him. It was from Capri that the longer novels, _The Spy_ and
this work, _The Confession_, were written. He was by this time living
entirely in the cultured world, thinking earnestly and scientifically
to the best of his ability about the political and social conditions
around him.
The great light, the great inspiring motive power of the Russian has
ever been the people. The only ray of happiness in the works of Gorky
is the joy that comes to his characters when they begin to work for the
people. Life is depressing, life is a quagmire, a bog wherein great
and noble souls are forced to wallow, when suddenly light appears. It
is in the organization for the creation of a better life. One feels
just for one little instant the happiness that life can bring when
this vision of the new order appears. In the novel called _Three of
Them_, the pages lighten with relief when the little Social Democratic
agitator appears, giving hope and courage, but she is swept out of the
life of the unhappy men that fill the pages of that book as suddenly as
she appeared and there is nothing for the hero to do but throw himself
under a passing train and die for disappointment and impotence.
This was in the beginning when he himself first saw the meaning of the
"Cause," before it had become fully part of his life. Later his works
changed their scene, following the exact manner in which the Russian
people themselves changed their mental attitude. The background of the
same Russian people, the same giants with the same courage and the
same ability, was no longer a quagmire, but a battlefield. They were
struggling to win their rights. Interwoven in the pages of his later
work rises the new Russia of the last decade, the self-conscious,
fighting Russia. In _The Spy_, which was written in 1908, we see the
Russian not yet come into his own, still living in ignorance and
disorder, but his activity is different. He is in a fight. The same
change is in _Mother_ and in the work _In Prison_. A new pæan is
sung, it is the song of the people marching _en masse_. Perhaps Walt
Whitman came the nearest to this same feeling of democracy, but unlike
Whitman it is not of the people that Gorky sings, but it is the people
themselves that are the song-makers. They are the "creators." "In them
dwells God."
The Russian who finds Gorky's later works too doctrinaire, too
purposeful, never quarrels with him because he finds his theme at fault
or the conclusions wrong, but because he thinks his art has failed.
They say they have revised their opinion that Gorky would mean to them
what Tolstoi has meant, for they still consider the latter to be more
universal and truer philosopher and artist. They find it inartistic
for Gorky to talk to them of what they already know. They want to hear
again about the strange and beautiful types they did not know of before
and to read again his beautiful lines with their exquisite descriptions
of nature, which they consider unsurpassed by the greatest. However,
to me Gorky's aestheticism is too one-sided. It is the aestheticism
of the primitive whom only the grandiose impresses. The soft, subtle
shadings leave him untouched. There is no doubt that he loves
passionately his "mother earth" with the vast, undulating steppes, the
tall mountains of the Caucasus, the great dome of the sky, and the
living sweep of the sea. His descriptions of these scenes glow as does
a Western writer over the charms of his beloved, but we miss the charms
of the beloved.
In reading Russian literature, it must always be remembered that one
is reading of a people whose civilization is intrinsically different
from that of the West. It is the difference between action and
passivity. Professor Milvoukoff would have us believe that it is the
autocratic form of government which has made the Russian live so long
in inactivity, that both his reasoning powers and imaginative faculties
have developed far in excess of the rest of Europe's. It is true that
the Russian is never afraid to go to the end of a thought, to fight
for freedom far in excess of that already attained in the Western
world, and to ask continually the fundamental questions of "Why," and
"Wherefore," and "Where am I going," and "Where does this lead me to?"
The knife of Russian literature discloses as surely a cross-section
of Russian civilization as does that of Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert,
Zola and other realists of the French school disclose the French. And
yet this cross-section of Russian civilization is difficult to grasp
without a more intimate knowledge of both the history and the people.
It is difficult for me now to remember my conceptions of Russian life
as I got them from the Russian writers before my visit to Russia ten
years ago. America, California, all the activities of our Western life
made the characters and problems in Turgeneff, Dostoyeffsky and Gogol
seem vague and unreal, made them move about in a nebulous society where
one asked embarrassing personal questions and were always answered with
a truth that had rudeness in it.
