There were various saints, and Deisises, and the Savior-not-made-by-hands with wet hair,6 and holy monks, and martyrs, and the apostles, and most wondrous were the multifigured icons with different deeds, such as, for instance, the Indictus, the feasts, the Last Judgment, the Saints of the month, the Council of Angels, the Paternity, the Six Days, the Healers, the Seven Days of the Week with praying figures, the Trinity with Abraham bowing down under the oak of Mamre, and, in short, it’s impossible to describe all this beauty, and nowadays such icons aren’t painted anywhere, not in Moscow, not in Petersburg, not in Palekh;7 and there’s even no talking about Greece, because the know-how has long been lost there. We all passionately loved these holy icons of ours, and together we burned lamps before them, and at the crew’s expense we kept a horse and a special cart in which we transported this blessing of God in two big trunks wherever we went. We had two icons in particular, one copied from the Greek by old Moscow court masters: our most holy Lady praying in the garden, with all the cypress and olive trees bowing to the ground before her; and the other a guardian angel, Stroganov work. It’s impossible to express what art there was in these two holy images!
You look at Our Lady, how the inanimate trees bow down before her purity, and your heart melts and trembles; you look at the angel … joy! This angel was truly something indescribable. His face—I can see it now—is most brightly divine and so swiftly succoring; his gaze is tender; his hair is tied with a fine ribbon, its ends curling around his ears, a sign of his hearing everything from everywhere; his robe is shining, all spangled with gold; his armor is feathery, his shoulders are girded; on his chest the face of the infant Emmanuel; in his right hand a cross, in his left a flaming sword. Wondrous! Wondrous! … The hair on his head is wavy and blond, curly from the ears down, and traced hair by hair with a needle. His wings are vast and white as snow, but azure underneath, done feather by feather, and on each shaft barb by barb. You look at those wings, and where has all your fear gone to? You pray, “Overshadow me,” and you grow all quiet at once, and there’s peace in your soul. That’s what kind of icon it was! And for us these two icons were like the holy of holies for the Jews, adorned by the wonderful artistry of Bezaleel.8 All the icons I mentioned earlier were transported by horse in special trunks, but these two we didn’t even put in the cart, but carried: Luka Kirilovich’s wife, Mikhailitsa, always carried Our Lady, and Luka himself kept the image of the angel on his breast. He had a brocade pouch made for this icon, lined with dark homespun, and with a button, and on the front side there was a scarlet cross made from real damask, and there was a thick green silk cord to hang it round the neck. And so this icon that was always kept on Luka’s breast preceded us wherever we went, as if the angel himself were going before us. We used to go from place to place for new work over the steppe, Luka Kirilovich ahead of us all, waving his notched measuring stick instead of a staff, Mikhailitsa behind him in the cart with the icon of the Mother of God, and behind them the whole crew of us marching, and there in the field there’s grass, meadow flowers, herds pasturing here and there, a shepherd playing his reed … a sheer delight for heart and mind! Everything went beautifully for us, and wondrous was our success in all things: we always found good work; there was concord among us; peaceful news kept coming to us from our folks at home; and for all that we blessed the angel who went before us, and it seemed to us it would be harder to part with his most wonderful icon than with our own lives.
And could we have thought that somehow, by some chance or other, we would be deprived of our most precious and holy thing? And yet that grief awaited us, and was arranged for us, as we perceived only later, not through people’s perfidy, but through the providence of our guide himself. He himself wished to be insulted, in order to grant us the holy ordeal of sorrow, and through it to show us the true path, before which all the paths we had trodden were like a dark and trackless wilderness. But allow me to inquire whether my story is interesting and I am not troubling your attention for nothing?
“Not at all, not at alclass="underline" be so kind as to continue!” we exclaimed, having become interested in what he was telling.
“Very well, sirs, I obey, and will begin, as best I can, to set forth the wondrous wonders that came to us from our angel.”
III
We came to do big work near a big city on a big stream of water, the Dniepr River, to build there a big and now highly famous stone bridge.9 The city stands on the steep right bank, and we settled on the low left bank covered with meadows, and a beautiful peosage opened before us: old churches, holy monasteries with the relics of many saints; lush gardens and trees such as are pictured in the frontispieces of old books, that is, sharp-pointed poplars. You look at it all and it’s as if somebody’s plucking at your heart—it’s so beautiful! You know, of course, we’re simple people, but all the same we do feel the all-graciousness of God-created nature.
And so we fell so cruelly in love with this place that, on the very first day, we started building ourselves a temporary dwelling there. We first drove in long piles, because the place was low-lying, right next to the water, then on those piles we set about constructing a room, with an adjacent storeroom. In the room we set out all our holy icons as they ought to be by our forefathers’ rules: along the length of one wall we opened a folding iconostasis of three levels, the lowest for big icons, and the two upper shelves for smaller ones, and thus we built a stairway, as it should be, up to the crucifix itself, and we put the angel on the lectern on which Luka Kirilovich read the Scriptures. Luka Kirilovich and Mikhailitsa set up house in the storeroom, and we closed off a little barrack for ourselves beside it. On looking at us, the others who came to work for a long stretch began building for themselves in the same way, and so, across from the great, established city, we had our light little town on piles. We got down to work, and everything went as it ought to! The money counted out by the Englishmen in the office was reliable; God sent us such good health that we didn’t have a single sick man all summer, and Luka’s Mikhailitsa even started complaining, “I’m not glad, myself, I’ve grown so plump in all quarters.” What we Old Believers especially liked about it was that, while we were subjected to persecution everywhere back then, we had an easy time of it here: there were no town or district authorities, no priests; we didn’t set eyes on anybody, and nobody was concerned or interfered with our religion … We prayed our filclass="underline" put in our hours of work and then gathered in the room, and there the holy icons shone so much from all the lamps that your heart even got to glowing. Luka Kirilovich would begin by pronouncing the blessing, and then we’d all join in and sing praises so that sometimes, in calm weather, it could be heard far beyond our settlement. And our faith didn’t bother anybody, and many even seemed to fall in with our way, and it pleased not only simple people, who were inclined to worship God in Russian fashion, but even those of other faith. Many churchgoers of pious disposition, who had no time to go to church across the river, used to stand under our windows and listen and begin to pray. We didn’t forbid them this standing outside: we couldn’t drive them all away, because even foreigners who were interested in the old Russian rite came more than once to listen to our singing and approved of it. The head of the English builders, Yakov Yakovlevich, would even come and stand under the window with a piece of paper and kept trying to take down our chanting in notes, and then he’d go around the works humming to himself in our way: “God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us”—only for him, naturally, it all came out in a different style, because this singing, which is set down in the old notation, can’t be accurately recorded in the new Western notes. The English, to do them credit, were most reliable and pious people themselves, and they liked us very much, considered us good people, and praised us. In short, the Lord’s angel brought us to a good place and opened to us all the hearts of people and all the peosage of nature.