Russka: The Novel of Russia

  His lust for ecclesiastical power, however, was his downfall. For Tsar Alexis, often away on campaign, had left Nikon in charge in his absence and even given him the highest title of Great Sovereign; and it was not long before Nikon had started to suggest, like a medieval Pope, that the Patriarch and the Church should have authority over the Tsar and the state – an idea which neither Alexis nor the boyars would tolerate. Mighty Nikon was exiled: his rule was over.

  But his Church reforms remained.

  At first, even in 1653, there had been opposition. A small group of conservative clergy – the best known of whom was the Archpriest Avvakum – had opposed the changes. At once the Patriarch had crushed them, and exiled Avvakum to the far north; but the opposition had continued.

  In 1666 the great Church council called to settle the dispute agreed that, while the over-ambitious Nikon should be deposed, his reforms should stand and, amongst other things, three fingers should be raised in making the sign of the cross, instead of the traditional two. Those who refused to follow the new practices were to be excommunicated as heretics.

  And thus began the great fissure in Russian society known as the Raskol – the Schism – and the appearance on the scene of a new and important group of Russians. In the nineteenth century they would come to be known as the Old Believers. But in these times they were called by the more general term for religious dissidents – the Raskolniki, the Schismatics.

  It has sometimes been suggested that the reformers represented progress and the Raskolniki were obscurantist priests supported by illiterate peasants. This is not so. Indeed, Nikon’s new translations were done in such a hurry that they were full of inconsistencies, and he himself insisted upon details which other Patriarchs from the Orthodox Churches declared to be unnecessary. As for the Raskolniki, many were literate merchants and well-to-do peasants.

  The Raskolniki also had a cogent objection, which it was hard for the reformers to answer. ‘For if Moscow is, as the Church has long claimed, the third Rome – after which, we know, there shall be no other – then how can all these things the Church has taught and practised now, suddenly, be wrong? Are we to say the practices of the Russian saints, and the liturgy confirmed by the great Church council of Ivan the Terrible, were heretical?’

  In a Church which had always relied on the power of tradition, rather than textual analysis or logical proof, these objections were especially telling.

  This was the quarrel at the centre. And who could guess what echo would return, after a time, from the hinterland?

  Meanwhile, in the years that followed, there were other, mighty rumblings in the land.

  1670

  It was summer and the normally quiet little town of Russka was in a frenzy of excitement.

  For the rebels were coming.

  The monks, uncertain what line to take, looked to the abbot for guidance, but he himself could not make up his mind whether to defend the monastery or open its gates to them. In the town, and the nearby village of Dirty Place, opinion was similarly split. Many of the younger folk thought it would be a liberation. ‘He’s going to free the peasants,’ they said. ‘They’ll hang the Bobrovs and the land will be ours.’ But many of the older folk were more pessimistic. ‘If those rebels come,’ a small merchant remarked, ‘they’ll be like a plague of locusts.’

  And nobody was even sure where the rebels were. The other side of the Volga, thought some; close by Nizhni Novgorod, suggested others; already across the Oka, declared some alarmists.

  And what of their leader, the daring Cossack, Stenka Razin? In the space of a few short years his name had already become a legend. ‘He’ll rule in Moscow,’ they said, ‘like a true Tsar.’

  It was amidst all this excitement that the little children of Dirty Place found a new amusement. This was to taunt a quiet, serious, sixteen-year-old girl. She paid no great attention to them, although their persistent question, accompanied by giggles and peals of laughter, hurt her more than they knew. Her name was Arina, and the question they asked was always the same. ‘Arina, is Stenka Razin really your father? Is he coming to save us? Tell us, Arina, is it really your father coming?’

  It hurt her because she did not know.

  Who was her father? No one would tell her.

  Until she was five, she supposed it was the steward: after all, they lived with him. He was a stern, sour-faced man, and although he sometimes took her on his knee, it made little Arina sad because she sensed he did not love her. No doubt it was her fault. But when she was five, he died, and she and old Elena moved into her uncle’s large izba. And it was a little after this that a little girl told her: ‘Your father was a Cossack.’

