Chapter I: The Religion of Russian Peasants

The contrast which strikes the traveller who travels directly from Central to Little Russia (which is in the South) is not unlike that of which a traveller would be aware if he went straight from Cambridgeshire or Norfolk to South Devon or Normandy. The season in both places is doing the same thing. The vegetation in the one place is not startingly behindhand or ahead of the vegetation in the other place; autumn in both places has reached the same stage; only in each place it has reached that stage in a different manner. In Central Russia there is a bite in the morning air, a smell of smoke, of damp leaves, of moist brown earth, and a haze hangs before the tattered trees, which are generously splashed with crimson and gold. In Little Russia the pageant of decay is just as far advanced; but little green remains in the yellow and golden woods; everything is hot and dry; there is no sharpness in the air and no moistness in the earth; summer instead of being conquered by the invading cold seems to be dying like a decadent Roman emperor of excess of splendour and softness and opulence. The contrast in the habitations of man is sharper still. In Central Russia the peasant’s house is built of logs and roofed with straw or iron according to the means of the inhabitant. The villages are monotonously and uniformly brown, colourless, and sullen; in the South the houses are white or pale green; these are surrounded with orchards and fruit trees; they often possess the luxury of glass verandahs; there is something well-to-do and smiling about them, something which recalls the whitewashed, straw-thatched cottages of South Devon, or the farms in Normandy, and all the delicious things which the French language conveys and suggests better than any other, since it is lighter; for in a few words, such as--

“Dans le jardin de mon père
Les lilas ont fleuri.”

It conjures up endless vistas of joyousness, gaiety, and sunshine.

When people generalise about the intense misery of the Russian peasants, the squalor in which they live, they should remember that Russia is a large country; that it possesses a north, a south, an east, and a west, and that what is true about one place is quite untrue about another. So that in one village the peasants may be starving for want of bread, and a hundred miles to the north or south you may find a village where the peasants have spent 300,000 roubles (£30,000) in building an enormous church, which is the case in the village of Lamki, government of Tambov, and there the church stands, towering and immense, built entirely by the voluntary contributions of peasants, to witness if I lie.

Tennyson, I think, says something about the North being dark and tender and true, and the South false and fickle. I asked a Little Russian gentleman what the main differences were between Little Russians and Big Russians, and he said the Little Russians were more decent people but far lazier than the Big Russians; that the Little Russian was so lazy that he would say to his wife: “Little wife, say ‘woa’ to my horse; I have a pain in my tongue.”

On the other hand, I asked a Muscovite who lived in Little Russia, who told me that he infinitely preferred to deal with Big Russians, but that the Little Russians were perhaps cleverer, though they would pretend to be stupid out of laziness. On the score of indolence everybody seemed to be agreed. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any great burst of energy in a country where the sun is so hot in October and the air so mild and so heavily charged with sunny indolence.

The country in the government of Kharkov was in distress owing to the want of rain; special services were being held in the village square praying for rain, because if the drought continues next year’s harvest will be ruined, and it is impossible at the present moment to sow. The dryness of the autumn in the government of Kharkov, which was threatening distress and disaster for the future, was in the meantime adding to the beauty of the present. The woods were harmonies in many-coloured golds; the nights were not yet cold, and every evening the sun sank in a cloudless halo of golden dust, making the yellow trees shine like the banners in a cathedral, as though they were the trophies of a triumphant conqueror instead of the last tattered remnants of the robe of a dying king. The little farms painted pale green are clean inside as they are outside. The walls are painted red and blue; the furniture is neatly arranged, and no poultry live in the living-room. Contrary to my expectations the inhabitants, instead of being dressed in their gloriously picturesque South Russian costumes, are far less striking to look at than the inhabitants of Central Russia, and they looked as if they had ordered their clothes from Birmingham or Manchester. The reason of this is the prevalence of large factories in this region, which spread education, civilisation, and the shirt and collars of the “intelligent” middle class. Every now and then, however, you see something which appeals more strongly to that which is primeval in you than to that which is progressive; a thing which may distress the theorising Socialist spirit in you, if you possess it, and please that which in you hankers towards Homer, _Puss in Boots_, and the elementary needs of the human heart. I saw just such a thing. It was a blind beggar. He was sitting on a hill in front of a church, and he was playing an instrument called a “lira,” that is to say, a lyre. But the lyre was not what you imagine when you think of pictures of the lyre of Orpheus or of Apollo. It was a wooden instrument shaped exactly like a violin. It had three strings, which were tuned with pegs like a violin, but it was played by fingering wooden keys, like those of a large concertina and by at the same time turning a handle which protruded from the base of the violin. The musician said he could play any kind of music, sad, joyous, and sacred, and he gave examples of all three of the various styles; they were to my ear indistinguishable in kind; they appeared to me all tinged with the same quick and deliciously plaintive melancholy, and the _kind_ of music made by this instrument instantly suggested that which Schubert has rendered in the accompaniment of a song called “Der Leiermann”: the plaintive comfortable noise of the very first organ-grinders. But what I wondered at the time was this. Is the instrument, the sound of which Schubert renders in his song “Der Leiermann,” this very identical “lyre” which my blind beggar was playing in the village Giebko, government of Kharkov? Or is Schubert just imitating the noise of the earliest portable grinding organs, whose music is made by wind proceeding from a bellows into a small box and thence into pipes, and whose principle of construction is exactly the same, though the scale is different, as that of the organ in St. Paul’s Cathedral? In any case the noise made by this “lyre” was the same in kind as the noise which Schubert imitates in the accompaniment of his song “Der Leiermann.” I afterwards ascertained that this instrument is called Leierkasten in Germany, _Vielle_ in France, and Hurdy-gurdy in English, and that my blind beggar must have been identical with Schubert’s Leiermann.

