Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

‘Princess Sofya Vladimirovna was telling me that he is a most wonderful preacher,’ said the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress one day to her son. ‘Faites-le venir. Il peut prěcher à la cathédrale.’¹²

‘No, it would be better to have him preach to us here,’ said the Tsar, and he gave orders that the elder Isidor should be invited to come to the court.

All the generals and highest officials were assembled in the court chapel. A new and unusual preacher was something of an event.

A small grey-haired, thin old man came out and cast his eye over them all. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’ he said, and began his sermon.

To begin with all was well, but the further it went, the worse it became. ‘Il devenait de plus en plus aggressif,’¹³ as the Empress put it immediately afterwards. He fulminated against everyone and everything. He referred to the death penalty. He said that the need for the death penalty was a symptom of bad government. Could it really be permissible, in a Christian country, to kill people?

They all looked at one another, all of them concerned exclusively about the impropriety of the sermon and about how disagreeable it was for the sovereign, but no one said anything out loud. When Isidor had said ‘Amen’ the Metropolitan went up to him and asked him to come and have a word with him in private.

After his talk with the Metropolitan and the Chief Procurator of the Synod the old man was sent straight back to a monastery – not to his own monastery, but to the one at Suzdal, where the Father Superior and commandant of the prison was Father Misail.

XV

They all pretended that there had been nothing disagreeable about Father Isidor’s sermon, and no one made any mention of it. Even the Tsar felt that the elder’s words had left no impression in his mind, nevertheless on two occasions later that day his thoughts turned to the execution of the two peasants and to the telegram sent by Sventitsky’s widow appealing for their pardon. That afternoon there was a parade, followed by a drive to an outdoor fěte, then a reception for ministers, then dinner, and in the evening the theatre. As usual the Tsar fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow. That night he was wakened by a terrible dream: in a field stood a gallows with corpses dangling from it, and the corpses were sticking out their tongues, and the tongues protruded further and further. And someone was shouting ‘This is your doing, this is your doing.’ The Tsar woke up sweating and started to think. For the first time ever he started to think about the responsibility which lay upon him, and all the things the little old man had said came back to him …

But he could see the human being within himself only as if from a great distance, and he was unable to yield to the simple demands of the human being within him because of all the other demands coming at him from all sides as Tsar; and to acknowledge the demands of the human being within as taking precedence over those of the Tsar – that was beyond his strength.

XVI

After serving his second term in prison Prokofy [Proshka], that lively, proud, dandified young fellow, had come out an utterly broken man. When he was sober he simply sat about doing nothing, and however much his father shouted and swore at him, he went on living an idle life consuming the family’s bread, and furthermore whenever he got the chance he would steal things and take them off to the tavern to get drunk on the proceeds. He lounged about, coughing, hawking and spitting. The doctor whom he went to consult listened to Prokofy’s chest and shook his head.

‘What you need, my lad, is what you haven’t got.’

‘I know that, it’s what I’ve always needed.’

‘You need to drink plenty of milk, and you mustn’t smoke.’

‘But it’s Lent now, and anyway we don’t have a cow.’

One night that spring he could not get to sleep the whole night, he felt rotten and he was longing for a drink. There was nothing in the house for him to get his hands on and sell. He put on his fur hat and went out. He walked down the street until he came to where the clergy lived. Outside the deacon’s house there was a harrow standing propped up against the wattle fence. Prokofy went over, slung the harrow up on to his back and walked off with it to Petrovna at the inn. ‘Maybe she’ll give me just a little bottle of vodka for it.’ He had not gone far before the deacon came out on to the porch of his house. It was now fully light, and he could see Prokofy making off with his harrow.

‘Hey, what are you up to?’

The deacon’s servants came out, seized Prokofy and threw him in the lock-up. The Justice of the Peace sentenced him to eleven months in prison.