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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The
Confession: A Novel
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: The Confession: A Novel

Author: Maksim Gorky

Translator: Rose Strunsky

Release date: October 27, 2017 [eBook #55828]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (online soon

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

CONFESSION: A NOVEL ***
THE CONFESSION
A NOVEL

BY
 MAXIM GORKY
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY

ROSE STRUNSKY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

1916

INTRODUCTION

To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so

fashionable for young Russia to mourn.
"Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art,"
they say and shake their heads, "We can get all the doctrines we
want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the
theorists of the Social Revolutionaries—why go to Gorky? Or if it is a
philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is
greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write
again a Foma Gordyeeff, or an Orloff and His Wife, or a Konovaloff!"
I re-read Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff and so on,
and read also Mother, The Spy, In Prison, and the little fables with a
purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky
writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the
road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years
of his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and
passed through deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when
Gorky first published his immortal story of Makar Chudra, to her
present moment of titanic struggle in the World War—the beginning
of the year 1916.
Russia's changes were Gorky's changes. He first flung his type of
hero, the people from the lowest of the low—water-rats, tramps,
petty thieves—into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia.
It was a Russia that had almost decided that there were no more
people, that they were without courage, that the misery and
degradation in which they lived was there because of their own
inefficiency, their lack of idealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea
and to strike and fight for it.
The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened
from its torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost
learned to scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding
ideas, with deep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that
had settled back in bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the
Revolutionary movement of the eighties.
Like an eddying pool, the generations in Russia have risen to the
surface, made their protest against the anachronism of autocracy
and despotism, and then subsided back again into the still and inert
waters of the nation. But each rising generation has made a wider
and wider eddy, coming ever from a greater depth. Thus in 1825 it
was merely a small group of military officers, who having learned
from the Napoleonic campaigns that there were such things as
constitutional law and order, that liberty and freedom were truths to
fight for, broke out in revolt in Petrograd in December of that year
only to be immediately crushed. Five of the leaders were hanged,
and the rest, intellectuals and writers among them, were sent to
Siberia.
The loss of the élite of Russia, despite the names of Pushkin and
Lermontoff which graced that period, made great inroads in the
intellectual life of the country. But in the fifties and sixties the
seeming quiet was broken into by a new restlessness. This time the
student youth, the young sons and daughters of the landlords and
the nobles, became inspired by a passion for learning, for new
conceptions of education, for new liberties of the people, for the
abolition of serfdom and for a Pan-Slavism that would be
democratic. It was then that the women left their homes to seek
higher education and to enter new fields of work. They had to break
with family tyranny which was fostered by tradition and the State,
their men comrades standing valiantly by, helping them to make
escapes, going through the forms of mock marriage, and conducting
them safely to that Mecca of learning for the Russian youth—the
medical school of Geneva. It was in this way that Sonya Kovalevsky,
who later became the famous mathematician in the University of
Stockholm, made her escape into the world, and the untold other
heroines of Russia who were soon to return educated, free, and fired
with a zeal to spread their new-found freedom to the people.
The abolition of serfdom in '61 brought with it great discontent, for
the peasants had been led to believe that they would be liberated
