Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

To the question, why they had fallen away from the Church, they replied that in the church people worshipped wooden gods made by human hands, whereas not only was this not laid down in Holy Scripture, but in the prophecies it said just the opposite. When Father Misail asked Chuyev whether it was true that they referred to the holy ikons as ‘boards’, Chuyev replied: ‘That’s right – just you take any ikon you like and turn it round, and you’ll see for yourself.’ When they were asked why they did not recognize the priesthood, they replied that in Scripture it was written ‘freely have ye received, freely give’, but priests would only dispense their grace in return for money. To all Misail’s attempts to support his position by reference to Holy Scripture, the tailor and Chuyev retorted calmly but firmly, referring to the same Scripture, of which they had a thorough grasp. Misail grew angry and threatened them with the secular authorities. To this the sectarians replied that Scripture said ‘If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.’

The encounter was inconclusive and the whole thing would have ended quietly, but the next day at mass Father Misail preached a sermon about the pernicious influence of those who distort the truth, and how they deserved all kinds of retribution; and some of the peasants as they came out of the church started talking about how it would be good to teach the godless ones a lesson so that they wouldn’t go on confusing the people. And that very day, while Father Misail was enjoying some appetizers of salmon and white fish with the rural dean and an inspector who had arrived from the local town, a disorder broke out in the village. The Orthodox folk had gathered together in a crowd in front of Chuyev’s hut and were waiting for those inside to come out so that they could give them a good hiding. There were about twenty of the sectarians in there, both men and women. Father Misail’s sermon, followed by this assemblage of the Orthodox and their threatening shouts had aroused in the sectarians a fierceness which had not been there before. Evening had come and it was time for the peasant women to milk the cows, but the Orthodox believers continued to stand there and wait, and when a young lad came out they started hitting him and drove him back into the house.

The sectarians were discussing what they ought to do, but they were unable to agree among themselves.

The tailor said that they should put up with whatever happened to them and not try to defend themselves. Chuyev, however, said that if they just put up with it they might all end up getting slaughtered, and he seized a poker and went out into the village street. The Orthodox believers hurled themselves upon him.

‘All right then, let it be according to the Law of Moses,’ he shouted, and he started hitting the Orthodox believers with the poker, putting out one man’s eye in the process. The rest of the sectarians slipped out of the hut and returned to their homes.

Chuyev was put on trial for heresy and blasphemy, and sentenced to exile.

Father Misail, however, received an award and was made an archimandrite.

XXI

Two years before these events took place, a healthy attractive young woman of oriental looks named Turchaninova had come from the Don Cossack territory to St Petersburg to study at the university. In Petersburg she met a student named Tyurin, the son of a zemstvo leader in the Simbirsk province, and fell in love with him, but her love for him was not of the usual womanly type, involving the desire to become his wife and the mother of his children, but a comradely love which drew its strength above all from a shared anger and detestation against the existing social order and the people who represented it, and from a consciousness of their own intellectual, educational and moral superiority to those people.