The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

They sang it thrice, and the great doors threw themselves open before us. We entered the resurrected temple, and before our eyes, in the glow of the chandeliers, great and small votive lights, in the sparkling of silver, of the gold and precious stones on the icons, in the bright paper flowers on the Easter cakes—blazed up the Lord’s Easter. The priest, wrapped in incense smoke, his face radiant, exclaimed joyfully and volubly: “Christ is risen!” and the people answered him with the tremor of a heavy snow avalanche: “Indeed, he is risen.”

Grishka appeared next to me. I took both his hands and said, “Tomorrow I will give you a red egg. The best there is. Christ is risen.” Fed’ka was standing nearby. I promised him a red egg as well. Then I saw Davyd, the yardman. I went up to him and said, “I’ll never call you ‘street sweeping martyr’ again. Christ is risen.”

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All this time the words of the Easter canticle flew through the church like lightning:

For meet is it that the heavens should rejoice, and that the earth should be glad, and that the whole world, both visible and invisible, should keep the Feast. For Christ is risen, the everlasting joy.

My heart contracted with joy; near the amvon I saw a girl with blond braids whom I had noticed at the Good Friday service. I went up to her in a dreamlike state, my face burning, and lowering my eyes said: “Christ is risen.”

She was taken aback, dropped her candle, then quiet as a flame leaned to me and we kissed three times . . . and then, totally embarrassed, we stood a long time with our heads lowered.

And all that time from the amvon thundered the paschal sermon of St. John Chrysostom:

“If any man be devout and loveth God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast . . . Christ is risen, and life reigneth!”

NOTES

In Orthodox churches the apse (referred to as the altar) is located on an elevated level (amvon) which extends beyond the icon screen (ikonostas, “ikonostasis” in Greek) out into the main space of the church. It is from here that the priest reads the Gospels and delivers the sermon. The word is derived from the Greek “ambon,” (raised edge).

Tradition had it that there were 1600 churches in Moscow; it was customary to refer to them in units of forty.

Scripture was written not in Russian but in Old Church Slavonic; the relationship of OCS to contemporary Russian is somewhat analogous to the relationship of Chaucer’s language to contemporary English.

The bread of eternal life. It is broken up and distributed on Saturday at the end of Easter (“Bright”) Week.

Chapter Nine

Mark Vishniak, In Two Worlds

Mark Vishniak, who was trained in government law, was one of numerous highly educated Russians who joined the opposition to the monarchy. The events of 1905 pushed him into the camp of the Social Revolutionaries, an affiliation he was to maintain. However, his opposition to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution of 1917 ultimately forced him into exile. As part of the Russian diaspora in Paris, where he arrived in 1919, Vishniak became a publicist and writer, helping to found and edit one of the more prominent journals there, the Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Notes). He authored a number of books, including a study of Lenin. Taken from Mark Vishniak, Dan’ proshlomu [Tribute to the Past]. New York: Izd. Imeni Chekhova, 1954.

I cannot determine precisely what made the problem of personal guilt and responsibility primary in my consciousness. I was interested in this question for a long while. All the philosophers, legal philosophers, and criminologists with whom I became acquainted touched on this issue. The social side and the sociological school in criminal law and external conditions, wherein responsibility was not an issue, interested me less. But imputation and responsibility, guilt and misfortune were internally linked with morality and law as well as a human’s biology and psychopathology. My attention was drawn to what, in pre-Freudian times, was referred to as moral insanity, i.e., the inability to distinguish right from wrong and resist amoral action. This was irrespective of whether one was conscious or not of the amorality of the deeds. A practical conclusion derives from this: philosophical speculation and jurisprudence were not enough to solve this basic problem. It was also necessary to know the nature of man, be it healthy or ill. But in order to “master” psychopathol-ogy, it was essential to take a course in medicine.

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