together with the land, since Russian serfdom, unlike the Western,
was based on the theory that the peasant was attached to the land
and that the landlord's hold on it came through his ownership of the
serf. Consequently it was argued, when the Russian serf was
liberated and the ancient communal village form maintained, that all
the land the serfs had owned would go to them. Of course, that was
very far from what really happened. It is true that the serfs were
liberated and the ancient communal form kept, but the land allotted
to the village was poor and meager, the plots were scattered, and
the tax on them for repayment to the landlords was so great that it
took over fifty years to pay.
The peasants foresaw exactly the future that awaited them; the
dearth in land, none too much to begin with, and the consequential
lessening at each redistribution as the village increased in "souls,"
the needed "renting" from the landlord at exorbitant rates, the
inability to pay and the resultant "paying in his own labor," and the
eventual reestablishment of a virtual serfdom. Insurrections took
place all over the country, the peasants believing firmly that the
Government had treated them more kindly but that the landlords
were deceiving them. However, the Government came only too
gladly to the aid of the landlords, having got used to blood-baths in
its drastic quenching of the Polish insurrection of '63.
The general disappointment among the youth in the Government's
attitude towards both Polish liberty and peasant rights led to a
stronger and more revolutionary stand on their part. Unlike the
reaction that set in during the long and tyrannical reign of Nicholas
I, after the outburst of the Decembrists, or the reaction that was to
follow those thirty years of effort when the notes of Gorky were to
sound like a clarion call to a renewed faith, the decade of the
seventies rose to one of extreme and intense idealism. The
generation which had gone out of Russia to gain for itself new
liberties had now returned and was spread throughout the length
and breadth of the vast land, making converts by the thousands
where formerly there were but few. The "fathers" and "sons" though
not understanding each other very fully, were nevertheless following
a pretty equal tendency. Where the former had sought for new
general liberties in politics and social life through education, the
latter, feeling that a great deal had already been won, had decided
upon propaganda of action. The movement changed from a freeing
of one's self to a freeing of the people. "To the people" became the
watchword of the hour. The youth of the better classes went to live
among the peasants, taught them, organized them into secret
revolutionary groups for "land and liberty," made several abortive
attempts at peasant revolution, and finally, the Government growing
more and more reactionary, ended in the wielding of a personal
"terror" against the Government representatives, which culminated
in the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, in 1882.
The reprisals that set in, the wholesale exiling of the youth to
Siberia, the internment for life in the fortresses of Peter and Paul and
in Schlüsselberg for participation in the Party of the Will of the
People, and the general opinion that however reactionary Alexander
II was he was still much more ready for reforms than his successor
Alexander III, gave rise to a fundamental disillusionment. The
sacrifices of the youth had been too much. They had led themselves
to be hanged and tortured only to bring in an era of still greater
darkness. The people were not ready for reforms, they did not wish
them. They would not have understood what to do with liberties
could they have had them. There was nothing to do but sit back on
one's estate, exploit the peasants as did the grandfathers and say,
"We are powerless and the peasants unworthy."
This period was the more painful because it came fast upon one
which was full of idealism and hope. The men who lived on in
inertia, drinking tea and discussing vacuously the futility of life, had
known a time when they had hoped and thought and planned
otherwise. They had almost cynically to repudiate their former
selves.
The writer who brought out most acutely the great anguish of this
period was Anton Chekhov. He is now being recognized as the
greatest artist of his time, who followed naturally the trend of the
years he lived in. His humor, at first gentle and sorrowful, became
later coarse and gross as the darkness around him deepened. His
characters are inert, some eaten up by unfulfilled desires, others
incapable even of recalling the faint echo of a former hope. A
"Chekhov Sorrow" became a well-known definite phrase in Russian
life.
It was before this Russia that Gorky made his appearance. Himself
