careful not to mention words like ‘cemetery’ or ‘funeral’ in his presence, knowing that they threw him into a panic.63

    Orthodox and pagan - yet a rationalist: an educated Russian could be all these things. It was part of the Russian condition to master such conflicting strands within oneself and fashion out of them a sensibility, ways of living, of looking at the world that were perfectly at ease with each other. Stravinsky, for example, though more chameleon-like than most, found an intellectual home in French Catholicism in the 1920s. Yet at the same time he became more emotionally attached than ever to the rituals of the Russian Church. He attended services at the

    Orthodox Church in Paris on a regular basis from 1926; he collected Russian icons for his home in Paris and faithfully observed the Russian rituals in his private worship there; he even planned to build a Russian chapel at his house. There was no contradiction in this combination -at least not one that Stravinsky ever felt. Indeed, it was quite common for the cosmopolitan elites into which Stravinsky had been born to live in several different faiths. Some were drawn to the Roman Church, particularly those (like Zinaida Volkonsky when she moved to Italy in the 1830s) who found its internationalism more in keeping with their own world view than the ethnocentric Russian Church. Others were more drawn to Lutheranism, particularly if, like many of the aristocracy, they were of Russian-German parentage. It is difficult to say what was more important in the evolution of this complex religious sensibility, the relatively superficial nature of the aristocracy’s religious upbringing which allowed space for other beliefs or the multinational influences on that class, but either way it made for a culture that was far more complex than the type we might imagine from the mythic image of the ‘Russian soul’.

4

    In 1878 Dostoevsky made the first of several trips to Optina Pustyn. It was a time of profound grief in the writer’s life. His favourite child Aleksei (Alyosha) had just died of epilepsy, an illness he had inherited from his father, and, on the urging of his wife, Dostoevsky visited the monastery for spiritual comfort and guidance. The writer was working on the last of his great novels, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which at that time he was planning as a novel about children and childhood.64 Many of the scenes he witnessed at Optina would reappear in it, and the long discourse of the elder Zosima on the social ideal of the Church, which really should be read as Dostoevsky’s own profession de foi, was borrowed from the writings of the monastery, with long parts lifted almost word for word from The Life of the Elder Leonid (1876) by Father Zedergolm.65 The character of Zosima was mainly based on the elder Amvrosy, whom Dostoevsky saw on three occasions, once, most memorably, with a crowd of pilgrims who had come to see him

    at the monastery.66 The novelist was struck by the charismatic power of the elder and, in one of the novel’s early chapters, ‘Devout Peasant Women’, he re-creates a scene which takes us to the heart of the Russian faith. Zosima gives comfort to a desperate peasant woman who is also grieving for a little son:

    ’And here’s one from a long way off,’ he said, pointing to a woman who was still quite young, but thin and worn out, with a face that was not so much sunburnt as blackened. She was kneeling and staring motionless at the elder. There was almost a frenzied look in her eyes.

    ’From a long way off, Father, from a long way off,’ the woman said in a sing-song voice… ‘Two hundred miles from here - a long way, Father, a long way.’

    She spoke as though she were keening. There is among the peasants a silent and long-enduring sorrow. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is also a sorrow that has reached the limit of endurance: it will then burst into tears and from that moment break out into keening. This is especially so with women. But it is not easier to bear than a silent sorrow. The keening soothes it only by embittering and lacerating the heart still more. Such sorrow does not desire consolation and feeds upon the sense of its hopelessness. The keening is merely an expression of the constant need to reopen the wound…

    ’What is it you’re weeping for?’