I had a coward's entry into Russia. There were rumors of riots and
disorders, for it was in the year of general strikes and barricades,
and as the train moved farther into the interior, the guards who
shoveled the snow off the track seemed to me soldiers under arms,
standing there to protect us from some infuriated mob. My heart beat
with fear at that great and uncouth stranger to me, the Russian
people. But as my stay in Russia was prolonged, my kinship with the
people grew. The common man appeared to me as a gentle protector and
friend. The drivers of the droshkies, the peasants, the workingmen, the
conductors on the trains, all became kindly elder brothers, who set
one on one's right path or made a friendly remark as one passed along.
Every one talked to every one, and although the great interest of the
time was the Duma and the political situation, there lurked always a
personal understanding and a personal relation behind each discussion.
All classes had this attitude, and though the educated had more facts
at their resources, for they knew history and the outside world, they
had the same outlook and the same manner as the others. I became so
much at one with the people around me, that when I left Russia eighteen
months later, I felt this time fearful at going away, as if now truly
I were going from home into a strange land. As the train came into the
Western world, as I found myself in Poland and out again into Austria,
I was again alone, a solitary and detached individual who was to stand
on guard against the ill-turn which would be given me if I were not
watchful. Outside of Russia, the people, "the God-creators," as Gorky
calls them, fell apart into millions of various atoms, each struggling
for his own life. It was in Russia that I left them still unspoiled,
unadventitious, united in a great simplicity of faith and love. It is
therefore that the last chapter of this book is distinct and real to
me, and I can almost see with my own eyes that vast, surging procession
of the people, showing their loving strength and giving of their
strength to the weak.
To-day, when all ideals and hopes have gone smash in the hurly-burly of
this World War, Gorky has taken his side with his country and is again
living in Russia. In the interim, before he can pick up the gauntlet
to fight on for a new and better order, he has gone back to his former
theme, writing as before of the tramps and "ex-men" and gipsies he knew
in his youth, and Russia is pleased with him once more.
ROSE STRUNSKY.
New York, February, 1916.
THE CONFESSION
CHAPTER I
Let me tell you my life; it won't take much of your time--you ought to
know it.
I am a weed, a foundling, an illegitimate being. It isn't known to
whom I was born, but I was abandoned on the estate of Mr. Loseff in
the village of Sokal, in the district of Krasnoglinsk. My mother left
me--or perhaps it was some one else--in the landlord's park, on the
steps of the little shrine under which the old landlady Loseff lay
buried and where I was found by Danil Vialoff, the gardener. He was
walking in the park early in the morning, when he saw a child wrapped
in rags lie moving on the steps, of the shrine. A smoke-colored cat was
walking stealthfully around it.
I lived with Danil until I was four years old, but as he himself had a
large family, I fed myself wherever I happened to be, and when I found
nothing I whined and whined, then fell asleep hungry.
When I was four I was taken by the sexton Larion, a very strange and
lonely man; he took me because of his loneliness. He was short of
stature, round like a toy balloon and had a round face. His hair was
red, his voice thin like a woman's, and his heart was also like a
woman's, gentle to everybody. He liked to drink wine and drank much of
it; when sober he was silent, his eyes always half-closed, and he had
an air of being guilty before all, but when drunk, he sang psalms and
hymns in a loud voice, held his head high and smiled at every one.
He remained apart from people, living in poverty, for he had given
away his share to the priest, while he himself fished both summer and
winter. And for fun he caught singing birds, teaching me to do the
same. He loved birds and they were not afraid of him; it is touching
to recall how even the most timid of little birds would run over his
red head and get mixed up in his fiery hair. Or the bird would settle
on his shoulder and look into his mouth, bending its wise little head
to the side. Then again Larion would lie on a bench and sprinkle
hempseed in his head and beard, and canaries, goldfinches, tomtits
and bullfinches would collect around him, hunting through his hair,
creeping over his cheeks, picking his ears, settling on his nose while
he lay there roaring with laughter, squinting his eyes and conversing
tenderly with them. I envied him for this--of me, the birds were afraid.
Larion was a man of tender soul and all animals recognized it; I can't
say the same for men, though I don't mean to blame them for I know man
isn't fed by caresses.
It used to be rather difficult for him in winter; he had no wood and
he had nothing to buy it with, having drunk up the money. His little
hut was as cold as a cellar, except that the birds chirped and sang,
and the two of us would lie on the cold stove, wrapped in everything
possible, listening to the singing of the birds. Larion would whistle
to them--he could whistle well--looking like a grossbeak, with his
large nose, his hooked bill and his red head. Often he would say to
me: "Well, listen, Motka" (I was baptized Matvei). "Listen!"
