Be As Children (9781912868797) by Sharov Vladimir; Ready Oliver (TRN); Emerson Caryl (AFT)

Author:Sharov, Vladimir; Ready, Oliver (TRN); Emerson, Caryl (AFT) [Sharov, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912868797
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2021-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

***

I visited Father Nikodim in Snegiri over a period of almost thirty years, albeit with interruptions. I liked the way he celebrated the services and took confession, even if it surprised me that during his sermons he would avoid any mention of his own fate – prison, the camps – and would speak as if the Revolution had never happened. The Church of course had been attacked many times before then – there had been entire epochs of persecution and punishment – but the Bolsheviks had played their full part in this mournful history, and he seemed to have forgotten all about them. But the reason I kept distancing myself from Nikodim, then coming back to him, was not his preaching.

I usually travelled to Snegiri for Sunday mass and when after the service, Father Nikodim invited me for tea in his living room upstairs, it would be late evening before I returned to Moscow. Nikodim was very different after mass, even to look at. In church he wore a monk’s black habit, but for tea he changed into the clothes he always wore when walking around the village. Old linen trousers and a marginally less faded jacket – pretty much the uniform, to judge by paintings and photographs, of Soviet agronomists of the ’30s. Over tea Nikodim no longer avoided talking about the camps and I remember feeling troubled by this sudden change, although I don’t think the reason was a fear of informants in church and a fresh sentence. It was probably all a question of time. Life in the camps had broken off so abruptly – Nikodim wasn’t even halfway through his third term – that he still didn’t know what to make of many of the things that had happened to him as a zek.

It was at the dacha in Snegiri that I heard what follows below, heard it from his own lips, and I’m no more ready than I was before to separate it from him. He linked some of the ideas he spoke about to his cellmates, that is he gave the thoughts both a name and a biography, sometimes a rather extravagant one, but never with a happy ending; he took issue with others and tried to refute them in our presence, often with our help, but all the same I didn’t much like hearing a priest, straight after a service tell us things that lay outside Orthodox teachings, and that more often than not, were outright heresies. Nikodim, whether or not he meant to, was seeding doubts in our faith, as if putting it to the test, and our doubts were made all the bigger when we saw that for him too these questions had not gone away, that they were troubling him as much as ever.

Nikodim told us about a cellmate who had been with him in pre-trial detention in Barnaul, an Amur Cossack by the name of Nikolai Yevstratov. They’d tried to execute Yevstratov on three occasions – once they had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.