Natasha's Dance (52 page)

    The oldest of these folk myths was the legend of Kitezh - a sacred city that was hidden underneath the lake of Svetloyar (in Nizhegorod province) and was only visible to the true believers of the Russian faith. Holy monks and hermits were said to be able to hear its ancient churches’ distant bells. The earliest oral versions of the legend went back to the days of Mongol rule. Kitezh was attacked by the infidels and at the crucial moment of the siege it magically disappeared into the lake, causing the Tatars to be drowned.

    Over the centuries the legend became mixed with other stories about towns and monasteries concealed underground, magic realms and buried treasure under the sea, and legends of the folk hero Ilia Muro-

    mets. But in the early eighteenth century the Old Believers wrote the legend down, and it was in this form that it was disseminated in the nineteenth century. In the Old Believers’ version, for instance, the Kitezh tale became a parable of the truly Christian Russia that was concealed from the Russia of the Antichrist. However, among the peasantry it became a vehicle for dissident beliefs that looked towards a spiritual community beyond the walls of the established Church. Throughout the nineteenth century pilgrims came to Svetloyar in their thousands to set up shrines and pray in hopeful expectation of a resurrection from the lake. The height of the season was the summer solstice, the old pagan festival of Kupala, when thousands of pilgrims would populate the forests all around the lake. The writer Zinaida Gippius, who visited the scene in 1903, described it as a kind of ‘natural church’ with little groups of worshippers, their icons posted to the trees, singing ancient chants by candlelight.
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    Another of these Utopian beliefs, no less tenacious in the popular religious consciousness, was the legend of Belovode, a community of Christian brotherhood, equality and freedom, said to be located in an archipelago between Russia and Japan. The story had its roots in a real community that had been established by a group of serfs who had fled to the mountainous Altai region of Siberia in the eighteenth century. When they did not return, the rumour spread that they had found the Promised Land. It was taken up, in particular, by the Wanderers, who believed in the existence of a divine realm somewhere at the edge of the existing world, and parties of the sect would journey to Siberia in search of it.
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The legend grew in status after 1807, when a guidebook to Belovode was published by a monk who claimed to have been there and, although his directions on how to get there were extremely vague, hundreds of peasants set off each year by horse and cart or riverboat to find the legendary realm. The last recorded journeys, in the 1900s, seem to have been prompted by a rumour that Tolstoy had been to Belovode (a group of Cossacks visited the writer to see if this was true).
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But long after this, Belovode remained in the people’s dreams. The painter Roerich, who took an interest in the legend and visited the Altai in the 1920s, claimed to have met peasants there who still believed in the magic land.

    ’I stopped at the Hermitage at Optina’, Gogol wrote to Count A. P. Tolstoy, ‘and took away with me a memory that will never fade. Clearly, grace dwells in that place. You can feel it even in the outward signs of worship. Nowhere have I seen monks like those. Through every one of them I seemed to converse with heaven.’ During his last years Gogol came to Optina on several occasions. He found comfort and spiritual guidance for his troubled soul in the tranquillity of the monastery. He thought he had found there the divine Russian realm for which he had searched all his life. Miles away from the monastery, he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘one can smell the perfume of its virtues in the air: everything becomes hospitable, people bow more deeply, and brotherly love increases’.
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    Nikolai Gogol came from a devout family in the Ukraine. Both his parents were active in the Church, and at home they kept to all the fasts and religious rituals. There was a tinge of mysticism in the Gogol household which helps to account for the writer’s life and art. Gogol’s parents met when his father had a vision in the local church: the Mother of God had appeared before him and, pointing to the young girl standing next to him, had said that she would become his wife, which indeed she did.
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Like his parents, Gogol was not satisfied by the observance of the Church’s rituals. From an early age he felt a need to experience the divine presence as a drama in his soul. In 1833 he wrote to his mother:

    [in my childhood] I looked at everything with an impartial eye; I went to church because I was ordered to, or was taken; but once I was there I saw nothing but the chasuble, the priest and the awful howling of the deacons. I crossed myself because I saw everyone else crossing themselves. But one time - I can vividly remember it even now - I asked you to tell me about the Day of Judgement, and you told me so well, so thoroughly and so touchingly about the good things which await people who have led a worthy life, and you described the eternal torments awaiting sinners so expressively and so fear-somely that it stunned me and awoke in me all my sensitivity. Later on it engendered the most lofty thoughts in me.
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    Gogol never had religious doubts, as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did. The torments of his final years arose only from doubts about his own merits before God. But the intense nature of the writer’s faith could not be contained within any Church. In some ways, as he himself acknowledged, his faith had much in common with the Protestant religion, in the sense that he believed in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
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Yet in the six years which Gogol spent in Rome, from 1836 to 1842, he also became close to the Catholic tradition, and if he chose not to convert to Rome, it was only, in his words, because he saw no difference between the two creeds: ‘Our religion is just the same thing as Catholicism - and there is no need to change from the one to the other.’
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In the final version of
Dead Souls,
which he never published, Gogol planned to introduce the figure of a priest who would embody Orthodox and Catholic virtues. He seems to have been searching for a Christian brotherhood that would unite all the people in a spiritual Church. This is what he thought he had found at Optina and in the idea of the ‘Russian soul’.

