Natasha's Dance (50 page)

    This emphasis on the mystical
experience
of the Divinity was associated with two important features of the Russian Church. One was the creed of resignation and withdrawal from life. The Russian monasteries were totally devoted to the contemplative life and, unlike their counterparts in western Europe, they played no active part in public life or scholarship. Orthodoxy preached humility and, more than any other Church, it made a cult of passive suffering (the first saints of the Russian Church, the medieval princes Boris and Gleb, were canonized

    because they let themselves be slaughtered without resistance). The second consequence of this mystical approach was the burden that it placed on ritual and art, on the emotional experience of the liturgy, as a spiritual entry to the divine realm. The beauty of the church - the most striking outward feature of the Orthodox religion - was its fundamental argument as well. According to a story in the
Primary Chronicle,
the first recorded history of Kievan Rus’, compiled by monks in the eleventh century, the Russians were converted to Byzantine Christianity by the appearance of the churches in Constantinople. Vladimir, the pagan prince of Kievan Rus’ in the tenth century, sent his emissaries to visit various countries in search of the True Faith. They went first to the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but found no joy or virtue in their religion. They went to Rome and Germany, but thought their churches plain. But in Constantinople, the emissaries reported, ‘we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth’.
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    The Russian Church is contained entirely in its liturgy, and to understand it there is no point reading books: one has to go and see the Church at prayer. The Russian Orthodox service is an emotional experience. The entire spirit of the Russian people, and much of their best art and music, has been poured into the Church, and at times of national crisis, under the Mongols or the Communists, they have always turned to it for support and hope. The liturgy has never become the preserve of scholars or the clergy, as happened in the medieval West. This is a people’s liturgy. There are no pews, no social hierarchies, in a Russian church. Worshippers are free to move around - as they do constantly to prostrate and cross themselves before the various icons - and this makes for an atmosphere that is not unlike a busy market square. Chekhov describes it in his story ‘Easter Night’ (1886):

    Nowhere could the excitement and commotion be felt as keenly as in the church. At the door there was a relentless wrestle going on between the ebb and flow. Some people were coming in, and others were going out, but then they were soon coming back again, just to stand for a while before leaving again. There were people scuttling from one place to another, and then hanging about as it they were looking for something. Waves started at the door and rippled through the church, disturbing even the front rows where

    there were serious worthy people standing. There could be no question of any concentrated praying. There was no praying at all in fact, just a kind of sheer, irrepressible childlike joy looking for a pretext to burst forth and be expressed in some kind of movement, even if it was only the shameless moving about and the crowding together.

    You are struck by the same same kind of extraordinary sense of motion in the Easter service itself. The heavenly gates stand wide open in all the side-altars, dense clouds of smoky incense hang in the air around the candelabra; wherever you look there are lights, brightness and candles spluttering everywhere. There are no readings planned; the energetic, joyful singing does not stop until the end; after each song in the canon the clergy change their vestments and walk around with the censor, and this is repeated every ten minutes almost.
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    Anyone who goes to a Russian church service is bound to be impressed by the beauty of its chants and choral song. The entire liturgy is sung - the sonorous bass voice of the deacon’s prayers interspersed with canticles from the choir. Orthodoxy’s ban on instrumental music encouraged a remarkable development of colour and variety in vocal writing for the Church. The polyphonic harmonies of folk song were assimilated to the
znamenny
plainchants - so called because they were written down by special signs
(znameni)
instead of Western notes - which gave them their distinctive Russian sound and feel. As in Russian folk song, too, there was a constant repetition of the melody, which over several hours (the Orthodox service can be interminably long) could have the effect of inducing a trance-like state of religious ecstasy. Churches famous for their deacons and their choirs drew huge congregations - Russians being drawn to the spiritual impact of liturgical music, above all. Part of this, however, may have been explained by the fact that the Church had a monopoly on the composition of sacred music - Tchaikovsky was the first to challenge it when he wrote the
Liturgy of St John Chrysostom
in 1878 - so that it was not until the final decades of the nineteenth century that the public could hear sacred music in a concert hall. Rachmaninov’s
Vespers,
or
All Night Vigil
(1915), was intended to be used as a part of the liturgy. The summation of Rachmaninov’s religious faith, it was based on a detailed study of the ancient chants and in this sense it can

    stand not simply as a work of sacred art but also as the synthesis of an entire culture of religious life.