He would lie on his back, his hands under his head, squinting his eyes
and singing something from the funeral Liturgy in his thin voice. The
birds would then become quiet, stopping to listen, then they themselves
would begin to sing one after the other. Larion would try to sing
louder than they and they would exert themselves, especially the
canaries and goldfinches, or the thrushes and starlings. He would often
sing himself up to such a point that the tears from his eyes would
trickle from out his lids, wetting his cheeks and washing his face gray.
This singing sometimes frightened me, and once I said to him in a
whisper:
"Uncle, why do you always sing about death?" He stopped, looked at me
and said, smiling,
"Don't get frightened, silly. It doesn't matter if it is about death;
it is pretty. Of the whole church service the funeral mass is the most
beautiful. It offers tenderness to man and pity for him. Among us, no
one has pity except for the dead." These words I remember very well, as
I do all his words, but of course at that time I could not understand
them. The things of childhood are only understood on the eve of old
age, for these are the wisest years of man.
I remember also that I asked him once, "Why does God help man so
little?"
"It's none of His business," he explained to me. "Help yourself,
that's why reason was given to you. God is here so that it won't be so
terrible to die, but just how to live, that is your affair."
I soon forgot these words of his, and recalled them too late, and that
is why I have suffered much vain sorrow.
He was a remarkable man! When angling most people never shout and never
speak so as not to frighten the fish, but Larion sang unceasingly, or
recounted the lives of the saints to me, or spoke to me about God, and
yet the fish always flocked to him. Birds must also be caught with
care, but he whistled all the time, teased them and talked to them and
it never mattered--the birds walked into his traps and nets. The same
thing as to bees; when setting a hive or doing anything else, which old
bee-keepers do with prayers, and even then don't always succeed, the
sexton, when called for the job, would strike the bees, crush them,
swear profanely, and yet everything went in the best way possible.
He didn't like bees--they blinded a daughter of his once. She found
herself in a bee-hive--she was only three at the time--and a bee stung
her eye. This eye grew diseased, and then blind, and soon the other
eye followed. Later the little girl died from headache, and her mother
became insane.
Yes, he never did anything the way other people did, and he was as
tender to me as if he were my own mother. They did not treat me with
much mercy in the village. Life was hard, and I was a stranger, and a
superfluous one.... Suddenly and illegally to be eating the morsel that
belonged to some one else!
Larion taught me the church service, and I became his helper and sang
with him in the choir, lit the censer, and did all that was needed. I
helped the watchman Vlassi keep order in the church and I liked doing
all this, especially in winter. The church was of brick, they heated it
well, and it was warm inside it.
I liked vespers better than morning mass. In the evening the people
were purified by work and were freed of their worries, and they stood
quietly and majestically, and their souls shone like wax candles with
little flames. It was plain then, that though people had different
faces their misery was the same.
Larion liked the church service; he would close his eyes, throw back
his red head, stick out his Adam's apple and burst forth into song,
losing himself so that he would even start off on some uncalled for
hymn and the priest would make signs to him from the altar: "Where is
it taking you?" He also read beautifully. His voice was singsong and
sonorous, and had tenderness in it, and emotion and joy. The priest did
not like him, nor did he like the priest. More than once he said to me:
"That, a priest! He is no priest, he is a drum upon whom need and
force of habit beat their sticks. If I were a priest, I would read the
service in such a way that not only would I make the people cry, but
even the holy images!"
It was true--the priest did not suit his post. He was short-nosed and
dark as if he had been singed by gun-powder. His mouth was large and
toothless, his beard straggly, his hair thin and bald on top, his
arms long. He had a hoarse voice and he panted as if carrying a load
that was too much for his strength. He was greedy and always in a bad
humor--for his family was large and the village was poor, the land of
the peasants bad and there was no business.
In summer, even when the mosquitoes were thick, Larion and I spent our
days and our nights in the woods to hunt for birds or on the river to
catch fish. It happened that he would be needed unexpectedly for some
religious ceremony and he would not be there, nor would any one know
where to find him. All the little boys in the village would scatter
to hunt for him, running like hares and crying, "Sexton! Larion! Come
home!" He would hardly ever be found. The priest would scold and
threaten to complain, and the peasants would laugh.