  She did not understand, and when she asked her grandmother about it, old Elena just said: ‘What nonsense.’

  But Arina soon realized, instinctively, that there was something strange about her. Something wrong. There were whispers and giggles. And finally, when she was seven, Elena abruptly told her: ‘The steward wasn’t your father. It was a Cossack. That’s all. Don’t talk about it.’

  She didn’t. But from that day she understood, that in the minds of the village people, this strange, unseen figure of the Cossack in her past was like a mark upon her.

  A Cossack. what did it mean? She had never seen one, but she knew that they were wild, terrifying fellows; that each had a single lock of hair sprouting out of his shaved head, and long moustaches; and that they rode the steppe like the Tatars. Could it really be that one of these devils was her father? Once, hesitantly, she had asked her grandmother what he was like. ‘Just a Cossack. Dark. Forget him,’ Elena had replied curtly. And an entire year had passed before Arina had dared even to ask: ‘What was my father’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not important.’ Old Elena sounded irritable. ‘What difference does it make? He’s probably dead and even if he isn’t, you’ll never see him anyway.’ Then, seeing Arina’s disappointment, she had added more kindly: ‘Don’t worry, my little dove, you’ve got all the family you need here, thank God.’

  It was true. Besides her uncle – who was her mother’s brother – about half the village seemed to be related to her in some way or other. Even the priest who came to the little wooden church in Dirty Place was a distant cousin; so were two of the merchants in Russka. No, Arina supposed, she had no excuse for feeling lonely.

  Life in the village was often hard: the peasants expected to suffer. Their parents could remember the grim last days of Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles that followed. Twice in Arina’s short life, the harvest had failed and they had nearly starved. One year news came that a huge population of wolves – three or four thousand of them – had invaded the city of Smolensk in the west and roamed the streets in search of food.

  But the greatest hardship was war. There seemed to be no end to the fighting. As feared, a new war with Poland had broken out the moment the Tsar took the Ukraine under his protection. For thirteen years, not a season went by without another batch of men leaving Russka for the Tsar’s army; and many did not return.

  It was a piece of bad luck for the village that Nikita Bobrov had made a good marriage – it happened just after Arina’s birth – for what was good for the landlord was certainly not so for Dirty Place. ‘He’s got other estates now,’ Elena complained. ‘What’s it to him if half our men are killed? He just hands them over to Germans and heretics who drive them like cattle. He doesn’t care.’ Indeed, in his eagerness to please the Tsar, Nikita was generous in supplying serfs from this village – which he seldom visited – to fight under the foreign officers who so often commanded in the Tsar’s army. All through Arina’s childhood, the village seemed only half-alive, waiting for the return of those who never came.

  Yet despite these troubles, her own family had emerged unscathed. For some reason, Arina’s uncle had not been sent away to fight. By good fortune his three boys, when they came of age, were not chosen either. The family prospered. Arina’s uncle was the only man in the village
who was not in debt to the Bobrovs for paying his taxes and the family even had a hired labourer of their own to help in the fields.

  It was only gradually that Arina realized her uncle bribed the steward. The old steward had been a peasant, but when he died, Nikita Bobrov had sent a slave in his place, and the reason why her uncle’s sons were never sent away to fight was that, somehow, he could afford to bribe this man. When she came to understand this, she was rather shocked. Wasn’t it wrong, she asked old Elena.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Elena said. ‘But be glad he does it.’

  ‘Where does Uncle find the money?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘It isn’t just, though,’ Arina said.

  Elena only smiled ruefully. ‘You know the saying,’ she answered. ‘“The wolf is near, but on a cold, dark night, the Tsar is very far away indeed.” Don’t worry about right and wrong, just survive.’