    Russians pray with their eyes open - their gaze fixed on an icon. For contemplating the icon is itself perceived as a form of prayer. The icon is a gateway to the holy sphere, not a decoration or instruction for the poor, as sacred images became in western Europe from medieval times. In contrast to the Catholics, the Orthodox confess, not to a priest, but to the icon of Christ with a priest in attendance as a spiritual guide. The icon is the focal point of the believer’s religious emotion -it links him to the saints and the Holy Trinity - and for this reason it is widely seen by Russians as a sacred object in itself. Even an ‘outsider’ like Kireevsky, who had been a convert to the Roman Church, felt himself attracted to the icon’s ‘marvellous power’. As he told Herzen:

    I once stood at a shrine and gazed at a wonder-working icon of the Mother of God, thinking of the childlike faith of the people praying before it; some women and infirm old men knelt, crossing themselves and bowing down to the earth. With ardent hope I gazed at the holy features, and little by little the secret of their marvellous power began to grow clear to me. Yes, this was not just a painted board - for centuries it had absorbed these passions and these hopes, the prayers of the afflicted and unhappy; it was filled with the energy of all these prayers. It had become a living organism, a meeting place between the Lord and men. Thinking of this, I looked once more at the old men, at the women and the children prostrate in the dust, and at the holy icon - and then I too saw the animated features of the Mother of God, and I saw how she looked with love and mercy at these simple folk, and I sank on my knees and meekly prayed to her.
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    Icons came to Russia from Byzantium in the tenth century, and for the first two hundred years or so they were dominated by the Greek style. But the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century cut off Russia from Byzantium; and the monasteries, which were largely left alone and even flourished at this time, began to develop their own style. The Russian icon came to be distinguished by qualities that guided the worshipper at prayer: a simple harmony of line and colour and a captivating use of ‘inverse perspective’ (where lines seem to converge on a point in front of the picture) to draw the viewer into the picture

    space and to symbolize the fact, in the words of Russia’s greatest icon scholar Leonid Ouspensky, that ‘the action taking place before our eyes is outside the laws of earthly existence’.
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That style reached its supreme heights in Andrei Rublev’s icons of the early fifteenth century - an era coinciding with Russia’s triumph over Tatar rule, so that this flowering of sacred art became a cherished part of national identity. Rublev’s icons came to represent the nation’s spiritual unity. What defined the Russians - at this crucial moment when they were without a state - was their Christianity. Readers may recall the last, symbolic scene of Andrei Tar-kovsky’s film about the icon painter,
Andrei Rublev
(1966), when a group of craftsmen cast a giant bell for the ransacked church of Vladimir. It is an unforgettable image - a symbol of the way in which the Russians have endured through their spiritual strength and creativity. Not surprising, then, that the film was suppressed in the Brezhnev years.

    It is hard to overstress the importance of the fact that Russia received its Christianity from Byzantium and not from the West. It was in the spirit of the Byzantine tradition that the Russian Empire came to see itself as a theocracy, a truly Christian realm where Church and state were united. The god-like status of the Tsar was a legacy of this tradition.
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After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the Russian Church proclaimed Moscow to be the Third Rome - the direct heir to Byzantium and the last remaining seat of the Orthodox religion, with a messianic role to save the Christian world. This Byzantine inheritance was strengthened by the marriage of Ivan III to Sofia Paleologue, the niece of Byzantium’s last Emperor, Constantine, in 1472. The ruling princes of Muscovy adopted the title ‘Tsar’ and invented for themselves a legendary descent from the Byzantine and Roman emperors. ‘Holy Russia’ thus emerged as the providential land of salvation - a messianic consciousness that became reinforced by its isolation from the West.

