‘Why have you brought only one sort of jam? Go and get another,’ he said to the lay brother. ‘I really am deeply, deeply concerned about this matter,’ he continued, addressing Misail.
Misail was glad of this opportunity to show his mettle. However, being a man of modest means he requested his travel expenses in advance, and since he feared that there might be some resistance from the uncouth peasantry, he requested that the governor of the province should be asked to send an instruction to the local police to give him every assistance, should the need arise.
The bishop set up all the arrangements, and Misail, having with the help of the lay brother and the cook assembled the hamper and provisions so necessary for a journey to the back of beyond, set off for his appointed destination. As he started out on this official mission Misail was agreeably aware of the importance of the job he was engaged in, and also of the easing of any doubts he might have had concerning his own faith: he was, on the contrary, fully confident of its authenticity.
His thoughts were centred not on the essence of his faith – this he took to be axiomatic – but on the refutation of these objections which were being made to its outward forms.
XX
The village priest and his wife received Father Misail with great respect, and the day after his arrival they called all the people together in the church. Misail, wearing a brand-new silk cassock and a pectoral cross, his hair well combed, advanced to the ambo;8 beside him stood the priest, a little further away the deacons and the choristers, and at the side-doors a few policemen had been stationed. The sectarians had also made their appearance, dressed in dirty, rough sheepskin coats.
After the set prayers were over Father Misail delivered a sermon in which he exhorted those who had fallen away to return to the bosom of Holy Mother Church, threatening them with the pains of hell and promising full absolution to all who repented.
The sectarians did not say anything, but when questioned they did reply.
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.
She was a gifted student, well able to memorize the contents of lectures and to pass examinations without much effort, and in addition she devoured enormous quantities of the most recently published books. She was sure that her vocation lay not in bearing and bringing up children – in fact she regarded such a vocation with disgust and contempt – but in destroying the present order of things which fettered the fine potential of the common people, and in pointing out to men and women the new path of life revealed to her by the most recent European writers. Full in figure, pale of skin, rosy-cheeked and attractive, with dark flashing eyes and a thick plait of dark hair, she aroused in men feelings which she had no desire to arouse and could not possibly share, utterly absorbed as she was by her task of agitation and argument. But all the same she found it pleasant to arouse such feelings, and for that reason although she did not deliberately dress to show herself off, neither did she neglect her appearance. She enjoyed being attractive, and indeed it gave her the chance of showing how much she looked down on that which other women held to be so important. In her views on the possible means of struggle against the existing order she went further than most of her associates, her friend Tyurin among them, and took it as read that all methods in the struggle were valid and to be used, up to and including murder. Yet Katya Turchaninova the revolutionary was still at heart a kind and unselfish woman, forever spontaneously putting the interests, enjoyment and well-being of other people before her own, and always glad of the chance to do something to make someone else happy, whether it was a child, an old person, or an animal.
Turchaninova spent the summer vacation period in a district town in the Volga province staying with a friend of hers who was a village schoolmistress. Tyurin was living in the same district, in his father’s house. The three young people, and the local doctor too, met together frequently, lent each other books, argued, and fed one another’s shared sense of social indignation. The Tyurins’ property adjoined the Livyentsov estate where Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky was now working as the steward. As soon as Pyotr Nikolayevich had arrived there and set about restoring order, young Tyurin, noting that the Livyentsovs’ peasants had a spirit of independence and a firm resolve to stand up for their rights, began to take an interest in them and often walked over to the village to talk to the peasants, explaining to them the principles of socialism in general and of the nationalization of the land in particular.