The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible.”²⁴

That, of course, was evasiveness.

However, it would be wrong for anyone to think that Golovan was a sectarian or avoided the Church. No, he even went to Father Pyotr at the Boris-and-Gleb cathedral “to verify his conscience.” He would come and say:

“Cover me with shame, father, I don’t like myself these days.”

I remember this Father Pyotr, who used to come to visit us, and once, when my father said something to him about Golovan being a man of excellent conscience, Father Pyotr replied:

“Have no doubts: his conscience is whiter than snow.”

Golovan liked lofty thoughts and knew the poet Pope,²⁵

but not as a writer is usually known by people who have read his works. No, Golovan, having approved of An Essay on Man, given him by the same Alexei Petrovich Ermolov, knew the whole poem by heart. And I can remember how he once stood by the doorpost, listening to the story of some sad new event, and, suddenly sighing, replied:

My gentle Bolingbroke, ’tis no surmise,

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies.

The reader need not be surprised that a man like Golovan could toss off a line from Pope. Those were harsh times, but poetry was in fashion, and its great word was dear even to men of good blood. From the masters it descended to the plebs. But now I come to the major incident in Golovan’s story—the incident which unquestionably cast an ambiguous light on him even in the eyes of people not inclined to believe all sorts of nonsense. Golovan came out as not clean in some remote past time. This was revealed suddenly, but in the most vivid form. There appeared on the squares of Orel a person who meant nothing in anyone’s eyes, but who laid the most powerful claims on Golovan and treated him with incredible insolence.

This person and the history of his appearance make a rather characteristic episode from the moral history of the time and a picture from life that is not without some color. And therefore I ask you to turn your attention for a moment slightly away from Orel, to still warmer parts, to a quiet-flowing river between carpeted banks, to the people’s “feast of faith,” where there is no room for everyday, practical life, where everything, decidedly everything

, passes through a peculiar religiosity, which imparts to it all its special relief and liveliness. We must attend the revealing of the relics of a new saint—which was an event of the greatest significance for the most various representatives of society in those days. For simple folk it was an epic event, or, as one of the bards of the time used to say, “the accomplishment of the sacred feast of faith.”

VIII

Not one of the printed accounts of that time can convey the commotion that set in at the opening of the solemnities. The living but low-life aspect of the thing escaped them. This was not today’s peaceful journey by coach or rail, with stops at comfortable inns, where there is everything necessary and at a reasonable price. Travel back then was a great feat, and in this case a feat of piety, which, however, was equal to the expected solemn event in the Church. There was also much poetry in it—once again of a special sort—motley and shot through with various tinges of the Church’s everyday life, of limited popular naïveté and the boundless yearnings of the living spirit.

A multitude of people from Orel set out for this solemnity. Most zealous of all, naturally, was the merchant estate, but landowners of the middling sort didn’t lag behind, and simple folk in particular came pouring in. They went on foot. Only those who transported the infirm “for healing” dragged along on some wretched nag. Sometimes, however, the infirm were transported on the back and were not even counted a burden, because the inns charged them less for everything, and sometimes even let them stay without paying at all. There were not a few who deliberately “invented a sickness for themselves: rolled up their eyes, and two would alternately transport a third on wheels, so as to earn income from donations for wax, and oil, and other rites.”

So I read in an account, unprinted but reliable, copied down not from a standard pattern, but from “living vision,” and by someone who preferred the truth to the tendentious mendacity of that time.