one of the people, he showed them again the face of the people. It
had beauty and courage, it had qualities of strength long since
forgotten. The effect was electrical. Gorky was hailed as one upon
whom the cloak of Tolstoi was to fall, for better than Tolstoi, he did
not appear as a leader of the people, but as one who disclosed the
people en masse.
Gorky's appearance in the cultured and literary world of Russia
suffering from the "Chekhov Sorrow" has an analogy in my mind to
the sudden appearance of Peter Karpovitch in the fortress of
Schlüsselberg. There sat the men and women for almost twenty
years, cut off from all outside communication, wondering when and
how their work would be carried on. One by one they had died off
and only a handful remained to question if the youth would ever
awake to strong purposes again. Then suddenly, in the year 1902,
the big gates opened, and the student Peter Karpovitch entered.
Without connection with any revolutionary group, by an instinctive
feeling of the pulse of the time, he made his strike against the
increasing reaction, shooting the Minister of Education, Bogolyepov,
in February, 1901, for the wholesale exiling of the students into the
military on the lines employed by Nicholas I.
This advance guard of the Russian Revolution was tall and
handsome, with the traditional heroic, figure of the Little Russian. He
came to the men of the past in all his strength and beauty as a
symbol of the new era. Upon his footsteps followed fast Bolmashev,
the executor of Sipiagin, who this time committed his act under the
direction of an organized group, the Social Revolutionaries. In two
years Russia was aflame. The Governor General of Finland,
Bobrikoff, was shot in June, 1904. This was followed in a few weeks
by the assassination of Von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, by
general labor strikes, by the demonstration in Petrograd in front of
the Winter Palace which led to the terrible massacre of Bloody
Sunday on January 22, 1905, by the mutinies in the Black Sea fleet
and in Kronstadt, and by the nation-wide general strike in every
branch of industry and life in October, 1905. Finally a Constitution
and the Duma were granted to the people. The herald of the new
order to the old was the tall handsome youth whose strange
footsteps were heard suddenly and unexpectedly one March morning
treading the hitherto silent corridors of the fortress.
Thus, as Karpovitch to the prisoners in Schlüsselberg, came Gorky to
Russia at large.
He was marvelously fitted to dispel the disappointment that was felt
about the people. Himself one of the people, he had merely to
disclose himself to prove again their courage and nobility. The life of
Gorky has been particularly tragic and particularly Russian. He was
born in a dyer's shop in Nizhni-Novgorad in 1869. His real name is
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and it is significant that when he came
to write he signed himself "Maxim Gorky"—"Maxim, the Bitter." His
father died when he was four and he was totally orphaned at seven.
His childhood was spent in the care of his maternal grandfather, who
was extremely religious and a miser. The foundation of the bitterness
he was to feel was thus laid early, for the life of the lonely child with
the harsh, unsympathetic old man, can be well imagined, though the
peculiarly Russian setting can be had only by reading his recent
book, My Childhood. At the death of his mother he was apprenticed
to a shoemaker, and at eleven he decided that he had had enough
of home ties and left Nizhni-Novgorad for good. He started tramping
and after various vicissitudes found himself a helper to a cook on
one of the Volga boats. This man had been at one time a
noncommissioned officer and he carried his past culture with him in
the form of a trunk full of books. It was a queer assortment, from
Gogol to school manuals and popular novels, and Gorky dipped
liberally into it. The result was that a craving for real learning arose
in him, which would have come no doubt to the imaginative youth at
this age even without the aid of that haphazard library. He left the
Volga steamer and tramped to the University of Kazan, thinking that
learning would be free to any one who wished it. He was bitterly
disappointed, for the University demanded fees, and so instead of
registering as a student he was forced to take a job as a bakery
helper. This work he did for two years and it seems to have made a
deep impression upon him, for there is scarcely a story of his where
the hero does not spend two years baking bread in some filthy cellar
among flour dust and general filth.
He left the bakeshop to wander with those tramps and "ex-men"
whose poet he was later to be. The life held suffering which ate
deep into the vitals of his being—hunger, privations, nights with the
police for vagabondage; and finally so great became this conflict
between the beauty and goodness for which his nature craved and
the constant evil around him, that in 1889 at the age of twenty-one
he sent a bullet through his chest. Like many of the Russian youth,
whose passionate natures make impossible the compromise between
their inherent idealism and the sordidness and brutality of actual
existence, he had decided to be done with the mockery. Fortunately
the bullet did not kill and he took up his life of vagabondage again.
In 1892 he is once more in Nizhni-Novgorad, actually holding the
respectable post of a lawyer's clerk. The lawyer, a man called Lanin,
seems to have taken a great interest in the intelligent young man
who discussed "cursed" questions and had a "live and energetic
soul." He threw opportunities for study in his way, but Gorky's free
and untamed youth, coupled with the taste of the "mother earth" he
grew to love so, made it impossible for him to lead the well-ordered
life of a professional clerk, and in a city, at that. He left Lanin, for he
did not "feel at home with these intelligent people," he said, and
tramped to the Caucasus, making a detour on the way from the
Volga, through the Don district, into Bessarabia and Southern
Crimea.
Coming to the Caucasus he found work in a railroad yard in Tiflis.
His mind had already begun to digest the types of those tramps,
Tartars and gipsies he met in his wanderings, for as early as 1890
his first story Makar Chudra made its appearance in the little paper
Kafhas in Tiflis. It is a story of two thieves, written with great
simplicity and naturalness. There is no doubt that Gorky had met
them and had been true to the incidents related. It showed them
strong, sensitive as women, with a subtle capacity of understanding
each other's emotions. In a typically Russian scene, one thief
unburdens his heart to the other, telling him how he had wanted to
kill him and how he had nearly done so. The other listens,
sympathetic, understanding fully how that state of mind came to
him, and they part in great tenderness! These are no weaklings,
they are personalities held by iron chains in a Greek fatalism, and
the fatality is life—Russian life. Gorky had not yet come to the point
where he could lay his hand on the social enemy and say "here it is."
He saw only a great misery and natures torn in anguish, but not
ruined as the generation before had supposed. Though this story
itself, appearing, as it did, in a provincial paper, made no immediate
name for him, his later stories, in which both canvas and treatment
are exactly the same, brought him recognition forthwith.
Gorky left Tiflis and wandered back to the Volga and there, by happy
chance, met the Little Russian writer, Korolenko, the author of
Makar's Dream and The Blind Musician. As editor of The
Contemporary, Korolenko introduced him to "great" literature, as he
put it, and in a flash he was made known to all of Russia. He
continued writing in the same vein he introduced in Makar Chudra,
using the strong, outcast, rebel types in Emilian Pibgai and Chalkash,
which were published in 1895 under Korolenko's editorship, and in
Konovaloff, Malva, Foma Gordyeeff his first long novel, and in the
innumerable other works which preceded the supposed "change" in
Gorky's manner. He showed his heroes to Russia as one shows a
scene by pulling back a curtain: "this is what exists; here are men
who do not conform to your laws, not because you have made
outcasts of them, but because they despise you and all your smug
respectability."
But he did not say so in so many words, he merely showed this
canvas. The change in Gorky is the change in Russia, which grew
from a silent and brooding mood to one of talk and action. As the
Russian people became more self-conscious so did he, changing
from a man torn hither and thither by circumstances to one who was
able to analyze life and know cause and effect. His very sudden
success so early in his life made it impossible for him to keep on
writing and re-writing the same themes in the same manner as he
had begun. He was too great and dynamic a genius for that. To him
as to most Russians the art itself is not the thing, but the self-
expression and the truth. Thus when Gorky swung out from the life
of tramps and wanderers into the intellectual life of Russia, he found
a nation organized into various groups, analyzing the cause of
Russian social and political misery, finding an economic and
materialistic reason for it, and setting about to remedy it. Gorky
joined one of these groups, the Social Democratic Party, was one of
the signers of the petition to the Czar which demanded with an
amusing Russian naïveté that the Czar grant not only economic
justice to the strikers in the steel works of Petrograd, but also a
constitutional assembly, universal suffrage, a direct and secret ballot,
and free speech, free press and freedom of religion! For these
demands and the subsequent demonstration in front of the Winter
Palace which resulted in the notorious massacre of Bloody Sunday,
Gorky was imprisoned in the fortress of Peter and Paul. His
prominence and the fact that he was subject to tuberculosis caused
a universal demand for his release. He was freed after a month and
was allowed to stay in Finland and even in Petrograd for a while
during the so-called days of freedom.
By this time Gorky had thrown himself entirely into the cause of the
Majority Faction of the Social Democratic Party, an organization not
strictly Marxian, in the sense that they did not wait for an economic
development to bring about the cooperative commonwealth but
believed that by mass action and general strike Russia could bring
about a revolution on socialistic lines without the necessity of
intermediary steps. In 1905 he left Russia and came to America,
hoping to collect money for the Revolutionary cause, but his work
failed entirely because of the fact that the charming and brilliant lady
who came with him to America and registered as his wife was not
legally so. The men of prominence, Mark Twain among them, who
formed committees to help raise the funds, resigned, and Gorky's
plans failed entirely. Not only was no money for the "cause" raised,
but he was received nowhere, the very hotel he stayed in asking him
to leave at midnight. It was supposed that agents of the Russian
Government, fearing Gorky's too great success in America, sprung
the trap and thus discredited him. At any rate, Gorky naturally left
the shores of America in great disgust, and the dark days of Russian
reaction having already set in, went to live in practical exile on the
island of Capri, in Italy. Leonid Andreyeff, the Russian writer, and
many revolutionary refugees generally stayed with him. It was from
Capri that the longer novels, The Spy and this work, The Confession,
were written. He was by this time living entirely in the cultured
world, thinking earnestly and scientifically to the best of his ability
about the political and social conditions around him.
The great light, the great inspiring motive power of the Russian has
ever been the people. The only ray of happiness in the works of
Gorky is the joy that comes to his characters when they begin to
work for the people. Life is depressing, life is a quagmire, a bog
wherein great and noble souls are forced to wallow, when suddenly
light appears. It is in the organization for the creation of a better life.
One feels just for one little instant the happiness that life can bring
when this vision of the new order appears. In the novel called Three
of Them, the pages lighten with relief when the little Social
Democratic agitator appears, giving hope and courage, but she is
swept out of the life of the unhappy men that fill the pages of that
book as suddenly as she appeared and there is nothing for the hero
to do but throw himself under a passing train and die for
disappointment and impotence.
This was in the beginning when he himself first saw the meaning of
the "Cause," before it had become fully part of his life. Later his
works changed their scene, following the exact manner in which the
Russian people themselves changed their mental attitude. The
background of the same Russian people, the same giants with the
same courage and the same ability, was no longer a quagmire, but a
battlefield. They were struggling to win their rights. Interwoven in
the pages of his later work rises the new Russia of the last decade,
the self-conscious, fighting Russia. In The Spy, which was written in
1908, we see the Russian not yet come into his own, still living in
ignorance and disorder, but his activity is different. He is in a fight.
The same change is in Mother and in the work In Prison. A new
pæan is sung, it is the song of the people marching en masse.
Perhaps Walt Whitman came the nearest to this same feeling of
democracy, but unlike Whitman it is not of the people that Gorky
sings, but it is the people themselves that are the song-makers.
They are the "creators." "In them dwells God."
The Russian who finds Gorky's later works too doctrinaire, too
purposeful, never quarrels with him because he finds his theme at
fault or the conclusions wrong, but because he thinks his art has
failed. They say they have revised their opinion that Gorky would
mean to them what Tolstoi has meant, for they still consider the
latter to be more universal and truer philosopher and artist. They
find it inartistic for Gorky to talk to them of what they already know.
They want to hear again about the strange and beautiful types they
did not know of before and to read again his beautiful lines with
their exquisite descriptions of nature, which they consider
unsurpassed by the greatest. However, to me Gorky's aestheticism is
too one-sided. It is the aestheticism of the primitive whom only the
grandiose impresses. The soft, subtle shadings leave him untouched.
There is no doubt that he loves passionately his "mother earth" with
the vast, undulating steppes, the tall mountains of the Caucasus, the
great dome of the sky, and the living sweep of the sea. His
descriptions of these scenes glow as does a Western writer over the
charms of his beloved, but we miss the charms of the beloved.
In reading Russian literature, it must always be remembered that
one is reading of a people whose civilization is intrinsically different
from that of the West. It is the difference between action and
passivity. Professor Milvoukoff would have us believe that it is the
autocratic form of government which has made the Russian live so
long in inactivity, that both his reasoning powers and imaginative
faculties have developed far in excess of the rest of Europe's. It is
true that the Russian is never afraid to go to the end of a thought,
to fight for freedom far in excess of that already attained in the
Western world, and to ask continually the fundamental questions of
"Why," and "Wherefore," and "Where am I going," and "Where does
this lead me to?" The knife of Russian literature discloses as surely a
cross-section of Russian civilization as does that of Guy de
Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola and other realists of the French school
disclose the French. And yet this cross-section of Russian civilization
is difficult to grasp without a more intimate knowledge of both the
history and the people. It is difficult for me now to remember my
conceptions of Russian life as I got them from the Russian writers
before my visit to Russia ten years ago. America, California, all the
activities of our Western life made the characters and problems in
Turgeneff, Dostoyeffsky and Gogol seem vague and unreal, made
them move about in a nebulous society where one asked
embarrassing personal questions and were always answered with a
truth that had rudeness in it.
I had a coward's entry into Russia. There were rumors of riots and
disorders, for it was in the year of general strikes and barricades,
and as the train moved farther into the interior, the guards who
shoveled the snow off the track seemed to me soldiers under arms,
standing there to protect us from some infuriated mob. My heart
beat with fear at that great and uncouth stranger to me, the Russian
people. But as my stay in Russia was prolonged, my kinship with the
people grew. The common man appeared to me as a gentle
protector and friend. The drivers of the droshkies, the peasants, the
workingmen, the conductors on the trains, all became kindly elder
brothers, who set one on one's right path or made a friendly remark
as one passed along. Every one talked to every one, and although
the great interest of the time was the Duma and the political
situation, there lurked always a personal understanding and a
personal relation behind each discussion. All classes had this
attitude, and though the educated had more facts at their resources,
for they knew history and the outside world, they had the same
outlook and the same manner as the others. I became so much at
one with the people around me, that when I left Russia eighteen
months later, I felt this time fearful at going away, as if now truly I
were going from home into a strange land. As the train came into
the Western world, as I found myself in Poland and out again into
Austria, I was again alone, a solitary and detached individual who
was to stand on guard against the ill-turn which would be given me
if I were not watchful. Outside of Russia, the people, "the God-
creators," as Gorky calls them, fell apart into millions of various
atoms, each struggling for his own life. It was in Russia that I left
them still unspoiled, unadventitious, united in a great simplicity of
faith and love. It is therefore that the last chapter of this book is
distinct and real to me, and I can almost see with my own eyes that
vast, surging procession of the people, showing their loving strength
and giving of their strength to the weak.
To-day, when all ideals and hopes have gone smash in the hurly-
burly of this World War, Gorky has taken his side with his country
and is again living in Russia. In the interim, before he can pick up
the gauntlet to fight on for a new and better order, he has gone
back to his former theme, writing as before of the tramps and "ex-
men" and gipsies he knew in his youth, and Russia is pleased with
him once more.
ROSE STRUNSKY.
New York, February, 1916.

THE CONFESSION

CHAPTER I

Let me tell you my life; it won't take much of your time—you ought
to know it.
I am a weed, a foundling, an illegitimate being. It isn't known to
whom I was born, but I was abandoned on the estate of Mr. Loseff
in the village of Sokal, in the district of Krasnoglinsk. My mother left
me—or perhaps it was some one else—in the landlord's park, on the
steps of the little shrine under which the old landlady Loseff lay
buried and where I was found by Danil Vialoff, the gardener. He was
walking in the park early in the morning, when he saw a child
wrapped in rags lie moving on the steps, of the shrine. A smoke-
colored cat was walking stealthfully around it.
I lived with Danil until I was four years old, but as he himself had a
large family, I fed myself wherever I happened to be, and when I
found nothing I whined and whined, then fell asleep hungry.
When I was four I was taken by the sexton Larion, a very strange
and lonely man; he took me because of his loneliness. He was short
of stature, round like a toy balloon and had a round face. His hair
was red, his voice thin like a woman's, and his heart was also like a
woman's, gentle to everybody. He liked to drink wine and drank
much of it; when sober he was silent, his eyes always half-closed,
and he had an air of being guilty before all, but when drunk, he sang
psalms and hymns in a loud voice, held his head high and smiled at
every one.
He remained apart from people, living in poverty, for he had given
away his share to the priest, while he himself fished both summer
and winter. And for fun he caught singing birds, teaching me to do
the same. He loved birds and they were not afraid of him; it is
touching to recall how even the most timid of little birds would run
over his red head and get mixed up in his fiery hair. Or the bird
would settle on his shoulder and look into his mouth, bending its
wise little head to the side. Then again Larion would lie on a bench
and sprinkle hempseed in his head and beard, and canaries,
goldfinches, tomtits and bullfinches would collect around him,
hunting through his hair, creeping over his cheeks, picking his ears,
settling on his nose while he lay there roaring with laughter,
squinting his eyes and conversing tenderly with them. I envied him
for this—of me, the birds were afraid.
Larion was a man of tender soul and all animals recognized it; I can't
say the same for men, though I don't mean to blame them for I
know man isn't fed by caresses.
It used to be rather difficult for him in winter; he had no wood and
he had nothing to buy it with, having drunk up the money. His little
hut was as cold as a cellar, except that the birds chirped and sang,
and the two of us would lie on the cold stove, wrapped in everything
possible, listening to the singing of the birds. Larion would whistle to
them—he could whistle well—looking like a grossbeak, with his large
nose, his hooked bill and his red head. Often he would say to me:
"Well, listen, Motka" (I was baptized Matvei). "Listen!"
He would lie on his back, his hands under his head, squinting his
eyes and singing something from the funeral Liturgy in his thin
voice. The birds would then become quiet, stopping to listen, then
they themselves would begin to sing one after the other. Larion
would try to sing louder than they and they would exert themselves,
especially the canaries and goldfinches, or the thrushes and
starlings. He would often sing himself up to such a point that the
tears from his eyes would trickle from out his lids, wetting his cheeks
and washing his face gray.
This singing sometimes frightened me, and once I said to him in a
whisper:
"Uncle, why do you always sing about death?" He stopped, looked at
me and said, smiling,
"Don't get frightened, silly. It doesn't matter if it is about death; it is
pretty. Of the whole church service the funeral mass is the most
beautiful. It offers tenderness to man and pity for him. Among us,
no one has pity except for the dead." These words I remember very
well, as I do all his words, but of course at that time I could not
understand them. The things of childhood are only understood on
the eve of old age, for these are the wisest years of man.
I remember also that I asked him once, "Why does God help man so
little?"
"It's none of His business," he explained to me. "Help yourself, that's
why reason was given to you. God is here so that it won't be so
terrible to die, but just how to live, that is your affair."
I soon forgot these words of his, and recalled them too late, and
that is why I have suffered much vain sorrow.
He was a remarkable man! When angling most people never shout
and never speak so as not to frighten the fish, but Larion sang
unceasingly, or recounted the lives of the saints to me, or spoke to
me about God, and yet the fish always flocked to him. Birds must
also be caught with care, but he whistled all the time, teased them
and talked to them and it never mattered—the birds walked into his
traps and nets. The same thing as to bees; when setting a hive or
doing anything else, which old bee-keepers do with prayers, and
even then don't always succeed, the sexton, when called for the job,
would strike the bees, crush them, swear profanely, and yet
everything went in the best way possible. He didn't like bees—they
blinded a daughter of his once. She found herself in a bee-hive—she
was only three at the time—and a bee stung her eye. This eye grew
diseased, and then blind, and soon the other eye followed. Later the
little girl died from headache, and her mother became insane.
Yes, he never did anything the way other people did, and he was as
tender to me as if he were my own mother. They did not treat me
with much mercy in the village. Life was hard, and I was a stranger,
and a superfluous one.... Suddenly and illegally to be eating the
morsel that belonged to some one else!
Larion taught me the church service, and I became his helper and
sang with him in the choir, lit the censer, and did all that was
needed. I helped the watchman Vlassi keep order in the church and
I liked doing all this, especially in winter. The church was of brick,
they heated it well, and it was warm inside it.
I liked vespers better than morning mass. In the evening the people
were purified by work and were freed of their worries, and they
stood quietly and majestically, and their souls shone like wax candles
with little flames. It was plain then, that though people had different
faces their misery was the same.
Larion liked the church service; he would close his eyes, throw back
his red head, stick out his Adam's apple and burst forth into song,
losing himself so that he would even start off on some uncalled for
hymn and the priest would make signs to him from the altar: "Where
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