It was after the suppression of the rebellion of Razin. The tsar’s
generals had erected near Arzamas a whole forest of columns with
cross-beams and towards evening the city saw in horror, as they looked
from one hill to another, hanging upon them the bodies of atamans and of
the men of Arzamas who had joined the revolt. The bloody sun set behind
the mountain, fearful darkness covered the heavens, and crows swarmed in
clouds around their booty. The people kept asking one another: “Who is
hanging there on the mountain? Criminals and murderers or the defenders
of popular freedom, the avengers of century-old injustices?”
That same night a young merchant of Arzamas was driving his tired horse
along the road from Saratov and he was urging it on with all his might.
He abandoned far from the city his cart and the wares which he was
bringing from the Volga, and was hurrying ahead without resting at all;
he had learned from fugitives whom he had met that there was something
wrong in the city and that the men of Razin were rioting in it. And he
had left in the city his father and mother and his young wife with her
first-born babe.
At midnight the young man galloped on his foaming horse out of the forest
on to a hill in sight of his natal city. There was no gleam of fire to be
seen above the city, no alarm bells to be heard. The city seemed dead;
but in two or three of the churches were there timid lights,—perchance
by the dead bodies of “honorable citizens,” who were waiting Christian
burial....
Suddenly ... his horse started.... It was at that very place where now
stand the “houses of God.” ... The merchant saw a dread and leafless
forest standing on the mountain side, and, like ripe fruit, the bodies of
good young men hanging on the trees, with crows flapping their wings and
picking out the eyes of the dead.
The young merchant’s heart had been surging with uncertainty and sorrow
during his hurried journey by day and night, uninterrupted save by the
need of changing his tired horses, and his soul was weighted down as by a
rock with his hatred for the rebels of Razin. He stopped his horse under
one scaffold, rose in his stirrups and with all his strength he lashed
one of the dead bodies and cursed it.... The body swayed.... The chain
creaked and a cloud of crows rose in the air, flapping and cawing.
A dreadful result followed: the tortured dead descended from every
scaffold, from every wheel, and from every hook and rushed at the
merchant.... The maddened horse tore through the fields, leaped the
ravines, and reached the city utterly exhausted. And throughout the whole
flight, like autumn leaves driven by a gale, dashed after him the shades
of the executed, with their dead eyes aflame, and their fettered hands
grasped after him with curses and moans, and their dead voices wailed,
lamented, cursed....
Then the merchant realized that it was not for him to judge those who
were now standing before a far different tribunal, pleading there their
own and others’ sins, their own and others’ wrongs, their own and others’
blood. In that dreadful hour he took a solemn oath to bury all those who
had been executed and yearly to have a requiem for them.
Since then, it is said that the houses of God have stood in Arzamas.
Since then the clergy sing the requiem over the nameless graves and the
ikons which have been brought hither do not perish unnoticed....