My Life for the Book by Sytin Ivan D.;Ruud Charles;Soroka Marina;

Author:Sytin, Ivan D.;Ruud, Charles;Soroka, Marina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

III

Memories of [My] Life

I got mixed up a bit. I spoke about the Church – that is more important. Our Church: Russian, great, of the people, of diverse kinds and branches, she resides in the great popular [one word undecipherable], in the thick of masses, in the remote rustic skity,12 in the tundra, still alive throughout the whole of Rus’. There are some priestless ones [bezpopovtsy]13 – the original Christians who believe deeply that our [official Orthodox] heresy has deprived us of Divine grace. They perform the rites according to the ancient books, without celebrating the Eucharist. There are Old Believers who observe the original pre-Nikon rule, who have not accepted Nikon’s corrections to the rules of Divine service, considering them to be heresy. There are a few more [sects who have made] changes but all of them in essence maintain the old Truth of that literal [...]14 teaching and they firmly follow the regulations of the Truth they believe in. The greater part strictly maintains its stand in the old, still pre-Nikon, ancient faith

Hundreds of thousands of this mass [of Old Believers] living in the remote skity, are spread over the huge Russian territory. For example, the estate of Bugrov [called] The Great Testament.15 A flour miller, he owns his mill, which employs up to ten [thousand] workers (all of them Russians, strict Old Believers). He is the sponsor – a father to more than ten skity all over the Volga and the Kama Districts. They all maintain an early Christian commune, keep apart from Orthodoxy, which they consider a heresy, believe in the ancient Christian Church [as it was] before Nikon, and keep the [old] customs. Upon examining all these rites of different Christian variations and sects one is deeply struck by this profound self-sacrifice in the name of the faith.

Simple Russian people who are predominantly loyal to their faith at the price of complete self-denial in, decidedly, all respects. And what is especially striking is that they have been doing this not just for one year or for a decade but for hundreds of endless years and [all over?] the great rural [narod-] country. And all this not in some wild forests but amongst us, so that you can, if you wish, approach more closely and see it all for yourself. So great and barbarous are our people still, in their majority. And how about the North with its Solovki? And the whole Northern part of the provinces of Vologda, Archangel, Kostroma?

Everywhere, among the masses, there reigns that natural coarseness that I myself have witnessed in those twelve years that I lived there. We have picked ourselves up [in Russia] over the [last] fifty years while Rus’ has remained as it was: black, backward, and numb, without books and without faith in life – nothing but the numb, oppressive, coarse superstition. Much remains [to be done]. The new immense and important task lies ahead. The great mass of the strong, young Russian people is barely literate, uneducated and one could say functionally illiterate.

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