  The family were kind to Arina and she certainly made herself useful. She would prepare the big earthenware pot to cook on the flat-topped stove overnight and salt the food to preserve it through the long winters. When one of her cousins made a fine gingerbread board, it was she who helped him design the peacock that was to be carved on it. She embroidered well.

  It was strange, given her parents, that she was so plain. From Andrei she had inherited dark hair, and from her mother a certain grace of movement. But that was all. Her face was pale; her nose, by general consent, was too long; she had a slight squint and there was a small wart on the left side of her chin. This lack of physical beauty, however, was modified by the fact that, when she allowed herself to show it, she had a smile of extraordinary sweetness.

  To compensate for her shameful birth, Elena had brought her up very strictly. Grandmother and granddaughter would always be seen, at every possible church service in Dirty Place, Russka or in the monastery, hurrying quietly by, their kerchiefs over their bowed heads, scarcely even looking up to speak as they crossed themselves before the doorway of the church, and again inside; they would light candles before every icon, and say a prayer.

  Above all, Arina loved to sing in the little wooden church in Dirty Place, with what became, by her fifteenth year, a beautiful contralto voice, so that the priest there would say: ‘She is our nightingale.’ And often he would remind the village people: ‘See how God, though He has not chosen to give this girl good looks, has instead given her a voice and a spirit of great beauty, by which He is praised.’

  It was as well that Arina should have a religious nature, for as her grandmother told her bluntly: ‘You will never be married.’ She saw it only too clearly. Thanks to the war with Poland, there were five women to every man in the district around Russka. ‘And of all the girls, I’m afraid you’d be the last to be chosen anyway,’ Elena said, ‘so you may as well get used to the idea.’

  If Arina ever felt bitter about any aspect of her fate, she never showed it. ‘I thank God,’ Elena would say to people in the girl’s presence, ‘I thank God, at least, that she isn’t headstrong like her mother.’ Submission, her grandmother taught her, submission and obedience were her only hope.

  When she was a little girl, Arina had often wondered about her mother. What sort of person had she been?

  Fortunately, old Elena would often talk about Maryushka. She had loved her so much that she couldn’t help it. Indeed, the memory of the vanished girl still, after all these years, seemed to exercise a fascination over the stout old woman. ‘She was a beauty, there’s no denying it,’ she would say to Arina, with a shake of her head.

  Her mother’s crime, Arina discovered, was not so much her affair with the Cossack. Such things were wrong, of course, but they happened. Her crime was being headstrong.

  ‘The steward, you see, he didn’t know he wasn’t your father. Not at first,’ Elena explained. He might never have known if he had not continually beat Maryushka.

  ‘Whenever something annoyed him, he’d take it out on her,’ Elena remembered sadly. ‘He used to hit her with his fist. She should have just taken it like most women do, but no, she had to lose her temper one day, just after you were weaned. She told him what she thought of him. Then she told him he wasn’t your father.’

  She sighed. ‘Ah, Maryushka, my poor dove. “I’ve done it now,” she says to me. “You have,” I said. “He’ll bide his time,” she says, “then he’ll kill me. I know him.” “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” “So will you take Arina?” she says. And then, next morning, without even saying goodbye to me, she’s gone.’

  So had begun Elena’s life with the steward. He had told her bluntly that since her daughter had left him like this, she had better look after him. And since he had power over her family, she had agreed. ‘But don’t you try hitting me, though,’ she had warned. ‘I’m not your wife.’

  Even then, the village assumed that wild Maryushka had run away because of the steward’s cruelty, and no one would have known about the Cossack if the steward himself, in his occasional drunken rages, had not blurted it out. ‘Curse him,’ Elena would remark. ‘He doesn’t mind dishonouring himself, so long as he can blacken her name. My poor Maryushka.’

  ‘Where did she go?’ the little girl would ask.

  ‘How should I know? To the steppe. Or across the Volga.’

  ‘And is she there now?’

  ‘Perhaps. If the wolves didn’t get her.’