    With Byzantium’s decline, Russia was cut off from the mainstream of Christian civilization and, by the end of the fifteenth century, it was the only major kingdom still espousing Eastern Christianity. As a consequence, the Russian Church grew introspective and withdrawn, more intolerant of other faiths, and more protective of its national rituals. It became a state and national Church. Culturally the roots of this went deep into the history of Byzantium itself. Unlike the Western Church, Byzantium had no papacy to give it supranational cohesion.

    It had no lingua franca like Latin - the Russian clergy, for example, being mostly ignorant of Greek - and it was unable to impose a common liturgy or canon law. So from the start the Orthodox community was inclined to break down into independent Churches along national lines (Greek, Russian, Serbian, etc.) - with the result that religion reinforced, and often became synonymous with, national iden-tity. To say ‘Russian’ was to say ‘Orthodox’.

    The rituals of the Church were the basis of these national differences. There was one essential doctrine - set long ago by the Church Fathers - but each national Church had its own tradition of rituals as a community of worshippers. For the Western reader, accustomed to conceive of religious differences in terms of doctrine and moral atti-tudes, it may be difficult to understand how rituals can define a national group. But rituals are essential to the Orthodox religion - indeed, the very meaning of the concept ‘Orthodox’ is rooted in the idea of the ‘correct rituals’. This explains why Orthodoxy is so fundamentally conservative - for purity of ritual is a matter of the utmost importance to the Church - and why indeed its dissenting movements have generally opposed any innovations in the liturgy, the Old Believers being the most obvious case in point.

    The whole of Russian life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was permeated with religious rituals. At birth the Russian child would be baptized and given a saint’s name. The annual celebration of a person’s saint’s day was even more important than that of their birth-day. Every major event in a Russian’s life - entry into school and university, joining the army or civil service, purchasing an estate or house, marriage and death - received some form of blessing from a priest. Russia had more religious holidays than any other Christian country. But no other Church was so hard on the stomach. There were five weeks of fasting during May and June, two weeks in August, six weeks leading up to Christmas Eve, and seven weeks during Lent. The Lenten fast, which was the one fast kept by all classes of society, began after Shrovetide, the most colourful of the Russian holidays, when everybody gorged themselves on pancakes and went for sleigh rides or tobogganing. Anna Lelong, who grew up on a medium-sized estate in Riazan province in the 1840s, recalled the Shrovetide holiday as a moment of communion between lord and serf.

    At around 2 p.m. on the Sunday of Shrovetide, horses would be harnessed up to two or three sleighs and a barrel would be put on the driver’s seat of one of them. Old Vissarion would stand on it, dressed up in a cape made of matting and a hat decorated with bast leaves. He would drive the first sleigh and behind him would be other sleighs on which our servants crowded, singing songs. They would ride round the whole village and mummers from other villages would join them on their sleighs. A huge convoy would build up and the whole procession lasted until dusk. At around seven our main room would fill with people. The peasants had come to ‘bid farewell’ before the Lenten journey. Each one had a bundle in his hands with various offerings, such as rolls or long white loaves, and sometimes we children were given spiced cakes or dark honey loaves. We would exchange kisses with the peasants and wish each other well for the Lenten period. The offerings were put in a large basket and the peasants were given vodka and salted fish. On Sunday only our own Kartsevo peasants came to say goodbye, and peasants from other nearby villages would come on the Saturday. When the peasants left, the room would have to be sealed tightly as it smelt of sheepskin coats and mud. Our last meal before Lent began with special pancakes called ‘
tuzhiki’.
We had fish soup, and cooked fish which was also given to the servants.
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