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Chapter Twenty-Eight
There is another thing that I then understood: The only thing that can truly transform a person is to love all people, including the wicked, and to answer evil with good. While in most cases, evil begets evil.
Throughout history, humanity on the whole has lived according to the rule “an eye for and eye”—and what is the result? Endless suffering. Auschwitz and hydrogen bombs. Because an evil plus an evil equals two evils.
My final turning point occurred after Crime and Punishment. In Raskol-nikov I recognized my former self, and in the collapse of his worldview, the collapse of mine. And our savior was the righteous sinner, Sonia Marmeladov with the Gospel in hand.
Dostoevsky brought to me fragments of the Gospel, and these fragments seemed more wonderful than anything I had known. I remember how, when I had read the final page, I went outside. There was a fine, light rain and the wind was blowing. I wandered the streets of Moscow that night and thought about how the next day, I would begin a new life, quite different from the one I had known until then.
But this new belief of mine still was not true religiosity. It was rather a reasoned belief. I simply considered that it was more proper, more reasonable to live in such a fashion (while acknowledging immortality, of course). Without that, this new life was just as senseless as everything else. Having been taught to be rational, I could not grasp the irrational. To me, the rituals of the Church seemed senseless, games old women played. Well, what would possibly occur if I were dunked in water or if I crossed myself? Then once, already as one who acknowledged the teachings of Christ and who sympathized with religion, I dropped by a church—just to take a look. The impression was incredible. Yes, it was all ornate, but the theater can also be ornate. But I was gripped by a feeling that I had never experienced in any theater. Most importantly, after that visit I became much stronger in my Christian convictions, and a simple thought occurred to me: we cannot simply think and feel, we must also express our thoughts and feelings symbolically. Our every word is in fact a symbol. Yet it doesn’t seem odd to us when we, upon greeting someone, say “hello” and shake his hand. The rituals of the Church are also symbols that cannot be dispensed with. Without them the faith within one’s soul will wither.
After that I had no doubts in the necessity of baptism. If the human soul in all its forms senses the difference between good and evil, and, with rare exceptions, a person who commits a vile act knows that he behaves wrongly, not humanely, and since there is nothing more humane than Christianity—it follows that in Christianity there is truth. (Later I became convinced of this in practice. And I think that if every person were to analyze his life without atheistic superstitions and prejudice, he would become convinced of the same.) A
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person can strive only after that which is implanted in him. After all, we don’t try to make ourselves grow tails.
I then told a student acquaintance in the Theological Academy, with whom I had previously spoken only about literature (he, from a reluctance to proselytize, and I from a sense of tact, so as not offend him by mocking religion), that I wanted to be baptized.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Valentin Kataev, A Paschal Memory
Valentin Kataev was a Russian author who had the rare privilege of going abroad during the Soviet period. On one such trip to San Francisco in the 1960’s he met a woman whom he had loved in Odessa before the Bolshevik revolution. He had proposed marriage to her then, but she declined. He recalls seeing her on an Easter Sunday, Paskha, the central holy day of the Orthodox Church which is celebrated after seven weeks of fasting with great expectation, solemn joy, and feasting. It is customary to kiss family, friends, acquaintances, and others three times on the cheeks this day, one time each for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For timid and shy people, the tradition served as a way of kissing a person one liked. The lit candles which Kataev recalls were traditionally carried home after Saturday night vespers before Palm Sunday and after the Holy Thursday “Passion Gospels,” always celebrated in the evening. In many families, upon arriving home, the youngest child would get to illuminate the darkened house from her candle. Excerpted from Valentin Kataev, Sviatoi kolodets [The Sacred Well]. Moscow, 1979.
[Kataev begins]: “Tell me, why didn’t you marry me back then?” “I was young and foolish,” she answered with an unreflecting and sorrowful lightness as if she had anticipated the question. Then, her head slightly down, she continued to look at me from beneath her brows not wiping her eyes, smiling quietly. On the wall in back of her I noticed a vaguely familiar watercolor. The only item which she managed to take with her from Russia some forty years ago. The painting was of a young woman, almost a girl, in a paisley kerchief carefully carrying before her a Holy Thursday candle in a paper cone lest the March wind blow it out. The candlelight illuminated the girl’s face from below her cheeks with a bright and tender glow. The upper
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face was in shadow but her eyes, with a gold-leaf flame in each pupil, looked straight out at me with innocence and joy. And I immediately recalled Blok’s poem.
Little boys and little girls Cradling candles and pussy willows
Set off for home. The flames glimmer, Passersby cross themselves,
And it smells of spring.
“Do you remember?” I asked. And right away, reading my mind, she answered:
Playful little wind, Light, little rain,
Don’t put out my flame. I’ll be first to rise On Palm Sunday morrow
For the sacred day.
Then it was my turn to read her mind and I saw what she saw: our first and only kiss, which never really counted as real for we did not really kiss but performed a socially accepted ritual.
Near the festively decorated table with tall Easter cakes, pink shavings of hyacinth, colored eggs in a bed of watercress, a baked ham, and a silver bottle of raspberry liqueur produced by the Brothers Shustov, stood my beloved girl. Her eyes were sleepy after the all-night Easter services, but her face was fresh and turned to me with expectation. Her arms were raised. The lace cuffs of her dress half-covered her fingers with their polished nails. She was looking at me without concealing her curiosity: what would I do? That was the first time I had seen her out of her school uniform. She was wearing a fine blouse that was a little big on her. It was honeycombed with tiny perforations through which pink silken shoulder straps showed. The outfit did not suit her at all, giving her slim figure a matronly appearance.
“Christ is Risen!” I said with more conviction than the circumstances demanded and stepped toward her with hesitation—washed clean, brushed, short on sleep, perfumed with my aunt’s cologne “Brocar,” with my hair larded stiff with Vaseline and my new shoes screeping.
“Truly He is risen!” she responded and asked smiling, “Do we have to kiss?”
“I guess we have to,” I said, barely controlling my breaking voice.
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