(A SKETCH FROM A TRAVELER’S NOTEBOOK)
I
Early one summer morning I put my knapsack on my shoulders and set out
from Arzamas.
Southeast of the city stretched the slopes of a green mountain. A little
white church welcomingly and mildly peered out through the trees which
grew in large numbers among the graves and beside the cemetery on the
pitted sides of the mountain were some strange white spots....
As I drew near I saw that these were small and almost toy houses of old
brick with peaked roofs covered with mosses and lichens. Three were
shorter than a man,—one, in the form of a chapel, was taller. The roofs
supported eight-pointed crosses, and on the walls were the dark boards of
ikons. The faces had been worn away by the winds and beaten by the rains.
I was told in Arzamas that these were all that was left of a unique
village. In earlier times the entire mountainside had been covered with
similar structures, as if a city of dwarfs had been laid out opposite to
the real city with its gigantic churches and its monastery. The people
called this place the “Village of God.”
Every year, on the Thursday of the Seventh Week after Easter the local
clergy come to this mountain and wave their censers in the air amid these
peculiar houses; the incense perfumes the place and the choir sings:
“Remember, Lord, Thy slaughtered servants and those who died an unknown
death, whose names, O Lord, Thou knowest....”
For whom they pray, for whom they sing the requiem, whose sinful souls
are remembered in this prayer,—neither the people of Arzamas who stand
around and pray nor the clergy of Arzamas can tell definitely.... For
them the service in the disappearing “village” is merely a pious and
revered custom, a relic of the hoary past....
And this past was sad and bloodstained....
Arzamas was once on the frontier. The city guarded the border. The breeze
which raised the dust on the distant steppes here roused great anxiety
and alarm. Some looked toward the steppes with terror, others with uneasy
hopes.... And every spark borne hither on the winds from the Don or the
Volga, found here a goodly supply of inflammable material in oppression,
violence, injustice, slavery, and grievous national suffering.
This was the soil where was planted the Village of God.