Another slight episode which gave me food for reflection happened in the train on a small line between the town of Kharkov and a neighbouring village. I was going to the town of Kharkov for the day; it was only half an hour’s journey. I was in a third-class carriage; there were not many passengers, and most of them were railway guards off duty, two peasants, a soldier, and a monk. The monk had no sooner entered the carriage than he began a theological discussion. Now, as soon as the train started, although I was sitting quite close, I could not unfortunately follow the intricacies of his argument for the noise made by the train, but whenever the train stopped at a station his words were plain. And the drift of the matter was this: that all the passengers in the carriage were uniting to express to him in forcible language that priests in general, and monks still more (and himself in particular), were lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing scoundrels, and deceivers into the bargain. The soldier said, and his words received universal approval, that every one who was not a born fool knew that there was one God, the same for everybody, and that all men were equal before Him, and that consequently there could be only one real religious faith (namely, a belief in God), and that all the rest was the invention of priests. By “the rest” it subsequently became plain that he meant the Devil and the tenets of the Orthodox Church in general and of any other Churches. The monk, on the other hand, said that the Devil was intensely real, and that every man was followed by angels, who were constantly fighting the Devil for the soul of the man. Now, the soldier, and three guards off duty who were taking part in this discussion, starting from the premise that there is only one God, one faith which consists in the belief in this one God, and that all priests are liars, worried the monk with questions and attacked him in every possible manner. They accused him of begging in the first place; they would be ashamed of doing such a thing, they said. Then the soldier asked him if he had seen the Devil. The monk said, “Yes, often.” “Where is he?” said the soldier. “It would be most interesting to see him.”

Then when the monk stood up for the Orthodox faith the soldier said: “You say it is the only faith. You lie, because I have been told there are any number of other Churches, and each of them says its faith is the true one. For instance, the Jews have an entirely different faith, and this proves that all priests are liars; because God is the same for everybody.”

At last the monk said that everybody attacked him and nobody stuck up for him, and he retired into another corner of the carriage, followed by the soldier, who went on with the argument, and afterwards repeated his main thesis to me separately, namely, that all priests were deceivers, because God is the same for everybody. Therefore there could be only one religious belief were it not for the lies of priests. But what struck me in this matter is a thing which has repeatedly struck me among Russians of the lower class, namely, their broad common sense in religious matters. “Mysticism,” Mr. Chesterton once wrote, “was with Carlyle as with all its genuine professors only a transcendent form of common sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths which cannot be formally demonstrated.” Now the Russians of the lower class seem to me often the genuine professors of mysticism, because their mysticism is simply common sense. And it is this very fact which seems to me to lead people astray when they discuss the religion of the Russian peasant. For instance, you often hear people bewail the _superstition_ of the peasant which makes him devote so much attention to paper and wooden images. Again, I have read in an English book on the Russian peasant that the peasant’s habit of perpetually crossing himself, his respect for images, and his prayers are purely mechanical and therefore meaningless, because they are often interrupted by, or simultaneous with, jokes, laughter, and the business of life. Now this union of the practice of the outward signs of religion with the business of everyday life, this interruption of a prayer by a conversation, this sign of the cross made before a theft seem to me all to derive from the broad common sense which is at the root of their belief, and which, as Mr. Chesterton says, is synonymous with mysticism.

Because if your belief in God is solid and based on great rocks of common sense it is not extraordinary that your outward expression of your allegiance to the great fact should be mechanical. For instance, if you are the loyal subject of the King, you mechanically take off your hat when he drives past you in the street or when you see the colours of his Army go by, and nobody says, if at that moment you happen to be whistling a comic song or thinking of the North Pole, that your action is hypocritical, insincere, or meaningless. But it is exactly the same in the case of the peasants; the outward expression of their religion is as mechanical as possible, but it is mechanical because their religious feeling is true and right and not because it is insincere and false.

I will end by telling two stories which exemplify the common sense which lies at the root of the Russian peasant’s religion. The first story happened at Kharbin. It was Easter, and the soldiers wanted Mass said for them. There were two priests. One priest had been engaged by some officers and the second priest was drunk. A soldier was relating these facts, and some asked: “Well, did you have to go without your Mass?” “Oh, no,” said the soldier, “we went to the priest who was drunk and we pulled him out of bed, and we said: ‘Say Mass, you devil’ (and a lot more uncomplimentary expressions), and he said Mass.” This story shows that the soldiers regarded the priest partly as an instrument to say Mass and partly as a man. They differentiated between the two, and the instrument had to perform its divine office whatever happened to the man, whose good or bad qualities had nothing to do with the case. This seems to me gloriously sensible.

The second story happened somewhere down in this government. A Socialist arrived in a village to convert the inhabitants to Socialism. He wanted to prove that all men were equal and that the Government authorities had no right to their authority. Consequently he thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policemen. So he took a holy image, and said: “There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this image and break it to bits, and if there is a God he will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.” Then he took the image and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants: “You see God has not killed me.” “No,” said the peasants, “God has not killed you, but we will,” and they killed him. And thus an act was committed which was one of common sense or of mysticism.