    ’I’m sorry for my little boy, Father. He was three years old - three years in another three months he would have been, I’m grieving for my little boy, Father, for my little boy - the last I had left. We had four, Nikita and I, four children, but not one of them is alive, Father, not one of them, not one. I buried the first three, I wasn’t very sorry for them, I wasn’t, but this last one I buried and I can’t forget him. He seems to be standing before me now - he never leaves me. He has dried up my soul. I keep looking at his little things, his little shirt or his little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that’s left of him, every little thing. I look at them and wail. I say to my husband, to Nikita, let me go, husband, I’d like to go on a pilgrimage. He’s a driver, Father. We’re not poor people, Father. We’re our own masters. It’s all our own, the horses and the carriage. But what do we want it all for now? My Nikita has taken to drinking without me, I’m sure he has, he used to before: I had only to turn my back, and he’d weaken. But now I’m no longer thinking of him. It’s over two months since I left home. I’ve forgotten everything, I have, and I don’t want to

    remember. And what will my life with him be like now? I’ve done with him, I have, I’ve done with them all. I don’t want to see my house again and my things again. I hope I’ll never see them again!’

    ’Now listen to me, Mother,’ said the elder. ‘Once, a long time ago, a great saint saw a woman like you in church. She was weeping for her little infant child, her only one, whom God had also taken. “Don’t you know,” said the saint to her, “how bold and fearless these little ones are before the throne of our Lord? There’s none bolder or more fearless than they in the Kingdom of Heaven: Thou, O Lord, hast given us life, they say to God, and no sooner had we looked upon it than Thou didst take it away. And so boldly and fearlessly do they ask and demand an explanation that God gives them at once the rank of angels. And therefore,” said the saint, “you, too, Mother, rejoice and do not weep, for your little one is now with the Lord in the company of his angels.” That’s what the saint said to the weeping mother in the olden days. And he was a great saint and he would not have told her an untruth… I shall mention your little boy in my prayers. What was his name?’

    ’Aleksei, Father.’

    ’A sweet name. After Aleksei the man of God?’

    ’Of God, Father, of God. Aleksei the man of God.’

    ’He was a great saint! I shall mention him in my prayers, Mother, I shall. And I shall mention your sorrow in my prayers, too, and your husband that he may live and prosper. Only you should not have left your husband. You must go back to him and look after him. Your little boy will look down on you and, seeing that you’ve forsaken his father, he will weep over you both: why do you destroy his bliss? For don’t forget, he’s living, he’s living, for the soul lives for ever, and though he is no longer in the house, he’s always there unseen beside you. How do you expect him to come home if you say you hate your house? To whom is he to go, if he won’t find you, his father and mother, together? You see him in your dreams now and you grieve, but if you go back he will send you sweet dreams. Go to your husband, Mother, go back to him today.’67

    Dostoevsky was a man who yearned for faith. But the death of little children was a fact he could not accept as a part of the divine plan. His notebooks from when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov are filled with agonizing commentaries on incidents of awful cruelty to children which he had read about in the contemporary press. One of these true stories appears at the centre of The Brothers Karamazov and

    its discourse about God. It involved a general whose hunting dog was wounded when a serf boy on his estate threw a stone. The general had the serf boy arrested, stripped naked in front of the other villagers, and, to the cries of his desperate mother, torn to shreds by a pack of hunting dogs. This incident is cited by Ivan, the rationalist philosopher among the three Karamazov brothers, to explain to Alyosha, his younger brother and a novice at the monastery, why he cannot believe in the existence of a God if his truth entails the suffering of little innocents.

    ’I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs… Is there in the whole world a being who could or would have the right to forgive? I don’t want harmony. I don’t want harmony, out of a love for mankind, I don’t want it.’68

    In a letter to a friend Dostoesvky said that Ivan’s argument was ‘irrefutable’.69 In terms of moral feeling it was unacceptable to leave such torture unavenged, and even Alyosha, who tries to follow Christ’s example of forgiveness, agrees with Ivan that the general should be shot. Here was the fundamental question which Dostoevsky posed, not just in this novel, but in all his life and art: How could one believe in God when the world created by him was so full of suffering? It was a question he was bound to ask when he looked at the society in which he lived. How could God have made Russia?

    Dostoevsky came, in his own words, from a ‘pious Russian family’ where ‘we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle’.70 The teaching of the Gospels always remained at the core of Dostoevsky’s personality and even when, in the 1840s, he became a socialist, the type of socialism to which he subscribed had a close affinity with Christ’s ideals. He agreed with Belinsky that if Christ appeared in Russia he ‘would join the socialists’.