I came to the Holy Mountains at twelve o’clock.
He wrote the family about his two days at this holiday gathering, and this account from his travels is one of the rare instances where he gives as vivid a description in his correspondence as in his fiction:
It is a remarkably beautiful and unique place. The monastery stands on the bank of the river Donets at the foot of a huge white rock covered with gardens, oaks, and ancient pines crowded together and overhanging, one above another. It seems as if the trees had not enough room on the rock, and as if some force were driving them upward…. The pines literally hang in the air and look as though they might fall any minute. Cuckoos and nightingales sing night and day.
The monks, very pleasant people, gave me a very unpleasant room with a pancake-like mattress. I spent two nights at the monastery and gathered a mass of impressions. While I was there some fifteen thousand pilgrims assembled because of St. Nicolas’ Day; eight-ninths of them were old women. I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago. About the monks, my acquaintance with them and how I gave medical advice to the monks and the old women, I will write to [New Times] and tell you when we meet. The services are endless: at midnight they ring for matins, at five for early mass, at nine for late mass, at three for the song of praise, at five for vespers, at six for the special prayers. Before every service one hears in the corridors the weeping sound of a bell, and a monk runs along crying in the voice of a creditor who implores his debtor to pay him at least five kopecks for a ruble:
“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us! Please come to matins!”
It is awkward to stay in one’s room, and so one gets up and goes out. I have chosen a spot on the bank of the Donets, where I sit during all the services. I have bought an ikon for Auntie [his mother’s sister]. The food is provided gratis by the monastery for all the fifteen thousand: cabbage soup with dried fresh-water fish and porridge. Both are good, and so is the rye bread. The church bells are wonderful. The choir is not up to much. I took part in a religious procession on boats.5
In July he would write up this scene again in “Uprooted: An Incident from My Travels” (“Perekati-Pole”). As the subtitle indicates, the story is told in the first person and begins “on my way back from evening service.”6
Comparing Chekhov’s letter to Chekhov’s fictional representation, I retreat from trying to figure out which is better: his voice in the letter is looser, funnier; the narrator of “Uprooted” is more grounded and focused. Through these two voices, Chekhov gives us a fascinating picture of this cultural event:
More than ten thousand people flocked to the Holy Mountains for the festivals of St. John the Divine and St. Nikolay the wonder-worker. Not only the hostel buildings, but even the bakehouse, the tailoring room, the carpenter’s shop, the carriage house, were filled to overflowing…. Those who had arrived toward night clustered like flies in autumn, by the walls, around the wells in the yard, or in the narrow passages of the hostel, waiting to be shown a resting-place for the night. The lay brothers, young and old, were in an incessant movement, with no rest or hope of being relieved. By day or late at night they produced the same impression of men hastening somewhere and agitated by something, yet, in spite of their extreme exhaustion, their faces remained full of courage and kindly welcome, their voices friendly, their movements rapid. […] Watching them during the course of twenty-four hours, I found it hard to imagine when these black moving figures sat down and when they slept.
The biggest difference, of course, is that in the letter to his family Chekhov had to be out in front, speaking as himself, maintaining his family’s impression of him as their joking guide. Here, his narrator wants us to focus not on himself but on appreciating the overlooked, overwhelmed but kindly priests.
In dreams and in fiction, Chekhov went straight at what caught his attention. “Unlocking the little padlock on my door,” writes the narrator of “Uprooted,” “I was always, whether I wanted to or not, obliged to look at the picture that hung on the doorpost on a level with my face. This picture with the title, ‘A Meditation on Death,’ depicted a monk on his knees, gazing at a coffin and at a skeleton laying in it. Behind the man’s back stood another skeleton, somewhat more solid and carrying a scythe.”
The story then becomes about the Jewish convert who a priest has asked the narrator to share his room with. The hunting out of “Jewish” characteristics was, as Donald Rayfield has noted, a reflex Chekhov had developed growing up in Taganrog.7
He was a young man of two-and-twenty, with a round and pleasing face, dark childlike eyes, dressed like a townsman in gray cheap clothes, and as one could judge from his complexion and narrow shoulders, not used to manual labor. He was of a very indefinite type; one could take him neither for a student nor for a man in trade, still less for a workman. But looking at his attractive face and childlike friendly eyes, I was unwilling to believe he was one of those vagabond impostors with whom every conventual establishment where they give food and lodging is flooded, and who give themselves out as divinity students, expelled for standing up for justice, or for church singers who have lost their voice…. There was something characteristic, typical, very familiar in his face, but what exactly, I could not remember nor make out.[…]
In his language, too, there was something typical that had a very great deal in common with what was characteristic in his face, but what it was exactly I still could not decide. […]
“You know I am a convert.”
“You mean?”
“I am a Jew baptized…. Only lately I have embraced orthodoxy.”
Now I understood what I had before been utterly unable to understand from his face: his thick lips, and his way of twitching up the right corner of his mouth and his right eyebrow, when he was talking, and that peculiar oily brilliance of his eyes which is only found in Jews. I understood, too, his phraseology…. From further conversation I learned that his name was Alexander Ivanich, and had in the past been Isaac, that he was a native of the Mogilev province, and that he had come to the Holy Mountains from Novocherkassk, where he had adopted the orthodox faith.
In spite of his prejudices, the narrator is fascinated by the convert’s story:
“From early childhood I cherished a love for learning,” he began in a tone which suggested he was not speaking of himself, but of some great man of the past. “My parents were poor Hebrews; they exist by buying and selling in a small way; they live like beggars, you know, in filth. In fact, all the people there are poor and superstitious; they don’t like education, because education, very naturally, turns a man away from religion…. They are fearful fanatics…. Nothing would induce my parents to let me be educated, and they wanted me to take to trade, too, and to know nothing but the Talmud…. But you will agree, it is not everyone who can spend his whole life struggling for a crust of bread, wallowing in filth, and mumbling the Talmud. At times officers and country gentlemen would put up at papa’s inn, and they used to talk a great deal of things which in those days I had never dreamed of; and, of course, it was alluring and moved me to envy. I used to cry and entreat them to send me to school, but they taught me to read Hebrew and nothing more. Once I found a Russian newspaper, and took it home with me to make a kite of it. I was beaten for it, though I couldn’t read Russian. Of course, fanaticism is inevitable, for every people instinctively strives to preserve its nationality, but I did not know that then and was very indignant….”