  ‘Will she come back?’ Arina had sometimes asked hopefully.

  In fact, Elena felt sure Maryushka was dead. What hope of survival had a lone woman walking off into the unknown? At best she had been captured and taken as a serf by a landlord somewhere. ‘No. She won’t come back,’ she would say bitterly. ‘What for?’

  Yet although she never dared to say so, the little girl had always believed that one day her mother would come. Sometimes, at harvest, when the women were out with their sickles in the field, she would watch their long, bobbing line and suppose to herself that just once, even if only for a moment, one of them would detach herself from the line and come towards her, smiling and saying: ‘See, my little dove, I have returned to see you after all.’

  And at harvest’s end, she liked to go over to the big meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon and stare at the squat haystacks that dotted the empty spaces. For some reason, then, she would become convinced that her mother was out there, concealed behind one of the haystacks, and she would run from one to another, peeping round them, half-expecting to find a strange yet familiar form, who would take her into her arms. But each time she played this solitary, foolish game with herself, she would find nothing in the empty silence of the endless meadow except the freshly cut stubble and the high, sweet-smelling stacks so that, by the time the shadows lengthened, it seemed to the little girl in her sharp imagination as if God Himself had hidden His face behind a cloud, and left her all alone.

  By the time she was ten, however, the village people seemed to have forgotten about her parents; at least, no one bothered to talk about them. And her life at Russka had been quiet.

  But now Stenka Razin was coming. And who knew what that might mean?

  There had been similar risings before, and there would be others in the future, but no Russian rising has ever attained the same romance in Russian legend as that of Stenka Razin in 1670. Perhaps this was because it was the last real cry from the old, free Russia of the borderlands.

  It had begun, far away, amongst the freedom-loving Cossacks of the Don. For by 1670 even their democratic way of life had broken down, and a new class of rich Cossacks had appeared, who cared little for their poorer brothers. It was these poor Cossacks and peasants who, around 1665, had first rallied to a daring leader known as Stenka Razin, who was operating in the southern lands between the Volga and the Don.

  It might have been only some local raiding, scarcely heard of across the endless steppe, but something about the character of Razin made it more. The raids soon turned into a rising, then a full-scale rebellion. Promising free assemblies of
the people in the old-style Cossack way, he swept up the Volga taking town after town. By the summer of 1670, the rebel army was huge, had taken over half of south-east Russia, and seemed about to strike across at Moscow and the Russian heartland itself.

  And now, suddenly, the village remembered Arina’s father.

  ‘Arina’s father’s coming,’ the little children cried. And the older ones, with more cunning: ‘How much loot has Razin got, Arina? Is he going to make you rich?’

  For three weeks the taunts went on, and the girl inwardly cringed.

  Then, suddenly, it was over. In early autumn, the Tsar sent an army that smashed the rebels. The democratic hero fled back to the Don, where the rich Cossacks captured him and handed him over to the Tsar. The following June, he was executed in Red Square. So ended, to all intents, the old free ways of the Cossacks.

  ‘The Tsar’s killed Arina’s father,’ the children now cried with glee.

  She tried to take no notice. Yet, long after they had forgotten to taunt her, she remained sad. Somehow the death of the dashing Razin seemed like another loss, reminding her vividly how that other Cossack, her father, had vanished from her life so many years ago. And it prompted her to ask Elena, one day in early spring: ‘The Cossack, my father – did he know my mother was going to have me?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Elena answered reluctantly.

  ‘Then,’ she pursued, ‘didn’t he ever come to see her again? Didn’t he even want to see me?’

  At first, it seemed to Arina that her grandmother had not even heard the question, because for a time she did not even deign to reply. Then at last she answered.

  ‘No.’

  Arina said nothing. She would not raise the subject again. Clearly, neither of her parents had loved her. She supposed that, for some reason, she did not deserve it.

  It did not occur to her that the real reason why Elena had paused before she replied, was that she had told a lie.