    Gogol’s fiction was the arena of this spiritual search. Contrary to the view of many scholars, there was no real divide between the ‘literary works’ of Gogol’s early period and the ‘religious works’ of his final years, although he did reveal a more explicit interest in religious issues later on. All Gogol’s writings have a theological significance - they were indeed the first in a national tradition that granted fiction the status of religious prophecy. Many of his stories are best read as religious allegories. Their grotesque and fantastic figures are not intended to be realistic - any more than icons aim to show the natural world. They are designed to let us contemplate another world where good and evil battle for man’s soul. In Gogol’s early stories this religious symbolism is embedded in biblical motifs and sometimes quite obscure religious metaphors. ‘The Overcoat’, for example, has echoes of the life of St Acacius - a hermit (and tailor) who died after years of torment by his elder, who later repented of his cruelty. This explains the hero’s name, Akaky Akakievich - a humble civil servant of St Petersburg who dies unloved, robbed of his precious overcoat, but who then returns to haunt the city as a ghost.
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After the ‘failure’ of
The Government Inspector
(1836) - a play intended as a moral

    parable but which the public look as a hilarious satire - Gogol sought

    to drive his religious message home. The work to which he then devoted all his energies was envisaged as a three-part novel called
Dead Souls -
an epic ‘poem’ in the style of Dante’s
Divine Comedy -
in which the providential plan for Russia was at last to be revealed. The grotesque imperfections of provincial Russia exposed in the first, and only finished (1842) volume of the novel - where the adventurer Chichikov travels through the countryside swindling a series of moribund squires out of the legal title to their deceased serfs (or ‘souls’) -were to be negated by Gogol’s lofty portrait of the ‘living Russian soul’ which he was intending for the second and third parts. Even the roguish Chichikov would eventually be saved, ending up as a paternal landowner, as Gogol moved towards the Slavic idyll of Christian love and brotherhood. The whole conception of the ‘poem’ was Russia’s resurrection and its spiritual ascent on an ‘infinite ladder of human perfection’ - a metaphor he took from the parable of Jacob’s ladder in the Book of Genesis.
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    Gogol’s divine vision was inspired by his champions, the Slavophiles, whose fantasy of Russia as a holy union of Christian souls was naturally attractive to a writer so disturbed by the soulless individualism of modern society. The Slavophile idea was rooted in the notion of the Russian Church as a free community of Christian brotherhood - a
sobornost’
(from the Russian word ‘
sobor’
which was used for both ‘cathedral’ and ‘assembly’) - as outlined by the theologian Aleksei Khomiakov in the 1830s and 1840s. Khomiakov came to his conception from a mystical theology. Faith could not be proved by reasoning, he said. It had to be arrived at by experience, by feeling from within the Truth of Christ, not by laws and dogmas. The True Church could not persuade or force men to believe, for it had no authority except the love of Christ. As a freely chosen community, it existed in the spirit of Christian love that bound the faithful to the Church - and this spirit was its only guarantee.

    The Slavophiles believed that the True Church was the Russian one. Unlike the Western churches, which enforced their authority through laws and statist hierarchies like the Papacy, Russian Orthodoxy, as they saw it, was a truly spiritual community, whose only head was Christ. To be sure, the Slavophiles were critical of the established Church, which in their view had been spiritually weakened by its close

    alliance with the Tsarist state. They espoused a social Church, some would say a socialistic one, and many of their writings on religion were banned as a result (Khomiakov’s theological writings were not published until 1879).
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The Slavophiles were firm believers in the liberation of the serfs: for only the communion of fully free and conscious individuals could create the
sobornost’
of the True Church. They placed their faith in the Christian spirit of the Russian people, and this was the spirit which defined their Church. The Slavophiles believed that the Russian people were the only truly Christian people in the world. They pointed to the peasantry’s communal way of life (‘a Christian union of love and brotherhood’), to their peaceful, gentle nature and humility, to their immense patience and suffering, and to their willingness to sacrifice their individual egos for a higher moral good - be that for the commune, the nation or the Tsar. With all these Christian qualities, the Russians were far more than a nationality -they bore a divine mission in the world. In the words of Aksakov, ‘the Russian people is not just a people, it is a humanity’.
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    Here was the vision of the ‘Russian soul’ - of a universal spirit that would save the Christian world - which Gogol tried to picture in the second and third volumes of
Dead Souls.
The concept of a national soul or essence was commonplace in the Romantic age, though Gogol was the first to give the ‘Russian soul’ this messianic turn. The lead came from Germany, where Romantics like Friedrich Schelling developed the idea of a national spirit as a means to distinguish their own national culture from that of the West. In the 1820s Schelling had a godlike status in Russia, and his concept of the soul was seized upon by intellectuals who sought to contrast Russia with Europe. Prince Odoevsky, the archpriest of the Schelling cult in Russia, argued that the West had sold its soul to the Devil in the pursuit of material progress. ‘Your soul has turned into a steam engine’, he wrote in his novel
Russian Nights
(1844); ‘I see screws and wheels in you but I don’t see life.’ Only Russia, with her youthful spirit, could save Europe now.
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It stands to reason that young nations like Germany and Russia that lagged behind the industrializing West would have recourse to the idea of a national soul. What such nations lacked in economic progress they could more than make up for in the spiritual virtues of the unspoilt countryside. Nationalists attributed a creative spontaneity

    and fraternity to the simple peasantry that had long been lost in the bourgeois culture of the West. This was the vague Romantic sense in which the idea of the Russian soul began to develop from the final decades of the eighteenth century. In his essay ‘On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul’ (1792), Pyotr Plavilshikov maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. Carried away by national pride, the playwright even claimed some unlikely firsts:

    One of our peasants has made a tincture which all the learning of Hippocrates and Galen failed to find. The bone setter of the village Alekseevo is famous among pioneers of surgery. Kulibin and the mechanic Sobakin from Tver are marvels in mechanics… What the Russian cannot grasp will for ever be unknown to men.
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    After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant’s soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in
Dead Souls.
In his earlier story ‘Taras Bulba’ (1835) Gogol had attributed to the Russian soul a special kind of love that only Russians felt. ‘There are no bonds more sacred than those of comradeship!’ Taras Bulba tells his fellow Cossacks: