Letters about the West

Contents Letter one. Instead of a preface, Letter Two. Slavism Letter third. Cologne Cathedral Letter Four. Divine service Letter fifth. Orthodoxy in the West Letter Six. Name Day of the Serbian King Letter Seven. On the Rhine Letter Eight. Sistine Madonna by Raphael Letter one. Instead of a preface You and I, my dear Friend, had to live in difficult, but at the same time extremely interesting and important times. Sometimes you feel positively dizzy, especially when you imagine those grandiose world events that we are destined to be contemporaries of. It’s as if some new, special era is approaching in the life and history of our Russia. It is not enough, I think, just to observe and experience events; It is useful to reflect on them. I hope that the current terrible war will be useful for Russian self-awareness. Victory over the enemy in the current state of affairs can be beneficial for the winners. But somehow I’m not very used to assessing life’s phenomena from the point of view of benefits. The ideological growth of a nation is more valuable to me than economic growth and cultural success. And the growth of our national self-awareness does not even depend on the outcome of the war; One collision with the West is enough. The impetus is given, and the thought is already working. In this letter I want to share with you, dear soul, my hopes for the future successes of our Russian self-awareness. The most ardent of the Slavophiles dear to my heart, Konstantin Aksakov, exclaimed: Always towards vain Europe Will the Slavic family be chained? The hardest thing is spiritual captivity, There are no more painful mental wounds! Is it not true that the Slavs and, in particular, we Russians, are chained to Europe? After all, it’s not just Griboyedov’s girls who admire the West. I’ll tell you, dear Friend, that I always felt somehow sad in my soul when I looked through the courses on “New Russian History” or the courses on “Russian Literature.” "Why?" – you ask. But because I caught their most general idea. This idea can be roughly expressed as follows. Rus' lived for a long time, but there was no sense in it. There was only darkness, ignorance, superstition. Finally, Peter the Great appeared. At first he often traveled to the German Settlement, then he “opened a window to Europe” and “transformed” Russia. Only with Peter did Russia see the light. In a word, “he was your god, Russia!” - as the flatterer poets exclaimed. “Pre-Petrine Rus'” is already a common noun. How the everyday ideals of our ancestors were ridiculed! “Domostroy” is something terrible for our Westerners. In general, without the Germans we are worthless and would remain forever in the darkness of ignorance. These are the thoughts that come to my mind when reading historical works. Russia seems to have existed for only two hundred years, and what happened before can only be studied for the sake of curiosity or because something needs to be studied. I think, my friend, that the last two hundred years can be called the German period in Russian history. The Germans climbed into our hut through Peter's window and occupied the front corner of it. And the Russian people began to turn into Germans. First they took off, and whoever didn’t want to, they forcibly took off his stately clothes and put on a short German caftan. They sent out funny and strange clothes - camisoles, tailcoats - all of that kind of clothing that, according to Metropolitan Philaret, does not so much dress as expose. And behind the clothes they began to change their souls, they began to live and think in German, they even forgot how to speak Russian. For two hundred years we worshiped the Germans. If the French were sometimes worshiped, it was again at German orders. Then the German courts also listened to the tone set by the French Versailles. So, my friend, we fell into shameful captivity. Prisoners are different. Some only think about how to escape from captivity, others cry, like the Jews in Babylonian captivity, and there are also such captives that they forget their homeland and try not to remember it at all. Russian people can be classified as this last class of captives. The Russians have forgotten Russian Russia. You know, my friend, when Karamzin wrote “The History of the Russian State,” they said about him that he discovered ancient Russia. Isn't this typical? But only a hundred years passed from ancient Russia to Karamzin. It is hardly possible to point out an example in all of world history where the subject of discoveries was a bygone era just a hundred years ago! Isn’t such a humiliation of all our loved ones deplorable? The national feeling, the national Russian consciousness seemed to have fallen asleep. I fell asleep, my friend, but not everyone. She fell asleep above, in “society,” but was awake below, among the people. If “society” considered itself only European, then the people thought and felt themselves primarily Russian. And so it seems to me that the split between the people and the so-called intelligentsia is nowhere more pronounced than in their attitude towards the West. The intelligentsia and the top of Russian society bowed to the German, and the people always looked down on the German, always critically, distrustfully and even ironically. After all, in the Russian language the word “German” is completely literary. And figure out what it means. In popular parlance, all Westerners are “Germans.” Doesn't this very name seem condescendingly ironic to you, my Friend? After all, when a little child babbles something incomprehensible, they say to him: “Oh, you’re a German!” And then, how does a German appear in folk songs, in folk jokes? Definitely funny, stupid and cowardly. The Russian is a fine fellow in front of him - both quick-witted and courageous. My thought especially dwells on those bright phenomena when the Russian genius rebelled against the foreign yoke and boldly declared that Russia not only could be good without the Germans, but that it would have been better without them; the question remains whether Russia was transformed towards good or evil. I mean mainly the Slavophiles, these smart, pure and honest sons of Russia. Despite desperate persecution by Westerners, despite the indifference of wide circles of society, Slavophilism was a noticeable phenomenon in Russian life during three quarters of the 19th century. And most importantly, what wonderful people they were all, Slavophiles! The names of many went down in history forever, because even the enemies could not help but recognize the brilliant mind and rich talents - philosophical, literary, poetic. But again it’s remarkable: whoever was engaged only in preaching Slavophile ideas, they tried to consign him to oblivion. They could not forget only those who were writers and poets. It is difficult to forget N.V. Gogol, A.S. Khomyakov, I.S. Aksakov, F.M. Dostoevsky. A.F. Gilferding, K.S. Aksakov and the like? After all, some have only recently begun to be “discovered.” But it’s also good that more than one people looked down on the Germans. The people's view was shared by the most talented and educated people of the nineteenth century. In general, my dear Friend, along with the worship of the West, you can’t help but notice in Russian thought both constant criticism of the West and condemnation of the West. Have you noticed how often we talk about the ideological crisis of Europe? “The Crisis of Western Philosophy” is the name of the first serious philosophical work of the original Russian thinker V. S. Solovyov. And how much in our spiritual journals they talk about the crisis of Catholicism or German Protestantism, about the collapse of the moral ideals of Europe! I don’t know if there is anything similar in Western literature about Russia and Russians, but somehow I can’t allow it. What can a German talk about regarding Russia? He can talk about the crisis of our grain trade, the crisis of our industry, but for a German to talk about our ideological crisis - no, this doesn’t fit into my mind at all! So the consciousness of its value, its originality has not yet been eradicated from the Russian soul. However, my friend, watching the press, listening to public sentiment, I still sadly notice in what a corner real Russian thought is, how timidly, as if apologizing, Russian people think in Russian if their thoughts do not coincide with Western thoughts. And this is where my hopes for a better future begin. We are facing the West. Undoubtedly, in this collision we will hurt ourselves painfully. And this will make us think about our relationship to the West, think about ourselves. Maybe the Russian shameful groveling before the West has come to an end, and then they will love their native, Russian, more. I gladly tell You, my Friend, that sometimes I notice favorable signs. As soon as the thunder of the war with its horrors roared, as soon as the blood of our defenders began to flow, we started talking about the “debunked idol” and by this idol they meant German culture. Western values ​​began to be intensively revalued. The idols that Russian people have been worshiping for two hundred years have not yet all been thrown from steep mountains into fast rivers, but some have already been thrown off and floated into the sea of ​​oblivion, although many are running along the shore shouting: “Kick it out, O God!” Our job is to push away these floating idols if they stick to the shore. Among modern thinking Russian people, I see, my friend, how some are dishonorably dragging German idols to the banks of Lethe, and how others along the banks of this river call to their deaf gods: “Knock it out, O God!” Back in October last year, the religious and philosophical society in memory of V.S. Solovyov organized a public meeting with speeches and reports on the outbreak of war. I, my friend, wanted to attend this meeting, but then I changed my mind. After all, I thought, the reports and speeches will be published, and I will get to know them while sitting in my cell. Indeed, in the December book of “Russian Thought” speeches and reports of representatives of our religious and philosophical thought were published. Have you read them, my Friend? I didn’t find any new revelations there, but the speeches and reports were very smart. For me they are dear as a public confession of their views by our modern thinkers. You will find out what is dear to them, what they want, what they hope for. I will not write in detail about these now published reports. I will only note that one way or another, the entire meeting of the religious and philosophical society turned to criticism of Western ideals, Western foundations of life. But at the meeting, the dual attitudes of Russian thinking people to the West that I described were clearly revealed. In the speech of the chairman of the society, G.A. Rachinsky, one can still hear the voice of admiration for German culture. He said: “In our struggle not to the gut, but to the death, we are not fighting the ancient and venerable culture of Germany. Not with the Germany of Albrecht Durer, Holbein and the artists who created the immortal paintings and sculptures of its ancient cathedrals, not with the Germany of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and Novalis; We are not fighting against the Germany of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, these teachers, both Russian Slavophiles and Russian Westerners, not with all this great culture of the recent past.” Moreover, the speaker reworks the poet’s poems, attributing them to German culture: The cowardly one who today I read the report of Prince E.N. Trubetskoy with sorrow, especially these lines: “Now, after so many lessons of history, we will not revive national pride and worship Russia as an idol.” Completely different thoughts were in the reports of V.I. Ivanov, Professor S.N. Bulgakov and V.F. Ern. “The war,” writes the first, “is being waged over the choice of the basic paths of the human spirit. Will the now semi-free tribe, which called itself the tribe of the “word”, but from ancient times bore the shadow of a slave and was significantly renamed into a tribe of slaves (Slavi – Sclavi – Sclaven), be enslaved again, and finally, and will it serve as a new layer of fertilizer for German “culture”, like its countless ancestors, wiped off the face of the earth by the parasitic bloodthirstiness of the once strongest in the struggle for the existence of the species? Or will the Slavs finally say their hitherto unspoken word?” Professor S. N. Bulgakov sees in the war “a crisis of new history and a failure of the cause of new European civilization,” because the spirit of the new European man broke away from the mystical center, moved away from the Church, rationalized and mechanized life. In this spirit, non-religious humanism and Protestantism, which has dried up, impoverished and secularized Christianity, dominates. “Russia did not actively participate in the sin of new Europeanism, it only became infected with it. It was not she, seduced by the charms of the prince of this world, who affirmed the cult of the man-god-man-beast... It was not she who carried out the Protestant substitution of Christianity by reducing it to practical, worldly morality. She can reject these beginnings of a new story and go her own, special way. She can renounce the tower of Babel and desire the city of God. She can undertake the feat of earthly construction not in her own name, but in the name of the coming Christ. It can be kindled with holy zeal for the cause of God, which will help Europe to turn the bricks of the collapsing Tower of Babel into the stones of the city of God. Russia has not yet been able to remake itself in the style of the new Europe, because it cannot find a real taste for this, because it vaguely hears a different call, a different command: to want the incompatible, the impossible, the miraculous, to thirst for earth and sky together, to languish with a holy yearning...” “A great and, in its meaning, stunning fact has happened: we again believed in Russia! And we owe this spiritual revival to the holy war and the humble sacrifice of the great Russian army.” This is how S.N. Bulgakov defines the meaning and significance of war. Can you imagine, dear Friend, with what consolation I read these truly “Russian thoughts”! This is the title of S.N. Bulgakov’s report. V.F. Ern entitled his report “From Kant to Krupp.” Here he elevates the history of recent days to philosophical principles and protests against the “simplified understanding of world history”, according to which “German culture is one thing, but atrocities are another.” Ern ends his report with a prayer “that the catharsis of the European tragedy will be experienced by us in all its depth, and that we will forever overcome not only the periphery of the brutal manifestations of German culture, but also become free from its deepest principles, now exposed to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.” Well, how can one not welcome such a confession of Slavophile views in the auditorium of the Polytechnic Museum! Lately, you can’t help but think about the phenomena of the Western world. I will share my thoughts with You, dear and close to my soul Friend. I will not describe the West. Is it necessary to describe the West? It has been described many times already. Who hasn’t read about the speed of German trains, the comforts of foreign hotels, and the cleanliness of Berlin streets? No, I would like to listen to the sighs of the Western soul, the beating of the Western heart, to compare the Western soul with the Russian soul. Sometimes small impressions lead to big thoughts. Similar impressions befell me, and I still reflect on them to this day. Letter two. Slavism Recently, when the Slavic world entered into a bloody struggle with the Teutonic world, I, my dear Friend, often remember one detail from my meetings with the Western Slavs. I met with different Slavic peoples, with different people and under different circumstances, but this detail, which I want to write to you about now, was repeated constantly. What kind of detail? I'll tell you the facts. On June 27, 1908, I traveled from Thessaloniki by rail north to Belgrade. Thessaloniki and Macedonia were then - and how long ago was that! – Turkish. The Turkish Railway is a great test of patience. Uskub... Still Türkiye. By evening we reach the Serbian border. To the right and to the left of the road a ditch ran along the level ground. Border. Ristovac station. Changed train. The Turks are missing. The conductors in fezzes were left behind. As soon as we set foot on Serbian soil, it was as if we felt a sense of family. It’s just an amazing feeling: abroad, but you feel close, dear, and at home. Even the area itself seems to resemble our native central Russia with its hills and fields. But at one of the stations I decided to get some boiling water. What happened? The Serb bartender and I do not understand each other. “Water” is understandable to him, but “hot”, especially “boiling water”, they don’t say anything to him and he pours me cold water. I shake my head; cold water pours out. I’m trying to explain descriptively what I need, but nothing comes out. How can we be here? At this time, one of the passengers comes to the buffet, and I have already walked away to the side with a hopeless look. I heard the newcomer speak to the barman in German. This was a revelation for me. It never even occurred to me to try to speak German to a Serb. Without thinking twice, I put my discovery to work and a minute later I went into the carriage - I had boiling water in the kettle. In Belgrade, it was as if I found myself in Russian society. Intelligent people speak Russian fluently, and our leaders and guides studied in Russian theological academies. However, in Belgrade there were misunderstandings based on mutual misunderstanding. One day at dinner one of the clergy decided to make a speech in Serbian in honor of the Russian guests. Alas! I didn't understand anything from this speech. I was somehow ashamed, and sad thoughts involuntarily arose in my head. I met several Belgrade seminarians and involuntarily noticed that I could only talk with students from senior classes, where they studied Russian and where they studied from Russian textbooks, and junior seminarians were incomprehensible to me. When one of the latter came up to me and began to “pray in the evening,” I did not immediately realize that he was inviting me to dinner. And in conversations with Belgrade seminarians I had to turn to German. One of the older students said the word “sweet ice” in a conversation. "What is this?" - I ask. “I don’t know how to speak Russian.” - “Well, what about in German?” - "Gefrorenes". - “Oh, ice cream!” Now we understand each other. Across the Danube from Belgrade lies Zemlin, from where Austrian cannons are now firing at the Serbian capital. Zemlin is already an Austrian possession. In this very Zemlyne I once spoke to a Serb. Austrian Serbs are no longer taught Russian at school. We each tried to speak our own language, but nothing came of it. It was no longer news to me that you could communicate with a Serb in German. And so two Slavs are forced to resort to German speech to exchange thoughts. Now I can quite clearly imagine the sad expression on the face of my interlocutor when, at the end of the conversation, he told me: “How sad it is that we Slavs are forced to speak German among ourselves!..” I, of course, could only willingly agree with him that this is sehr traurig 1. Indeed, my heart was sad... Almost on the same day I had to conduct a theological debate with a Croatian Catholic student from Zagreb; I proved to him that it was not at all becoming for a Slav to be a Catholic. But how we had to debate! Almost half in German. What a fact again! Slav (Croat) to Slav (me) in German proves the advantages of Catholicism, the Latin alphabet for the Slavic language, etc. Another time I happened to live in Prague for several days. It turned out that you also need to speak German with Czechs. It’s incomparably worse here than in Belgrade: they don’t speak Russian at all. I simply cannot forget that unpleasant feeling of powerless annoyance that I involuntarily had to experience during my entire stay in Prague. Servants in hotels and restaurants, salesmen and saleswomen in stores, people on the street - after all, they are all Czechs, Slavs by blood. You hear individual Slavic words in their conversation, you understand Czech books and newspapers without much difficulty, but if you decide to speak, it’s as if some kind of curtain is falling between us, and we immediately become somehow alien to each other. If you say or read something in Czech, Czechs smile; pronounced it wrong. And again I can’t forget how in Prague one girl explained to me in German how to read and pronounce Czech words correctly. You need, my friend, to go to such a large Slavic center as Prague to feel how difficult and unpleasant it is to speak German with the Slavs. Another memory, the last one. Russian border. Kalisz. What has become of him now? According to Russian custom, the station is far from the city. I'm going to the city in an omnibus. The Polish woman sitting opposite me asks me a question, but from her question I only understand the word “pan.” Well? Again we spoke German - and we understood each other. This is already in Russia! Poles, after all, these are “glades”, according to the chronicler. I'm probably a "Vyatich". Did the “Polyans” and the “Vyatichi” really speak German? Here, my friend, is a series of small memories for you about meetings with the Slavs in the West. You see, there is one detail everywhere: we do not understand each other and are forced to speak among ourselves in the language of a nation foreign and hostile to the Slavs. It’s a small detail, but sometimes it makes me think deeply. And is it just me? I remember that the late A. I. Vvedensky focused his attention on this forced need to speak German with the Slavs. What is this strange phenomenon? The language of our enemies serves as a means of communication and unity for us! Look at the ethnographic map of Austria. The “Patchwork Empire” is made more than half from Slavic pieces. Now the German state power unites the Slavic peoples into one political whole. The Slavs are divided - that’s what you feel first of all and feel with heartache. In our educational anthologies, the famous poem by A.S. Khomyakov “Kyiv” (“High in front of me...”) for some reason is printed in half abbreviated form (end: “The Eternal Sun of the East”). Precisely those verses where the Slavophile ideas of the poet are expressed are omitted. Is this by accident or on purpose? That is, so as not to corrupt students with Slavophile thoughts? And in these omitted verses there is again grief about the division of the Slavs. Brothers, where are the sons of Volyn? Sword and flattery, deceit and flame This is how Slavophile poets feel sad and mourn the disunion of the Slavs. Personally, my Friend, I perceive with particular pain the religious division of the Slavs. I just can’t think that Orthodoxy and Catholicism are almost the same thing, that they are two local Christian Churches. I confess that the Church is one, and Catholics for me are not the Church, and therefore not Christians, for there is no Christianity without the Church. And yet, how many Slavs fell away from the Church and believed in the Pope! Slavs are especially religious by nature. For them, religion is not an accessory to life, but life itself. The Slavs do not play around with religion, but live by religion. In religious terms, the Germans are worthless compared to the Slavs. German Catholics are a special religious type. Among German Catholics, religion is a kind of simply well-intentioned and dispassionate conservatism. The Slavs also treat Catholicism with their characteristic spontaneous religiosity. Of the modern Catholics, it seems to me that the most religious, spontaneously religious, are the Poles. The falling away from the Church of a Slav naturally affects the very essence of his relationship to the Slavs in general. Our liberal publicists, when they write about the Slavs, pay almost no attention to the religious division. And completely in vain. They themselves are accustomed to getting along in life without faith, but it is vain to think that the people can be as little interested in faith as the gentlemen publicists. In the popular imagination, a person is first of all named by his faith. In Galicia, for example, “Russian” means Orthodox, “Pole” means Catholic. “Russian faith” is Orthodoxy, “Polish faith” is Catholicism. It is in vain to explain the enmity between Slavs of different faiths with the fanaticism of propaganda. Enmity is already given in the essence of religious difference of opinion itself. Faith is the main nerve of human life, the most precious treasure of the soul. And if there is no unity on this point, then any other unity - cultural, scientific, political - will already be undermined and unreliable. The poet rightly says: Both love and friendship are swept away. Although I have observed little of the life of the Catholic Slavs, I still have a basis in my feeling to confess one of the main tenets of Slavophilism: “The spirit of the Slavs is determined by Orthodoxy.” Yes, only Orthodoxy. Outside of Orthodoxy, a Slav in a foreign land. I can’t even explain in detail why, but I always somehow feel a lie in the position of a Slavic Catholic. A dry legal account with the Lord God, into which every “good deed” is included for payment with a “reward” in heaven, a mercenary and even slavish attitude towards God, from whom one can expect either punishment or reward, leaving all church affairs to the hierarchy, the dry measured service of shaved priests, artificial pathos and recitation of their sermons - all this, in my opinion, should be extremely disgusting to the Slavic soul. Betrayal of Orthodoxy is, in essence, betrayal of the Slavs, a transition to the Western style in mood and life. At present, of course, the political subordination of the Slavic peoples to the Germans is most noticeable. After all, think about the military events, my Friend. Now many Slavs are forced to take up arms against Russia for the interests of the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. And what kind of Slavs? Partly Orthodox. The latter is especially painful. In other cases, the war does not significantly affect religious issues. The war with the Turks and Germans somehow fits into the mind more easily: both the Turks and the Germans are equally alien to the Church of Christ. But I remember when the war between the Serbs and Bulgarians began, my heart ached: after all, members of the one Body of Christ began to kill each other. A war between people equally belonging to a single Church seems to me to be some kind of continuous and gloomy horror. And now, under the compulsion of the Germans “external” to the Church, the Slavs must kill fellow Orthodox Christians, members of the united Church, “communists,” in the words of the Apostle Paul. Regarding the Polish rebellion, A. S. Khomyakov sent a curse to the one Against the Slavs to the Slavic brothers He handed over the swords at the criminal hour. The one who handed swords to the Orthodox against the Orthodox deserves even more damnation. In this madness of history, I find it difficult to call those Slavs who violate the oath of allegiance to the German emperors traitors. Together with Tyutchev you ask questions: When will you be a people? When will time be abolished? Your discord and adversity, And the cry for unity will ring out, And what divides us will collapse? You can easily answer in his own words: We wait and trust in Providence: He knows the day and hour... But has not now come the day and hour of Slavic unity, “the universal and Orthodox day?” Won't you and I, dear Friend, see this longed-for day? I'm waiting for this day. Share this expectation with me and You, my beloved Friend, whose like-mindedness I value so much. It seems to me, my Friend, that in dividing the Slavs, we Russians are not without sin. Our admiration for the West is to blame. The Russians are moving to the West, bypassing the Slavic lands. It often happens that our compatriot travels almost all of Europe and does not see a single Slav. Our Russians, when traveling to the West, make their first stop either in Vienna or Berlin, and to these points on German Schnellzugs they quickly fly past the Slavs. But the Slavs in Europe are a very respectable figure: they live from the Adriatic to the White Sea, from almost Switzerland to the Urals. What remains for everyone else? And it is this venerable Slavic figure that we in Europe are able to ignore. Often our Muscovite knows the streets of Paris and Berlin no worse than those of Moscow, but Sofia, Belgrade, Lvov, Prague and the like are drawn in the fog. Our school treats the West in the same way, that is, while studying the West, it leaves the Slavs without attention. We know something from history, from German, French and English literature, but the history and literature of the Slavs is an unknown land for us. If we were to give the Russian people an exam on the history of the Slavs, then, I think, something instructive would come out, namely: we would be ashamed of our ignorance. We learned about Charles, Frederick and Louis at school, but not about the Slavs. Only now they are planning to establish a special department at universities to study the history of the Slavs. That's when they missed it. It’s the same in our theological school. Several years ago they established a separate department for the history of the Slavic Churches, but a year later they closed it and joined it to the department for the history of the Byzantine Church. And even that didn’t exist before. We studied the history of heretical societies, but we did not hear a single lecture on the history of the Orthodox Slavic Churches in four years. About the fall of feudalism under the Capetians, about the situation of peasants, workers and townspeople under the Bourbons, about the Norman period in English history, about how James and Charles fought against parliament - I had to listen to lectures about all this at the Theological Academy, but no lectures were given about the church life of the Orthodox Slavs. For two months I sat on an essay on agrarian relations among the ancient Germans, but I did not specifically study the history of the Slavs for even two days. I think that among the students of our theological academies there will be many who will not be able to name the autocephalous Orthodox Slavic Churches. Don't you think, my friend, that all this is abnormal? Wouldn't you agree, Friend, with me that we Russians are not without guilt in the sad disunion of the Slavs? We stuck more to the Germans. Why be surprised if we are forced to speak German with the Slavs! I hope, Friend, that now we will retreat from the Germans and come closer to our brothers, who until now have been “in the nets of the treacherous Teutons” for centuries. And then, perhaps, Tyutchev’s prophecy will be fulfilled: It is not in vain that the Holy Church, in the troparion to Equal-to-the-Apostles Cyril and Methodius, asks the teachers of the Slovenian countries to the Lord of all to pray “to establish all Slovenian languages in Orthodoxy and unanimity.” I don’t know what will happen in the future: common Orthodoxy or like-mindedness, but I just think that without unity in the holy Orthodox faith, the Slavs cannot achieve true like-mindedness. Letter three. Cologne Cathedral Do not think, my dear Friend, that this letter will be entirely devoted to the description of Cologne Cathedral or its history. No, Cologne Cathedral this time will serve for me only as a symbol of religious European consciousness. I chose Cologne Cathedral for many reasons. Of the many Gothic cathedrals I have seen, Cologne made the most irresistible impression on me. I visited it several times, admired it from the outside and from all sides, and spent a long time inside contemplating its pointed tops. I examined other ancient cathedrals in Europe more like historical monuments, visited with the cold attention of a tourist who should see all the sights. There, only a wave of historical memories and dreams attacked the soul. I remembered kings, feudal lords, knights, tournaments. This was not the case near Cologne Cathedral. He beckoned me to him with some incomprehensible force. I glared at him as I approached the city along the Rhine. Leaving Cologne, I came to the cathedral to say goodbye. Rarely, very rarely have I experienced such a strong impression of artistic unity as I did near Cologne Cathedral. The Vienna Stephansdom, the ancient Mainz Cathedral, the Kaiserdom in Frankfurt am Main, the Notre-Dame de Paris, the Vienna Votivkirche and other Gothic cathedrals did not make such an impression on me. I, my Friend, not coping with courses in the history of medieval art, will tell you my opinion: Cologne Cathedral seems to me the most striking example of the Gothic architectural style. Just think, Friend, the dark gray masses of the Cologne Cathedral embodied the genius of a number of German artists: construction began in the 13th century, the cathedral was completely finished only in 1880. And regardless of the Cologne Cathedral, the Gothic style, it seems to me, is most typical for the West, in particular for the religious consciousness of the West. What exactly is the Gothic style? This is a purely Western product of art. There are no traces of Greek or Roman influence to be found in this style. This style began in the West already when the West fell away from the Church, when, consequently, the religious consciousness of the West became isolated from the Church-Christian consciousness. What came of this isolation? Take a closer look, dear Friend, at least at these photographs of the Cologne Cathedral, take a closer look - won’t you find the answer here? The exterior of Cologne Cathedral can be captivating. Look at the complexity of the drawing, the complexity of the artistic concept, what a mass of architectural details! And with all that, what grace, what subtlety of work, what unity of the artistic whole! There are many patterns of architectural design - and, however, everything is in its place, nothing catches the eye separately, nothing is visible that is superfluous. And everything is up, everything is up. When I came close to the cathedral for the first time, I felt as if someone was pulling me up too. Let's now go inside the cathedral. Inside, the impression remains the same impression of artistic unity. Here only the overall tone is lighter: not dark gray, almost black, like outside, but gray-yellow. And here, inside, countless columns stretched upward, intertwined there with complex arches. But it is so high that it hurts your head when you tilt it back to see the arches. The design inside is also complex: after all, there is not a single round column, each column seems to be connected from a dozen separate columns. However, inside you soon notice – and even with an unpleasant feeling – the monotony. The entire interior is filled with only columns, and the columns are all exactly the same. Some time passes and you begin to feel that in this beautiful, artistically built church something is missing, and something essential is missing. Thought begins to work, trying to answer the question of what is missing in the Cologne Cathedral and every Gothic church. The answer soon emerges by itself: God is missing here, holiness is missing, life is missing. Look at the interior of the cathedral! You will see that only two rows of statues along the columns of the middle nave decorate the cathedral, but these statues seem to have frozen, frozen - they are as gray as the columns. There is no what we call church splendor here. What remains? All that remains are the artistic tricks of the architect. The eyes wander over the architectural details - and that’s all. And enter our Orthodox church, decorated with all the beauty of church splendor, for example, the Trinity Cathedral of our Sergius Lavra. (I don’t find an equal church anywhere!) Here everything is imbued with holiness; First of all, when you enter here, you feel that you have entered the house of God, and your hand involuntarily raises to make the sign of the cross. In Orthodox churches, architectural art itself stands behind, as it were. I do not recognize Orthodox churches without church splendor at all and cannot in any way approve, for example, of the majority of Petrograd churches. Enter, for example, the Alexander Nevsky Lavra Cathedral! Many times you need to remind yourself that you have entered a church, and not just some gallery. We began to build empty churches when we contacted Western heretics and began to imitate them. Our pious ancestors always built churches with full church decoration. Sacred paintings cover the entire interior of our ancient churches. And in the new churches of the St. Petersburg era of Russian history, they began to hang only here and there paintings in frames and completely ugly paintings. It is remarkable that these paintings evoke, first of all, not religious pious moods, but only artistic emotions, as would be the case outside any church, for example, in an art gallery. That is why many people visit such churches in a way that one should not visit churches, but as one should only go around art galleries. I will not forget how one day in the Cathedral of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra a lady tourist, looking at a guidebook, asked me: – Tell me, where are the icons of Van Dyck and Rubens? - Madam! We don't have such saints. Such churches, which can only arouse sorrow and despondency, appeared among us, I say, only during the unfortunate St. Petersburg period, when we lived in someone else’s mind and turned away from our native historical treasures. But the Gothic style is such that a church built in this style cannot in any way be decorated in a church way to resemble God’s dwelling. Columns, columns, a whole forest of columns - but there is nowhere to paint a sacred picture. They came up with the idea of ​​​​making mosaic transparent windows, but from the middle nave the window images are not visible, and sometimes there are just carpet decorations, without any sacred paintings. This is how heretical Gothic churches stand – empty, as if uninhabited, somehow soulless. Take furniture, paintings and everything else out of any well-furnished apartment - it will be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and you will want to leave as soon as possible. I will make, my friend, one sharp comparison. If in a Gothic church, for example, in the Cologne Cathedral, rails are laid and steam locomotives with carriages are installed, then, in essence, there will be no offense to religious feelings. And try to do the same here in the Trinity or Assumption Cathedral - it’s simply terrible to imagine such blasphemy! In Dante's Inferno, heretics are tormented in hot, cramped coffins. This means that the sin of heretics is their narrowness, their one-sidedness. Everywhere outside of Orthodoxy one feels narrowness, some kind of myopia. For example, Western heretics care so much about the comfort of their own homes, how many styles they have invented that are more convenient than each other! But for God’s dwelling they invented Gothic, completely uncomfortable, gloomy, dry and dead. Apparently life moved away from religion when the heretics left the Church. It is remarkable that Gothic developed during the period of dominance of scholasticism. It seems to me, dear Friend, that Gothic and Scholasticism are related to each other. The scholastic system, like the Cologne Cathedral, can be complex and harmonious: there are many little things in it, but all these little things are connected with each other, they hold on to each other. But you will approach any scholastic system and you will see that, for all its harmony, it is lifeless, it smells of death. Gothic is scholasticism in stone. Scholasticism among Western heretics replaced religious life with its varied colors of feeling, with its beautiful impulses of will. In Western religious thinking, scholasticism dominates: Catholics study according to Thomas Aquinas, Protestants took up religious thinking for its own sake, without any connection with life. Even ancient church writers reproached heretics for rationalism, and Orthodox theologians, starting with A.S. Khomyakov, began to reproach Western heretics for rationalism. It seems to me that the Gothic architecture of Western churches also preaches about this rationalization of Christian life. For this it is worth tormenting Western heretics in cramped coffins. It is impossible to imagine narrower and more one-sided people than rationalists. It is not for nothing, my friend, that some art historians called the Gothic style the German style; The French disowned this style back in the 18th century. Yes, not in vain, because rationalism seems to have captured the German soul more than any other. It was the Germans who decided to replace theology with theological science. It was the Germans in philosophy who did not spare the world for the triumph of abstract thought. The typical German Kant turned the whole world into the incomprehensible and incomprehensible Ding an sich 2. A Slav is not a rationalist by nature. Rationalism is disgusting to a Slav. Do you remember how Tolstoy writes about self-confidence? “Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract idea, science, that is, an imaginary knowledge of perfect truth... A German is self-confident worse than anyone, and more firmly than anyone, and most disgustingly, because he imagines that he knows the truth, a science that he himself invented, but which for him is the absolute truth” (“War and Peace”). Here I hear the voice of a Slav. It’s only a pity that Tolstoy himself, as a religious false teacher, completely stood on the basis of disgusting German rationalism, German science. In “The Connection and Translation of the Four Gospels” he has the German Reise, one of the unimportant German scholars, on almost every page. It is no coincidence, I think, that the Gothic style could not take root in Slavic countries: it certainly does not suit Orthodoxy, and without Orthodoxy it will not find a sympathetic response in the Slavic soul. The Czechs have a Gothic cathedral in Prague, but their love for it is not visible: it is extremely neglected and so crowded with buildings that it can only be seen from a distance. But You, my dear Friend, perhaps object to me: “Is all religious life in the West really replaced by scholasticism and rationalism? Isn’t there mysticism and feeling there?” Oh, undoubtedly there is, but only mysticism and religious feeling in the West have an unhealthy imprint. And you know, my friend, it seems to me that the shades of this unhealthy feeling, by the way, are also materialized in the Gothic style. You and I can find these shades in the same Cologne Cathedral. Where did Gothic come from? Some answered this question like this: “The primary grain of Gothic is in the dense forests of Gaul and Germany with their intertwining peaks, with high and even trunks, with their mysterious twilight.” Chateaubriand, for example, said that in Gothic churches there is the same religious horror and mystery as in a dense forest. Religious horror... I like this expression; it conveys well the impression of Gothic churches. See the interior of Cologne Cathedral. Imagine that you are there, that dusk is gathering behind the patterned windows. Only the lamp flickers on the altar. The vaulted ceiling is completely buried in darkness. Religious horror will involuntarily creep into the soul... I can recommend to you, Friend, one experience. Take a closer and longer look at the image of the inside of the Cologne Cathedral. Even the picture exudes some kind of dreamy spirit. Isn't it true? And in the cathedral itself, just sit on a bench closer to the column - now daydreaming will attack. And I can imagine how you can sit in the twilight of the cathedral! The sounds of the organ rush, drown in the darkness under the arches, echo in the far corners of the church behind the rows of fancy columns... Creepiness and dreaminess - that, I think, is what should fill the soul of a person praying in a Gothic church! Remember how Victor Hugo describes Notre-Dame de Paris! There is also a lot of eerie and dreamy, sometimes even scary. Slave fear and sentimental daydreaming are what are materialized in the Gothic of the Cologne Cathedral, but these are precisely the features that distinguish Western religious feeling, Western religious mysticism. Recently, we have been remembering Francis of Assisi more often than necessary. But I personally simply cannot stand the sentimentalism of this Western mystic with his “sister swallows”, etc. Our saints were free from painful mysticism and sugary sentimentality. Take St. Sergius. How different his holy soul is from the enthusiastic and sentimental soul of Francis! Thanks to M.V. Lodyzhensky for showing in his mystical trilogy the superiority of the soul of St. Seraphim over the soul of Francis (“The Invisible Light”). Our saints do not have even a shadow of dreaminess, not to mention “religious horror.” And in general, at this point, Orthodox Russian psychology differs significantly from Western, heretical psychology. Idealism and realism, positivism and mysticism are combined together in the Russian soul. This was noted as a feature of the Russian soul by the Frenchman Leroy-Beaulieu (L'empire des tsars et les russes 3. Vol. III). It is not for nothing that sometimes Russian monasteries run excellent households and do so in simplicity of heart, without feeling any conflicts or doubts. Perhaps You, dear Friend, will think: “What’s wrong if the Gothic style produces religious horror?” But I think that religious horror should not be the goal of a Christian church. After all, a church is a place for the liturgical meeting of the Church; here “the sacrament of meeting or communion” takes place, as the author of the essay “On the Church Hierarchy” says. Any communication, of course, drives away any kind of “horror” from the soul. There is absolutely no sentimentality in church services, in church melodies of sacred osmoglanie. But how much of this nasty sentimentality there is in various sectarian meetings! It's sickening to listen to! I’ll tell you, Friend, frankly that I don’t like huge churches, like, for example, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where thousands gather and where therefore there is no “parish” and where the “sacrament of meeting” does not take place. It is dogmatically absurd when worship turns into some kind of spectacle, when pilgrims only observe what is happening, remaining completely alien to each other. It’s a completely different matter when our own people gather, when our priest is serving. And you especially experience the sacrament of gathering in sparsely populated monasteries, for example in the Paraclete desert, where everyone has their own place for worship and everyone gathers together. In such monastery churches, the sacrament of the Church, the sacrament of the congregation, is performed palpably, but in the “St. Isaac’s” this sacrament is not felt at all, as if it does not exist at all. But we began to build huge churches again, following the example of Western heretics, and earlier, for example, in Moscow they preferred to build “forty forty” churches, even if not huge ones. So, my friend, this is what the Cologne Cathedral says, if you look at it more closely. He talks about the rationalization of Christianity in the West; he speaks of the dreaminess of the morbid mysticism of the West. Rationalism absolutely does not tolerate church splendor; he wants the churches to be as dry and lifeless as logical diagrams, and the driven and suppressed feeling turns into stunted sentimentalism. In rationalism, both Catholicism and Protestantism are equal. And here, in my opinion, is a remarkable fact: they have the same church architecture, and the internal appearance of the churches is equally colorless, although Catholics recognize the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which forever blessed all church splendor. Rationalism radically undermines the main nerve of Christianity: the ideal of the deification of human nature, established at the incarnation of the Son of God. The Orthodox Church lives by this ideal, as evidenced by our ecclesiastical splendor. Indeed, according to the thoughts of the fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, “icon painting” serves us “to assure the true, and not the imaginary, incarnation of God the Word.” Protestants rejected the dogma of icon veneration, and now they are not at all confident in the true incarnation of God the Word. What did Protestants turn Christianity itself into? They turned it into some kind of religious system, which, moreover, everyone can formulate in their own way. Protestantism is Christianity without Christ, the Son of God, it is the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. But Catholics have also turned Christianity into a commercial transaction with God: good Catholics do “good deeds” and present a detailed bill to the Lord God for payment as a “reward.” Just as in earthly life a penalty under a writ of execution can be transferred to another, so, according to the Catholic faith, one can act in the matter of salvation: you can acquire someone else’s writ of execution, and the Lord God is obliged to fully pay the due “reward.” The true incarnation of God the Word has no place here either. An amazing thing!.. I saw many Catholic and Protestant churches and involuntarily thought: “Here you, gentlemen heretics, have decorated your churches with various architectural curls, your altars sometimes look like windows of furniture stores - well, tell me frankly, is this really better than our icon painting?” It seems to me, my dear Friend, that the internal appearance of Western churches is not a mere accident of taste. No, the basis lies precisely in the West’s perversion of Christianity itself, the darkening and even rejection of the true Christian ideal. If Christianity is a scholastic system, then Christian meetings need an audience that is more or less comfortable, and not a church. All Protestant, especially Reformed churches are similar to auditoriums: benches and a pulpit - that’s all the interior decoration. Do you know, my friend, sometimes Western churches simply horrified me; I was indignant with all my soul when I saw these fruits of religious poverty, religious squalor. I'll tell you about one of my similar experiences. It was in Dresden. Sunday. I hear them ringing all over the city, as if in what city of ours. Even though the ringing was pitiful, plaintive and cracked, not our solemn, majestic, soul-lifting sound, it still became pleasant: and the heretics, they say, honor the Lord! I went to mass at an Orthodox church. It is especially pleasant to hear the Orthodox service “in foreign lands.” After mass I went to the city center by tram. I see that almost the entire carriage was filled with pilgrims of the Orthodox church. Only Russian speech is heard. A priest is sitting here in a cassock with a pectoral cross. (Back then I was still in indecent clothes, that is, in secular clothes!) It was so nice! I reached Altmarkt. There is a large Protestant Kirche 4 nearby. It seems like Frauenkirche. However, I don’t remember exactly now. I walk through the door. The stairs lead up. I'm getting up. So what? Just like, for example, in the Moscow Bolshoi Theater, when they go up to the gallery. You go up to the floor - there is a door. Another floor - there is a door again. I still don’t dare to go in, but I’ve climbed too high – it seems to me, to the third floor. He opened the door and entered. What happened? I seemed to be on the balcony of the second tier. The huge church is built in exactly the same way as theaters are built. Below is a ground floor, and on the sides there are several tiers of balconies. Here and there, very sparsely, there are visitors sitting. Near one of the balconies there is a high pulpit, and on it the preacher-pastor delivers a sermon, as if he were giving a lecture in a well-equipped auditorium. I remember well, such pity overwhelmed me for the unfortunate heretics who so devastated, so discolored Christianity, made it mortally boring! There are no sacred images in the church: balconies, chairs and a pulpit - that’s all, nothing more. Oh, how I felt at that time the incomparable superiority of holy Orthodoxy! Yes, in the West, churches constantly turn, if not into theaters, then into concert halls. You enter the church and see posters hanging on the porch. What's happened? It turns out that in churches on certain days after services, concerts are given. Organist so-and-so, who came from somewhere. Everything has been announced. One concert - price 1 mark or franc, 12 concerts - price 10 marks or francs. I especially remember one such concert that I heard in the beautiful Swiss town of Interlaken at the foot of the Jungfrau. It was announced that a London organist was giving a concert on a huge organ driven by an electric motor. After the evening service, when the crowd had left, the servers walked between the benches and turned their backs to the altar. Just like on some Moscow trams, when you have to go in the opposite direction. Those who remained to listen to the concert sat down facing the organ and with their backs to the throne. My surprise increased even more when, having purchased the program, I saw secular singing numbers. In every concert, for example, the program included the play “Sturm” (“Storm”), I don’t know which composer. The thing is truly magnificent, and in the powerful performance of the organ it is downright delightful. I think that you, my Friend, who understand music a thousand times more than I do, would really like this piece. I would like to listen to it with You, to experience and feel together this magnificent sea of ​​sounds - sometimes powerful and menacing, like the waves of a fiercely stormy sea, sometimes quietly rumbling, like the sound of a distant sea, when the clouds have already disappeared, the sun has come out, but the sea still does not want to calm down. Yes, but listening to this in the church... You must first forget that you are in the church. In the West this is easy to do. In all Western churches, starting even with the Cologne Cathedral, it is easy to forget about the church, and precisely because, as I said at the beginning of the letter, they lack God, lack holiness. In our Orthodox churches you will not forget about God. Try to stand facing west in our Trinity Cathedral or in our academic church - instead of the iconostasis you will see a menacing picture of the Last Judgment. When you see this picture, you will not dream of a musical “Storm”, but rather you will think about how to calm the storm of passions in your soul and disperse the black clouds of sin. Letter four. Divine service It was on the picturesque shores of the marvelous Lake Geneva, in Lausanne... I cannot, my dear Friend, be indifferent to Switzerland. I was born and still live in central Russia, and I love the mountains and the sea. Our Caucasus is beautiful and formidable, but the beauty there is somehow austere, sometimes harsh. There are not enough mountain lakes there. And Switzerland is precisely rich in the most beautiful and beautiful lakes that can only be found among the mountains. Indeed, such a mountainous country, and almost all of it can be traveled by boat! You are sailing on a steamboat, and strange mountain masses approach the very shores, sometimes whitened at the top with snow. Streams rush down from the mountains noisily, often even turning into waterfalls. Our Crimean tourists travel from Yalta to look at the Uchan-Su waterfall. After the Swiss waterfalls, it’s somehow awkward to mention our attractions. The combination of mountain beauty with the beauty of streams and lakes gives me the impression of something majestic and at the same time soft and gentle. I love, my dear, the beauty of God’s world! How many times have I been delighted and moved by this beauty! How many times have I wanted to pray in the great church of nature! I remember a story I read somewhere about Archbishop Innokenty (Borisov). He watched the sunrise on Chatyr-Dag (oh, this is also a beautiful place!). He needed to serve the liturgy. He said: “I have already listened to Matins at Chatyr-Dag.” I understand this saint-poet, saint-artist with a tender and lofty soul! Mountain peaks bring a person closer to God and tear him away from the earth. Among the mountain beauties, all our “deeds” suddenly seem small, insignificant, and not worth attention to me. And if you take a break from all these “things”, you will involuntarily feel God in your heart. I really regret that I did not have the opportunity to attend the service on Mount Athos in that church, which was built at the very top of Mount Athos. I think that the liturgy there should be special. But among the beauties of nature, it is our Orthodox liturgy that is needed, our Orthodox service - majestic and grateful. For me, my dear and wonderful Friend, the memory of Lausanne, do you know what, is inextricably linked with it? With thoughts about the superiority of Orthodox worship over Western European heretical ones. Why is this so? But just by a little accident, which I’ll tell you about now. When you go up the mountain from the coastal Ouchy to Lausanne, you will see a beautiful view of Lake Geneva. All of it is among the mountains. From the opposite bank Mont Blanc itself looks out from afar. On a summer day, the lake is shrouded in haze. Steamboats ply it in different directions. You look at this beauty and you don’t want to tear yourself away. High up, as if on a special ledge of a mountain, stands the cathedral. I sat for a long time under the shady trees near the cathedral, immersed in silent contemplation of the beautiful painting of the great Artist of the world, bathed in sunlight. What a wealth of beauty in this picture! But then I go to the cathedral and... I am amazed at the squalor of its builders and “beautifiers.” Oh, how annoying it was for me to see this fruit of the religious misery of the Protestants right here, among the soul-delighting beauty of God's world! Bare gray stone walls and wooden benches - nothing more! Do the permanent residents of Lausanne really not feel this contradiction, which struck me from the first time, the contradiction between what is inside and what is outside their cathedral! Beauty and wealth are outside the church, but in the church there is wretched monotony. They decorate their own houses with flowers, plants, and balconies everywhere. Why should the church of God be without any decoration, dry, monotonous and inhospitable? Yes, another thing I noticed in the cathedral! There must have been statues in it before. Now these statues have been removed and lie disfigured on the floor in the corners of the cathedral, I don’t know why; it must be as a curious curiosity for visitors to examine. Such an indecent disregard for the saints of God! I sat with such thoughts for a long time on one of the benches in the cathedral. It was Saturday. The cathedral was empty. A servant came, like our watchman, or maybe a sexton, and began to prepare what was needed for the service. Usually in Protestant churches, worshipers hold in their hands Gesangbuch 5, a book of prayers. Each of these prayers is marked with a special number. And what numbers need to be sung are posted on a special board on the wall somewhere, sometimes in several places. I see that the sexton (I’ll call him that) pulled out a drawer from one of the tables. In his drawer he has numbers on cards, like those that are used in schools when children begin to learn numbers. From these numbers, the sexton compiled three or four numbers on a special board. I saw him dragging the phone to the preaching pulpit, called somewhere, probably the pastor, talked a little, changed one number on the board, and then hung the entire board on the wall. With me was my friend and friend from the academy, now a teacher of liturgics at one of the seminaries. I tell him: “Here’s the whole Typikon for you!” Indeed, what a simplification of service! After all, our Typikon is a book of more than a thousand pages. And take the leather-bound edition of the Edinoverie Typikon - it weighs almost a pound! There are so many details and various subtleties here! Just look at some Markov or church chapters! So the question arises: what is better – our Orthodox Typikon or a box with numbers? Remember how Leskov’s Tula blacksmith, who visited London, speaks about the advantages of the Orthodox faith: “Our books are much thicker” (“Lefty”). Very smart and completely fair judgment! In particular, it can be usefully attributed to liturgical books. Take Protestant liturgical books and compare them with our range of liturgical books. A Protestant liturgical book can be put into any pocket, even in secular clothing. What about us? Two Triodi, two Octoechos and twelve Menaia of menstruation - you can’t hide these books in your pocket, you need a whole closet for them. Maybe all this is unnecessary? Many people have heard an affirmative answer to this question. With You, my intelligent and pious Friend, it seems that we almost did not talk about the superiority of our worship compared to Western European ones. Let's talk a little now. Personally, I see our undoubted advantage in the fact that “our books are much thicker.” If our books are thicker, it means that we had more prayerful inspiration, we had more church poets, hymn writers and sweet singers. Indeed, even before the separation of the West from the Church, there were incomparably more church hymn-writers in the East, and our enormous advantage is that we did not throw away the rich heritage of the ancient Church with sinful neglect. We have preserved this inheritance and even increased it. And the West, in proud self-delusion, suddenly neglected all this inheritance, considered it beneath its dignity, and replaced the Typikon with a box of cards. Often Western theologians claim that Luther and others like him restored the true ancient Christianity. The idea of ​​“restoring Christianity,” in my opinion, can only be considered an extreme absurdity. Is it possible for a fifty-year-old person to regain the second or third decade of his life? Isn't it the same in the life of the Church? Each age has its own characteristics, and it has the right to have these characteristics. The Holy Spirit did not live only in the Church, but always lives in it. Why should centuries be forgotten, starting, say, from the fourth? Why not go back to the first century? Is there a limit to which one should “restore true Christianity”? Where is she? Who defined it? Who can determine it? These are the questions, I think, my dear Friend, that need to be asked when it comes to “simplifying” Christian theology, about liberating Christianity from later layers. We especially often talk about the supposedly excessive ritualism in worship. Some even call the Church Typikon “Orthodox Talmud.” Extreme nonsense! Our worship became more complicated gradually over the course of centuries. Gradually our thick books were compiled: Triodion, Octoechos and others. All this can only be called development, progress of worship. As a result of this progress, the Typikon turned out, this summary of all the best that happened over the centuries in different countries: and near Jerusalem in the monastery of St. Savva, and in Constantinople in the Studite monastery, and on Holy Mount Athos, and here, in ancient pious Rus'. The very name “Typikon”, that is, a model or ideal, is remarkable. With its beauty, an ideal evokes an involuntary desire for its implementation, although it is rarely possible to realize an ideal in all its beauty. Our Typikon is more complex than Western liturgical orders, and in this I, my friend, see our advantage. The Typikon unites us with the entire universal Church, with all its centuries. The West did not restore true Christianity, but broke the living connection with entire centuries of the ancient Church. Simplification of worship is self-robbery. Indeed, in regard to worship, the West has fallen into poverty and squalor. In fact, what can be observed in all German churches? They will gather in an empty hall, sit on the benches, sing a few spiritual verses, listen to a sermon - that’s all. Boredom and monotony are the most deadly! Isn’t it wonderful that with all the richness of Western culture, with the constant complexity of life, Western worship is becoming more and more poor, impersonal, simplified, colorless! Not so with us. Of course, in our country real liturgical life is maintained mainly and almost exclusively in monasteries. Parish churches have moved too far away from the typical ideal and have depersonalized our wonderful worship. I sincerely regret that You, Friend, with all your piety (I know him!) see little and understand the beauty of our worship. We need to visit monasteries more. In monasteries, each holiday has its own special character. Indeed, in the Typikon, special melodies are even set for every major holiday, “self-concordant stichera” are sung. You wait in advance to see how the stichera will be sung, for example, the Annunciation, “To Augustus Sovereign” at Christmas, “Glorious Today” at Trinity. And what a variety of services! Christmas and Epiphany with their eves, Lent and Pentecost... Ah, Friend, how sorry I am for secular people who either do not attend divine services at all, or go only to mass! Mass is the end of the holiday. For me personally, in comparison with divine services, all sorts of operas, concerts, etc. seem downright pitiful and poor. There are days when divine services in parish churches make it possible to at least partially understand and feel the beauty of Orthodox worship. These days are the last days of Holy Week and the entire Easter week. I have nothing to tell you about these days. You know them yourself and, I hope, you feel in your heart all their inexplicable beauty. Well, imagine, my dear, that instead of Matins on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, instead of Easter Matins, we would gather, sit on the benches, sing a few poems to the music and go home! After all, that would be an insult, a mockery, an insult. This is what comes from the “simplification” of worship, from the “restoration of early Christian simplicity”! So, my friend, I do not at all envy the Westerners that instead of the Typikon they have a box with numbers. The complexity of our worship is a sign that we are living the church life. We have nothing to be ashamed of our Typikon and, as it were, to apologize for it to enlightened Europeans or Russian Westerners. Ignorance and complete bad manners in the church sense are the only reasons for the arrogant attitude towards the liturgical regulations of the Orthodox Church. But perhaps an even more important advantage of our worship will reveal itself if we pay attention to its internal content. In its internal content and even in its external presentation, Western worship is extremely poor and amazingly mediocre. No matter how many Western European liturgical books I read, I only became stronger in my low opinion of their content. There is no theology in Western worship, little thought at all. But there is too much in it, which is extremely disgusting for me, some kind of sentimental familiarity with “Jesus”. Our worship is directly saturated with theology, and the most pure and sublime theology. After all, most of our church hymns were composed during the period of patristic boldness in theological thought, sometimes composed by great theologians, for example, St. John of Damascus, this greatest religious poet. After all, only we have “dogmatists” in our worship. Do you remember, my friend, on the night before Christmas I wrote to you about the distortion of the Christian understanding of life that has become established in Western theology - both Catholics and Protestants: it talks about redemption, about liberation from punishment for insulting the truth of God by sin. Christianity turns into some kind of meaningless trade deal with the Lord God. When our school theology fell under the harmful influence of Western theology, then we began to philosophize in a similar way. But at the same time I wrote to you that ancient church theology was imbued with completely different ideas. The idea of ​​renewal of human nature, the idea of ​​its deification through the incarnation of the Son of God, dominated there. Sin is not a crime, but a disease, the corruption of nature, which is internally associated with suffering, while liberation from sin, from corruption, gives bliss. Virtue itself is bliss, and sin is suffering. And it’s wonderful that in our worship services you encounter these very thoughts at every step. Our worship is a living element of the ancient church patristic sublime theology. Anyone who is at all familiar with the ancient church teaching about salvation will hear echoes of this lofty teaching in almost every prayer, in almost every stichera. It is not in vain that the “Epistle of the Patriarchs” says about our liturgical books that they “contain sound and true theology.” Yes, my friend, if our Eastern Orthodox worship is compared with the Western in terms of their ideological and theological content, then our superiority will be undeniable. The West, especially the German Protestant one, rejected the deeply meaningful chants of the ancient church inspired hymnals and began to use the poems of their own masters. In the West, not only school theology has broken with church truth, but also worship itself. The West has discarded the wonderful heritage of antiquity and replaced it with its own wretchedness. This is generally characteristic of any proud heresy: I certainly want my own, even if it is bad. Look at our sectarianism, at this fiend of the West. The Triodi and Oktoechos were rejected and replaced by Mr. Prokhanov’s mediocre translations from German and English. Have you, my friend, seen the sectarian collection of chants “Gusli”? What really upsets me in “The Gusli” is the ideological squalor, theological feeblemindedness, and general mediocrity. Think, Friend, and agree with me that the East is richer and smarter than the West in its service to the Lord God. Compare, Friend, even the external form of our liturgical chants with the form of Western ones - and again undoubted superiority is on our side. What breadth, what flight of thought and imagination in our chants! Read dogmatism, stichera for the Annunciation, the service of Holy Week, remember the kontakion of Nativity, Trinity, Intercession and much more! If you appreciate all this only from an artistic point of view, then, I think, you cannot help but be delighted. Western liturgical chants cannot be compared in any way. Turn your attention, my friend, even to the tunes. I can’t say that I heard much secular singing, but I still heard something; only it could never make such an impression on me as our church singing. I sincerely pity You, my friend, that You know little about church singing and value it little. But secular singing seems simply poor and boring to me. Western church singing is significantly different from ours. Our church singing is dominated by two elements: majestic and solemn and touching “with sweet singing.” Even in our sacred osmoconciliation these two elements can be distinguished. Compare, for example, the third voice with the eighth. The verses of self-congratulation are usually majestic and solemn; the tunes “like” are for the most part touching and touching. I am writing to you now, my Friend, about “self-agreement” and “similar” and I involuntarily think: “But for your Friend all these are empty words!” It’s a pity, a pity, my dear, that different operas are more familiar to you than “similar” and “self-agreeable”! And all this can be learned in monasteries, because in parish churches, especially in Moscow, the worst melodies of various “composers” have now become established. These melodies offend and outrage me, but the various monastery melodies always delight me. The singing of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, our Gethsemane monastery, the Zosima Hermitage (“Bless”, “Blessed is the Man”), the Optina stichera - what a luxury it all is, what amazing music! In Western singing, I am especially struck by the dominance of plaintive motives. These plaintive motives dominate in the West even where we are celebrating triumph. Have you heard, Friend, at least in a Polish church, how they sing “Holy God”, especially “have mercy on us”? And how is this same angelic song sung here, for example, at bishop’s mass? And here, in my opinion, is a very significant fact: the West is very proud of its culture, its freedom, its enlightenment, but when they gather in a church or church, they whine pitifully with some kind of slavish spirit. Yes, in Western Christianity (if you can talk about such a thing) there is a slave spirit. Theology and church practice inspires a person there that he is a criminal, worthy only of the punishment of Divine justice. For centuries, it was the slave spirit that was brought up in the West in the sphere of religion, and that is why the tunes there are plaintive. I involuntarily drew a parallel. Rich, cleanly dressed, self-satisfied Western people will gather in their church, sit on the benches and... sing pitifully, as if criminals are asking for mercy. And in our country, homespun Rus' with knapsacks on its shoulders will gather on a pilgrimage to the holy monastery, crowd into the church, you can barely stand, and loud triumphant chants rush from the choir, as if a victorious army is marching forward. Yes, my friend, Orthodoxy is the faith not of slaves, but of free people, not of mercenaries, but of sons, not of criminals, tremblingly awaiting execution, but of ascetics fighting against sinful passions, for whom crowns of incorruption are prepared in heaven. Letter five. Orthodoxy in the West On these July days, in my solitude among the empty academic buildings, I often remember, my dear Friend, how, also on July days, several years ago, I visited Russian Orthodox churches on holidays in various Western European centers. First of all, I remember that you definitely need to look for a Russian church in the West and that finding it is not entirely easy. For some reason, Russian churches are everywhere in European capitals, somewhere in the outskirts, in some alleys, far from city centers. I’m not talking about resorts where half the population was Russian in the summer. I'm talking about capitals. Only in Geneva is the Russian church visible in the general view of the city from Lake Geneva. I wandered around Vienna a lot, looking for a Russian church; It’s not easy to get to the Russian church in Paris either. And in Berlin you won’t find your own church at all; there is only a house church at the embassy on Unter den Linden. How are you going to go to the embassy? The embassy building is huge and impressive, but there was not much room for a church. And the real Russian church is already outside Berlin, in Tegel, where the Russian colony has found a place for itself with its institutions. I haven’t had a chance to visit Rome yet, but people who were close to it told me about the Russian Church in Rome. Where do you think she is located? In rented premises, in a simple house. They say there was such a case recently. The house owner did not want to renew the contract with the Russian mission, because the owner of the cinema wanted to pay more for the premises. So, move out with your Orthodox church, take out your altars and icons - you need the premises for cinema! It is extremely offensive for the Russian heart to see such a humiliation of our native Orthodoxy! And where else? In Rome, where Catholicism appears in all its greatness. Deceased - alas! the now deceased Berlin archpriest A.P. Maltsev painfully felt the abnormality of the situation of the Russian church in Berlin and dreamed of building a church in the city itself. He has already collected a significant amount of money to realize his dream. But now, of course, Berlin will not soon be decorated with an Orthodox church. However, I involuntarily have a thought: why should only individuals care about setting up decent Orthodox churches in European capitals? Isn’t this some kind of duty of the entire Russian Church and the entire Russian state? After all, they find it necessary to spend considerable sums on the maintenance of embassies. They are trying to ensure that the embassy is furnished in accordance with the greatness of Russia. Why not make sure that the church at the embassy is worthy of the Russian Orthodox name? And sometimes it seems that there is some kind of conscious neglect here. I also don’t understand well why our churches are usually driven into some kind of back alleys. The non-Orthodox living here don’t act like that. In Petrograd, on Nevsky Prospekt opposite the Kazan Cathedral, both Catholic and Protestant churches are striking. We also say about this: “Look how the colonnade of the Kazan Cathedral is open towards heterodox churches! It’s as if the Orthodox Church has opened its arms to Catholics and Protestants!” And I involuntarily see, my friend, an addition to these words: “Only non-Orthodox people back away and seem to shy away from Orthodox embraces!” The fact is that heterodox churches retreat from the line of houses on the avenue and I get the impression that they are shunning the open arms of the Kazan Cathedral. In the same Petrograd, look from the Trinity Bridge towards the fortress and Kamennoostrovsky Avenue. You will see how even the Peter and Paul Cathedral is lost in comparison with the dome and patterns of the oriental carpet of the mosque. Trinity Cathedral - small, old, low - could not stand Mohammed's neighborhood and burned down. That's how it is with us! For other people's churches - a better and more visible place! And in the West we ourselves are moving with our Orthodox churches somewhere away from enlightened European eyes, somewhere in a quiet alley. And the service itself in foreign churches has its own characteristics. I won’t say that these features are desirable. Seven years ago, on one holiday, I had to perform the duties of a psalm-reader in the Viennese Orthodox Church. At 10 o'clock in the morning we began to serve Matins and soon reached the Liturgy. While I was reading the clock, singers gathered in the choir. The liturgy began. I see that the singers sing well and skillfully, although there were only a few of them. Suddenly I notice that our regent is speaking to his singers in German. Are they really Germans? They started singing something musical. I looked at the sheet music of my neighbor, a blond tenor - the words of the chant were signed under the sheet music in Latin letters. I asked the regent who his singers were. It turned out that they were indeed non-Russian. My neighbor is German, the other singers are Czechs, but there are no Russians except the regent. In the same way, only one regent is Orthodox, and all the singers are Catholics. How do you like it, my friend? Orthodox people in a foreign land have gathered in their native church, but non-Orthodox people, even the Germans themselves, sing to them, singing something they do not understand. The singers at our services sometimes replace all those present and praying. There is some difference in the liturgical books: one must be sung by the “face”, the other by the “people”, that is, all the people in the church. But in practice, everyone is a choirboy. They sing at the litanies “Lord, have mercy,” they conclude the priest’s exclamations with the word “Amen,” thereby expressing their agreement and like-mindedness with the priest. A truly Orthodox person cannot only listen to the liturgy - he must participate in it. And so in foreign churches, during services, the Orthodox are replaced by heterodox Germans, who are not at all of the same mind with the Orthodox priest. In Rus', since the time of Peter, the Germans have stood between the tsar and the people, and in the West the Germans have even stood between God and the Orthodox people. And what kind of worship is possible with foreigners singing! After all, it is difficult to convey Slavic words in Latin letters; It is clear that singers’ pronunciation is often not entirely correct. Even “Lord, have mercy” does not work well for them: it sounds like “have mercy.” From a distance, of course, you get some illusion of Slavic singing. Yes, when they sing something notated, you often can’t understand the words even from Russian singers; only the sounds and musical intricacies remain. Afterwards I talked with the blond tenor. He turned out to be quite a free-thinking Catholic. He praised Orthodox worship, said that he would not mind converting to Old Catholicism, but was afraid of losing his job. Before the Orthodox mass, he had already sung a service somewhere in a Catholic church. In a word, it turned out that this was some kind of interconfessional choirboy. I asked the regent why he recruited singers from Germans and Czechs, and I heard from him a not particularly flattering description of his compatriots. “I tried,” the regent told me, “to recruit Russians, but there was only one problem with them: they were lazy, sloppy, and you couldn’t get them to sing. It's better to do business with the Germans. First of all, the people are quite intelligent. Did you see the blond tenor standing on the choir? After all, he is a Doctor of Philosophy and, in addition, has a special musical education. Even if the words are signed in Latin letters, even if he is sometimes lame in pronunciation, but how well he knows the notes! Have you noticed how confidently and even artistically he sings! There’s almost no need for rehearsals.” Later I learned that foreigners and non-Orthodox singers are the most common phenomenon in all our foreign churches. I once had a chance to celebrate the day of my (secular, of course!) Angel in Paris. I inquired about the time of the service. It turned out that an all-night vigil was being served the day before. I lived not far from the church, at the very end of rue de Rivoli, behind the Louvre. Something delayed me, and at about six o’clock in the evening I went underground and rushed by subway to the Russian church. The clock already showed twenty minutes past six when I approached the church. Well, I think I’m late, probably, the stichera on “Lord, I have cried” have already been sung. I enter the church. Almost completely empty, there seem to be only two people on the choir. But I can’t immediately figure out what they serve. So what? It turns out they are singing “The Most Honest”. Coming soon! A quarter of an hour passed and I was already on my way back. The next morning there is liturgy. Now the church is full of worshipers. Alas! It doesn’t feel Russian or Orthodox. The audience is the most Parisian. Ordinary people are not visible, but without ordinary people what is Orthodoxy! I listen to the singers. I immediately notice that the French are singing. The French are not good at Slavic speech at all. And when they sang “The Most Pious,” it was impossible not to smile. It’s hard to imagine what they got out of “The Most Pious.” The service is over. They began to disperse. The ladies had animated conversations about shopping as they left. And I had some feeling of dissatisfaction in my soul. I’m standing in a Russian Orthodox church, but I can’t say that there’s a Russian spirit here, that there’s a smell of Russia here. And they left the church and immediately drowned in the Parisian mass. You see, my friend, how our Orthodoxy appears in the West! Our churches are hidden away from view, services in churches are short, non-Russian and non-Orthodox people sing. I don’t know about you, but to me this state of Orthodoxy in the West seems quite regrettable and even offensive. What is this desire to hide so as not to be recognized? And this tendency towards secrecy is also manifested in the fact that our foreign clergy puts on duckweed only during divine services, and at all other times wears a secular suit. I saw one venerable foreign archpriest - under his cassock he had a full secular suit, except for a frock coat. After mass, he will take off his cassock, put on a frock coat and go to his dacha outside the city. I strongly disapprove of the custom of our clergy in the West dressing up in secular clothes. A Catholic priest will not be embarrassed or ashamed of his cassock anywhere. And we are too shy. I think, on the contrary, it was necessary to present ourselves in such a way in the West so that they would notice us. I'm not thinking about an empty demonstration. No, but our religious proof in the West could also have missionary significance. It’s amazing how bad and how little the West knows about Orthodoxy. For the West, all Christianity is exhausted by Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics and Protestants know each other, they look after each other, but Orthodoxy seems to not exist for them. I'm not talking about ordinary people. Even people of theological science do not know Orthodoxy. In our theological science about Catholicism and Protestantism, anyone can find the most detailed and versatile information. You can find entire studies devoted to the history of Western confessions in different periods; other works deal with the doctrine and organization of heretical societies. There are even entire books about parish life, for example in France, or about the mutual relations of the Church and the state in various Western countries. Our theologian professors spend entire years on scientific trips, in scientific and religious centers of the West. But the West can be reproached for its reluctance to learn the Orthodox truth. There, people of science know many times less about our Orthodoxy than our scientists know about Western errors. Fifteen years ago, the outstanding theologian of Germany, Berlin professor Adolf Harnack, gave 16 lectures on the “essence of Christianity” at the University of Berlin. He devoted one (13th) lecture to “the Christian religion in Greek Catholicism.” Strange judgments were expressed in this lecture about Orthodoxy. First of all, it is clear that the most brilliant professor’s concepts of modern Orthodoxy are very vague. It is not in vain that he refers only to some stories by L. Tolstoy and to his personal impressions. But Harnack could have had these impressions in Yuryev. Well, is it possible to study the spirit of Orthodoxy in half-German Yuryev! But it is clear that the Germans have developed a certain template for judgments about Orthodoxy, and the template is very unflattering for Orthodoxy. Harnack, for example, declares that Orthodoxy is something alien to the Gospel, as if, according to the Orthodox, religion is a cult and nothing else; our very worship seems to him to consist of nothing but formulas, external signs, and even idols. Traditionalism, intellectualism and ritualism are, according to Harnack, the characteristic features of Orthodoxy. It seems to me, my dear Friend, that in the West there is no longer a deviation from Orthodoxy, but a complete ignorance of Orthodoxy. The Lord commanded the apostles to go and learn all languages. In fulfillment of this commandment of the Lord, we should make at least some effort to enlighten the West with the light of Orthodoxy. Catholic Jesuits do not leave, for example, idle Moscow and Petrograd ladies without their care. Why should we turn away from the West, giving it the full right to distort Christianity as it pleases and even hold ugly opinions about Orthodoxy itself? An interesting phenomenon can be observed in our theological literature. We have a lot of polemical works against Catholics and Protestants. We are constantly at war with them. Polemics penetrate into dogmatic, church-historical, exegetical, and canonical works. It is difficult to say why all these polemical works are being compiled. We ourselves read all these works, and those against whom they are directed usually do not know them and often do not even suspect their existence. In the West itself, lively controversy continues between Catholics and Protestants; they watch each other closely. If some Protestant scientific book appears, where the interests of Catholicism are touched upon in one way or another, not even a year will pass - look, from the Catholic side, a whole book has been written on the same issue, refuting the Protestant one, and critical articles in Catholic journals appear in the first book published. And no matter what they write about us, our voice is completely inaudible. In our magazines we still respond, we respond one way or another, but these responses are not heard in the West. Which of our Orthodox theologians directly addressed the West itself? One can only point to A.S. Khomyakov with his polemical treatises, written and printed in French not for the Russian reader, but specifically for the Western one. He also wrote polemical letters to individual Western theologians. In this respect, Catholics are incomparably more enterprising than us. At the end of the 80s, we immediately had several scientific works against Catholicism, especially against papal supremacy. In response, the papists published in Freiburg an extensive (584 pages) book, “Church Tradition and Russian Theological Literature,” in Russian. This is almost the only case in recent times when our controversy was noticed. So it is in science, in theological literature. It’s no different in life. We can see real Catholics and Lutherans here. For some reason, we don’t have to occupy the Germans in our own country. What about in the West? The West sees Russian people, but Russian people who go to the West have very little to do with Orthodoxy. In some European centers there are many Russians, but they are usually people without any faith; You can’t judge Orthodoxy by these people. In fact, in some European capitals, for example in Paris, Russians live in thousands. And these thousands on a holiday cannot fill even one church. It is clear that Russians abroad, with small exceptions, of course, are religious nihilists. If we judge by such “representatives of the Russian people,” then one might perhaps think that Russian people do not have any faith, that Orthodoxy is not at all a native element for the Russian soul. Such people will not tell the West anything about the Russian folk faith. Yes, my Friend, it seems to me that we are to blame before the West. Unfortunate historical circumstances tore the West away from the Church. Over the centuries, the church's perception of Christianity has gradually become distorted in the West. The teaching has changed, life has changed, the very understanding of life has retreated from the Church. We have preserved the church's wealth. But instead of lending to others from this unexpendable wealth, we ourselves in some areas still fell under the influence of the West with its theology alien to the Church. In recent decades, the West has also shown interest in the Russian Orthodox Church. But who on our side stepped forward to meet this awakening interest? There were individuals walking, and very few of them, and even then, in most cases, they were secular. This phenomenon - of course, attempts to bring Old Catholics and Anglicans closer to us - is, of course, very gratifying, although I personally do not attach much importance to them. But it is interesting to note how these phenomena arose. They arose not at all because we managed to interest anyone in ourselves, to convince someone of the advantages of Orthodoxy over Western confessions. No, attempts to get closer to us have a different basis. The Old Catholics and Anglicans, having torn themselves away from their former soil, felt that something very shaky and unreliable remained under their feet. It is impossible, for example, for the few Old Catholics to consider themselves the only Christians in the world. Need to connect with someone. In a purely theoretical way, they remembered that in the East there is an ancient Christian Church, in which there is no papacy, which is hated, for example, by the Old Catholics. Having gotten to know each other better, we saw that it was impossible not to recognize the purity of teaching in the Eastern Church. So, we were found because we were torn away from our soil. This is how Columbus discovered America, although he was not looking for America, but a new country altogether. America is not at all to blame for its discovery. She did not move and accidentally fell into Columbus's path. The same thing happened with the Orthodox Church. She also lay motionless, not calling anyone in the West to come to her. The Old Catholics went to look for a new land, leaving the old continent of papism, and met Orthodoxy. On our part, there were no efforts to interest anyone in ourselves, to win anyone over. Those foreign churches that I have seen are symbolic for me. They are hidden, often not visible at all. This is the general position of Orthodoxy in the West. Orthodoxy there not only does not preach about itself, but seems to be hiding, dressing up in a secular costume so as not to be noticed. Little and bad knowledge of Orthodoxy in the West is known, and the Orthodox do not at all try to communicate anything about themselves. But in the end, I still cannot come to terms with the fact that in some European capitals there is not even an Orthodox church at all. The West needs to show Orthodox worship in all its beauty. It would be nice to set up, for example, a whole monastery in Rome. Build a cathedral, at least like our Dormition Lavra. Next to it is a bell tower with thousand-pound bells. The singers should be not Germans, not Italians, but a real monastery choir, which would sing not Italian partes, composed in one evening by some maestro, but our Orthodox melodies, created over centuries in pious monasteries. Let the peal ringing be heard throughout a foreign land (only, probably, the police would have banned it!), Let our triumphant melodies be heard under the arches of a real Orthodox church! And near this church we would place learned monks and laymen, who would be given special obedience - to preach about the Orthodox faith among the heterodox, to broadcast both orally and in print, so that those who are interested in religious truth could not help but notice this sermon. It would be necessary to say loudly and confidently to the West: “We are Orthodox and are not at all ashamed of it, we are even unshakably convinced of the superiority of our eternal truth!” Look, dear Friend, what dreams I sometimes have! They are hardly destined to come true! For a long time in the West, our Orthodox churches will stand in back alleys and strangers, distorting Slavic speech, will sing liturgical songs for the few Russian people praying to their God in a foreign land! Letter six. Name Day of the Serbian King The Serbian capital Belgrade is like one of our provincial cities. In it you constantly have to remind yourself that you are in the capital. For us, my Friend, the capital is something grandiose. European capitals are also no worse than ours. That is why, in our opinion, everything in Belgrade does not seem like a capital city. Now, probably, all the best buildings were destroyed by the Austrians, but there were few such capital buildings. It was nice for a Russian person to see that the best building in Belgrade belongs to the Rossiya society and is called “Hotel Moscow”. The royal palace itself is again not quite similar to our palaces. It is small and goes directly onto the street. A tram runs past it, next to it is a one-story house with a retail space. But still, Belgrade is the capital of our dear Serbian people. In 1908, I happened to be there, by the way, on June 29th. I could then observe both official and popular celebrations on the occasion of the royal name day 6]. It is this day that I want to remember in this letter to You, my dear Friend. First of all, I headed to the cathedral on Bogoyavlenskaya Street. Belgrade Cathedral is quite extensive, but the inside is quite poor. On his name day, the king attends services in the city cathedral. Here the unity of the ruler and the people is already taking place, because at this time in the cathedral there is not only an elected public, but also ordinary pilgrims. This happened in ancient Rus'. Go to the Assumption Cathedral and take a look. After all, there you will see a permanent royal place, where the king prayed with the people. Remember from the story of Patriarch Nikon. When Alexei Mikhailovich, angry with the patriarch, missed several solemn services in the Assumption Cathedral, Nikon saw this as an extreme insult not only for himself, but also for the Church. The king himself was not present at the beginning of the liturgy; he arrived only towards the end. The liturgy began, which was celebrated by Metropolitan Demetrius with two bishops. There are many peculiarities in serving the liturgy. I will mention some of them. For the Metropolitan, a special canopy of very impressive size was placed in the middle of the church. Under this canopy, only one metropolitan was seated on the elevated pulpit, while the bishops stood on the sides of the pulpit on the floor of the church. For the metropolitan and bishops there were ordinary chairs with backs. The Metropolitan was greeted not by two deacons, but by three. The priests dressed him. The priests, I remember, held a book for him during the liturgy. The Apostle was read at the metropolitan pulpit, and the Gospel was read from a special pulpit at one of the pillars of the cathedral, as is the case everywhere in the East. We are accustomed to hearing loud bass voices at bishop's mass - the protodeacon and deacons. We have even created a kind of sport in terms of reading the Gospel, pronouncing “great praise,” and living for many years. Loud protodeacons, like artists, each have their own fans. For many “lovers” the entire bishop’s mass consists of the Apostle, the Gospel, “great praise” and many years. Everything else interests them very little. At other times, such “lovers,” usually standing at the back wall of the cathedral, have a lively conversation about the merits of this or that protodeacon or deacon. Then they move on to memories. Moscow will certainly remember Shekhovtsev. A legendary image is often created from a living personality. In Serbia, our “amateurs” would have nothing to do. There, protodeacons, on the contrary, are the highest tenors. According to the Russian concept, the protodeacon is composed of the following four elements: voice, hair, ear, belly. For a Serbian protodeacon, only the first and third are required. And the voice is tenor. Do you remember, Friend, how the heroes of the Wanderer are skeptical about tenors! In the second letter I told you, my Friend, that the Serb and I cannot understand each other. But how nice it is that in church we pray in the same language! God hasn't quite mixed the Slavic languages ​​yet! Serbs serve even according to our Moscow or Kyiv books. However, the Serb’s pronunciation of Slavic words is completely different, so that he would not have understood some of the words if he did not know the service. In the middle of the church, behind the metropolitan seat, there stood an icon of the holiday, and a priest in vestments was near it all the time. Everyone who came kissed the icon and took the blessing of the priest. Our Russian Slavic choir sang. At that time, he traveled with his songs throughout the Slavic lands and on the king’s name day he decided to sing the liturgy. Soon after, Slavyansky died. I didn’t hear the Slavyansky Choir sing songs at their concerts, but I definitely didn’t like their singing of the liturgy. In general, it is clear that liturgical singing is not up to the standards of the artists. For this singing you need to have special qualities. In operas and concerts they sing about various earthly feelings and attachments. Artists are familiar with these things, and they can sing about them with sincere feeling. For liturgical singing you need a pious heart that knows repentance, prayer and tenderness. Without this, what remains? What remains is the musical technique, different piano 7 and pianissimo 8. Well, how can an artist sing, for example, “Open the doors of repentance,” if for him there is neither fasting nor repentance, and if tomorrow on the public stage he will sing the most passionate aria? The most famous choirs - I won’t name them for you, you know them yourself - only frustrate me with their artificial singing. And the fact that many people like such artistic singing in church, including, it seems, you, my Friend, this fact saddens me extremely. I didn’t like the artificial singing of the Slavyansky choir, with various pauses and freezes, in Belgrade either. Meanwhile, I noticed a certain pleasant simplicity in the cathedral. I stood on the left choir. There were Serbs here, candidates from our theological academies, who were high school teachers in their homeland. And so they participated in the divine service by reading and singing as, so to speak, amateurs. We probably won’t find a gymnasium teacher among such amateurs. But in Serbia it’s somehow simple. Yes, on such a solemn occasion we are not supposed to have any amateurs. With us, the more solemn, the more official, that is, the more soulless, the more boring. Meanwhile, representatives of the Serbian state world - secular and military officials - gathered in the cathedral. On the right side, the ministers stood in a row in front. I often remember now the imposing figure and intelligent face of Pašić. Behind the left choir the diplomatic corps was gathering. What a mixture of tribes and costumes! Out of the entire diplomatic corps, the high-ranking Austro-Hungarian envoy Forgács stood out. He is wearing some kind of medieval Hungarian uniform with fur trim. And it was hot outside. Who, just think, forces people to suffer, to put on warm clothes in the summer, and even the most ridiculous kind! In earlier years of my youth I loved to read travel stories. I somehow came across memories of life under the African tropics in Zanzibar. A dinner at the English consul's was described. The heat was most tropical, unbearable. Alas! Guests had to dress in tightly starched linen and warm cloth tailcoats. Remember the poet’s words: “Custom is a despot among people.” Custom is custom, but it seems that the crafty seven-thousand-year-old elder of the worldly people is not without participation here. Sometimes it seems to me that the evil one, tormenting people with ridiculous decency, clothes and the like, simply laughs at his faithful slaves. The Serbs even then looked unfriendly at the Austrian envoy. The next day, the newspapers wrote: yesterday, when leaving the cathedral, we saw the proud figure of Mr. Forgac, who arrogantly looked at the assembled Serbian people. There followed several barbs directed at him. Suddenly I see something incredible: a whole bunch of Turks are walking through the cathedral. As many as six officials of the Turkish embassy in their fezzes walked through the cathedral and took their places among other diplomats. It’s not a good thing to let non-Christians into the church! The liturgy of the faithful begins, and heretics and infidels enter the cathedral! So in their fezzes the Turks stood like idols. Soon we hear music and military shouts on the street near the cathedral. Petar, the thief of Srbije 9, arrived. The king, like everyone else, venerated the icon and walked to his place on the right side of the cathedral in front. Ministers and diplomats bowed their heads. The king arrived with his heir George and our current princess Elena Petrovna. The king no longer looked young and seemed tired. The former Serbian heir made a rather strange impression. He stood rooted to the spot at a distance from the king, military-style, and never even crossed himself. It seemed to me that he should leave the stage of Serbian history. At the end of the liturgy, Metropolitan Dimitri greeted the king with a speech in which I - alas! – I didn’t understand, because it was said in Serbian. A prayer service was held and a solemn departure from the cathedral followed. I told you, Friend, that Belgrade bears little resemblance to a capital. But in the cathedral one felt that it was still the capital, albeit of a small state. Here are ministers, here are envoys - nothing like that is allowed in a provincial town. And how, in essence, every official world is monotonous! One European template dominates everywhere, which depersonalizes everything original, historical, and national. After all, you must agree, my friend, that Moscow Rus' of the 17th century was more interesting, more original than the current official one. Now people’s faces are somewhat stereotyped, equally shaved, with the same hairstyle, wearing uniform clothes according to rank. I sometimes like, when I come to the Moscow Assumption Cathedral, to dream... about the past, how the boyars gathered there, how Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich came and stood at the left pillar, how the hero - Patriarch Nikon, the “great sovereign” and “brother’s friend” of the tsar, his “father and pilgrim” stood in his place at the right pillar. Everything there was original, created by the spirit of the people. Of course, Turks in fezzes would not have been allowed in there. Then the Germans were not allowed into Moscow, but were settled outside Moscow, in the German Settlement. Peter became friends with them, invited them to the Kremlin, and they remade Russian life in a common European way. This is hardly all for the better! People's life, my friend, has always seemed to me more interesting, original, freer, less subject to general patterns. On the same day I could somewhat observe the Serbian people. On the day of the royal name day there is a folk festival in the area of ​​Topčider, near Belgrade. Topchider is a park, sometimes turning into a forest. City residents, and mostly “villagers” and “villagers”, also gather in this park. Serbian folk festivals differ very significantly from Russian folk festivals. A lot of people gather, the whole park is filled. The first thing that caught my eye was that there were no drunks among the people. At that time, a Russian folk festival, of course, was still unthinkable without drunks and disorderly persons. People were having fun in separate groups. A group of people walking hired “musicians”, of whom there were many, usually three or four people, they began to play somewhere under a tree, in a clearing, and those hired danced and danced. Then they went to the side where there were tables, sat down at them and drank a glass of beer. Of course, this is not a Slavic drink, but a German one, but it conquered all of Europe. The Germans themselves drink beer from morning to evening. I saw how even four or five year old children were given beer. Despite all their hostility towards the Germans, the Serbs borrowed beer from them and are diligently destroying it. In the Serbian folk festivals I was struck, my friend, by amazing modesty, general decency, even silence. In fact, no “disorderly cries”, no ugly drunken songs. Only simple music can be heard. Most of the people walked modestly through the park. Our people, in fact, never walk in the sense that we do, in order to “breathe fresh air” and admire the “beauties of nature.” Even the word “walk” has acquired a reprehensible connotation in its meaning. From the word “walk” we have derivatives - “go on a spree”, “walking”, “reveler”, etc. But among the Serbs, at least on the name day of the Serbian king, I saw people walking. It was also impossible not to notice the predominance of national costumes, especially among women. Our national costume is already beginning to be artificially created by representatives not of the people, but of the intelligentsia. And rural residents, especially women, during any festivities, rush first of all to throw off their village attire and dress like a city, to become like, if not the masters, then at least the master’s maids. Among the Serbs, “Srpska narodna noshna” 10, it turns out, enjoys great respect from the people themselves: residents of the surrounding villages came to the solemn folk festival in their national costumes. I won’t describe Serbian costumes to you, my friend. I’m not an expert in this matter, I don’t know what to call it or how to describe it. In this regard, my soul is completely devoid of any femininity. Let me just mention that Serbian women wear special jewelry made of gold and silver coins. Sometimes there are a lot of these coins. They hang from head to shoulders, connected to each other. The Serbs told me that these decorations are, so to speak, generic: they are passed on from generation to generation, and therefore among the coins there are very ancient ones that already have a positive numismatic value. Before evening the king arrived in Topchider. He was dressed simply in a white jacket and rode in an open carriage. For some time the king rode around the park among his walking and celebrating people. The result was a very simple unity between the king and the people. I really liked this Serbian folk festival. The Slavic soul of the people was felt, meek, modest, serious and chaste. The Serbian people live, as it were, between two worlds hostile to them. On the one hand, there is the Teutonic world, which does not tolerate Slavic independence; on the other, the fanatical Muslim Turkish world. One must be amazed at how, in the centuries-long struggle with the Turk and the Teutone, the Serb not only preserved his identity, his nationality, but was also ready to die rather than lose it all. Before the real war, many of us seemed to be ashamed of the fact that they had the misfortune of being born of a Russian father and mother. The Serbs were not ashamed of their nationality before, and for their originality they entered into an unequal struggle with the age-old enemy - the Germans, in order to either die or remain Serbs. Our national idea seems to grow out of the war. For the Serbs, on the contrary, the war itself is a direct consequence of their always living national idea. Remember, Friend, the anthem of the Serbian people fighting for their nationality! Let him hurry with a sword in his hands Now the Turkish and Serbian borders do not touch each other. The enemy about whom the Serbs sang was driven away: For five centuries we were in slavery. There remains an enemy not only of the Serbian people, but of the entire Slavic people. This enemy will die, he will be pacified by the peoples of Europe - then the Slavs will breathe a sigh of relief and freedom. At the name day of the Serbian king, I felt that the Western Slavs were still alive and firmly holding on to their national independence. The Rhine, my dear Friend, is the German Volga. The name of the Rhine is German, just as the name of the “Russian river” is suitable for the Volga. It is not in vain that the Germans want the Rhine to belong to them right up to its mouth. The Germans love to sing “Wacht am Rhein” 11; Russians everywhere are singing “Down the Mother Volga.” And yet I think that the Volga is a less historical river than the Rhine. We, rather, have a historical river - the Dnieper. In fact, how much in our Russian history is connected with the Volga? The upper part of the Volga also resounds with the historical names of Yaroslavl and Kostroma, and when you go down beyond the Lower Volga, it’s as if you’ve left Russia, ancient historical Russia; More and more new cities began to appear, and foreign speech was heard. How long ago did Russian culture touch the Volga region? Has it touched you everywhere even now? The Rhine is a real historical German river. On the Rhine, it’s as if you involuntarily immerse yourself in the history of the German nation. When you talk about Reina, you just want to call him gray-haired. The word “Rhine” somehow immediately brings to mind not only the Middle Ages, but also more ancient history, up to and including the notes on the Gallic War of Julius Caesar. As soon as I got to Mainz, I felt that I was standing on old historical soil. The German capital Berlin is not a historical city. And in a place where people have lived for a thousand years, where a long and varied history of human life has taken place, you always experience something special there. That’s why you feel completely different in the Moscow Kremlin than on Senate Square in Petrograd. Ancient Germanic cities have one striking feature: they have parts that are called Altstadt, an ancient city. The buildings here are extremely crowded. Crooked, irregular alleys are often no more than two arshins wide. Sometimes the galleries span from one side of the alley to the other. For some reason, it is customary for us to consider narrow streets a sign of the East. Petrograd residents nod reproachfully at Moscow for its narrow streets. But not to mention Moscow, even in Constantinople I have not seen such narrow alleys as in Frankfurt, Mainz or Cologne. I spent hours in Mainz wandering through these sometimes dim alleys, and I was reminded of times long past. And the ancient Mainz Cathedral, which you can never get to, is so built up all around! There are houses attached to the cathedral itself. However, European leveling stubbornly fights against everything ancient and original. Old German cities present an extremely motley picture. It’s as if another picture was superimposed on one, completely different from the first. Here and there old colors show through the new picture. This impression, perhaps, is especially produced by Mainz from the Rhine side. New buildings built in the style of boxes stretch along the shore. After all, for human habitation, European culture did not create any other architectural form other than the shape of a box either laid on the ground with the long side, or raised up and only resting on the ground with the short side. From behind these boxes the massive figure of the ancient cathedral peeks out with its Gothic towers. The boxes, of course, are of little interest, they don’t remind you of anything, they don’t make you dream about anything. I wanted to be in the ancient city; I tried to settle in one of the cramped alleys, in a house with gradually narrowing floors, and climbed almost to the top floor, which all consisted of almost one room. I am often surprised, my Friend, at how European culture wants to introduce one common, rather boring template throughout the entire globe. As soon as I think that somewhere, for example, in Alexandria, in Cairo, in the land of the pharaohs, there are European hotels and restaurants, I become annoyed and offended. From Mainz to Cologne is the most interesting place to travel along the Rhine. You can read descriptions of the sights you encounter in any guidebook. I will write to you, my Friend, about my impressions and my observations. First of all, it turns out that not everything in Rus' is as bad as we usually think and say. Travel, for example, along the Rhine among the Germans is incomparably worse than our travel along the Volga. The steamships are worthless compared to our Volga ones, but they fill passengers without any restrictions, it seems. We have, perhaps, even excessive luxury on the Volga: steamships, especially the newest ones, are like floating palaces. The breadth of Russian nature is telling. The Russian does not look like a “neat German”. Accuracy, of course, is a good thing, but if accuracy is nested in nature itself, doesn’t it then indicate a certain limitation of nature? You enter a German Rhine steamer with a pleasant feeling of knowing that things are better here at home. But the second feeling that you experience on the Rhine is a feeling of national envy: the Rhine is much richer in beauty than our Volga. From Mainz to Koblenz, even to Bonn itself, it is difficult to take your eyes off the banks of the Rhine. All the time, both banks are high, entire mountains approach the river itself, sometimes breaking off with steep, bizarre cliffs. It’s not for nothing that there are so many mysterious tales, for example, about the Lorelei rocks! Sometimes the mountains move a little away from the river and open up a whole panorama of mountain views. With every turn of the river there are more and more beauties. With some resentment in your soul you remember the monotonous banks of the Volga. Only on the Zhiguli the memory stops with joy. There are, they say, places on the Volga that are no worse than yours! But the castles give the Rhine a special, so to speak, historical beauty. It is a rare mountain peak, a rare rock outcropping that is not adorned with an original medieval castle building. Towers rise high, mysterious narrow windows turn black - as if the whole medieval complex history is looking at you through these distant windows! Some castles have been restored, others are empty and dilapidated. All this is very beautiful and very original. Sometimes you begin to imagine a time when steamships did not whistle along the Rhine, railway lines did not run along both its banks, steam locomotives did not smoke, when feudal lords lived in their castle fortresses, when everything here on the Rhine lived its own special life... That time was long ago... Now the mountain peaks along the Rhine with their castles serve only as a walking place for idle, curious tourists. Here, my Friend, on the Volga you can’t plunge into historical memories and dreams when you sail past the most beautiful shores - unless you remember about Stenka Razin. Our Volga or Kama beauties lack historical glory; it is still wild, deserted and primitive there, especially on the Kama. Sometimes it gets a little creepy. This means that we still have a lot ahead, if little behind us. How much more work remains for the great Russian people if they wish to cultivate their native land, a great and abundant land! You are wide and spacious, dear country! It is poor in external effects, but rich in the inner beauties of the spirit! Castles that do not proudly fly up onto the rocks look into the quiet streams of our Russian rivers - humble villages and villages with squalid buildings approach these streams. There is only one decoration of these humble villages of the humble tribe of glory - God's churches with bell towers look in the mirror of Russian rivers. Since childhood, I, my dear Friend, have become accustomed to seeing just such a picture in my homeland, on the banks of my native Oka. In Lipitsy you will go out onto the hill behind the village and look at the Oka valley - you can see forty miles into the distance. Only in the nearest villages of your own and the neighboring parish do you make out individual houses, and then only the buildings of God's churches are noticeable: the red Teshili Church, the white church in Luzhki, in Pushchina, in Tulchin, and on the horizon in the fog the Kashira bell towers rise... You used to come home for Easter. You will go out to the river. It overflowed for several miles and flooded the entire plain. And you hear across the water from all sides the joyful Easter pealing in honor of the risen Christ: both from our Tula shore and from the Moscow shore the ringing is heard, as if two churches, two dioceses are merging in one solemn hymn. The spring sun is shining brightly and tenderly, muddy streams are noisily running through the ditches, rooks are striding importantly along the ground, the whole earth seems to have woken up and begun to breathe, the grass is already turning green. Nature comes to life, and the humble people celebrate the Feast of the Resurrection. You used to hear the Easter bell rushing over the river - as if waves of new life were pouring into the soul, tears were welling up in the eyes. You stand for a long time and silently, enchanted... Remember, my dear, this dear picture - and it’s not so offensive to realize that the banks of our Russian rivers are more modest than the banks of a German river. On the banks of this river you can’t hear the Easter bells – only the whistling of steam locomotives. And if so, then God is with them - and with castles, and with mountains, and with rocks! The humble rivers of my native land are dearer to my heart! The banks of the Rhine are beautiful, but European culture struggles with beauty here too, introducing its merchant spirit. Often, coastal mountains from the very water to the top are cut up for vineyards and therefore have lost all their natural beauty. The unevenness was smoothed out, everything was leveled, and only monotonous green stripes were drawn. As if oases or as if fragments of former beauty, among the artificial monotony there are the ruins of castles, such as Ehrenfels Castle. But, of course, we get a picture: a German is sailing along the Rhine and drinking Rhein Wein! You look closely at the passengers and notice the peculiarities of the German public. In Europe in general, my Friend, somehow you don’t see the people, but you meet the public. There is no division between the public and the people, which K.S. Aksakov wrote so eloquently and wittily about. You, Friend, remember, of course, that, comparing the public and the people, the famous Slavophile took the side of the people entirely, because our public is the most respectable, and the people are Orthodox, because when the public dances, the people pray. It seems to me that a journey (like a walk, which I wrote to you about last time, Friend) is a matter for the public, not the people. What can you do? Sympathizing with K.S. Aksakov more with the people than with the public, I, however, really love to travel. But people do not travel in order to see foreign lands, to see the beauty of foreign nature. Do you remember, Friend, not so long ago I wrote You enthusiastic letters from the Volga and Kama, regretting only that You were not with me! But then I saw how indifferent the people were to the beautiful shores. He is sitting on the ship, with his back turned to the shore; he turns his face to the shore only when he needs to throw something into the water, to rinse out, for example, a kettle. There are also souls among the people who are sensitive to the beauty of nature, but their attitude to the beauty of nature is not aesthetic, but religious: they are admired by the beauty of God’s world, God’s creation. They do not need stunning beauties: for them God is great even in the blades of grass on earth. I met such admiration for God’s creation especially often among simple monks from the people. After all, our monastery in Rus' collects all the most sensitive, the most tender, the most enthusiastic, the most profound of the Russian masses. On the Rhine I saw the German public traveling. You, Friend, cannot even imagine how advanced travel is among the Germans! Almost every German saves several dozen marks so that in the summer, after taking his German wife, he can take a ride along the Rhine, go to Saxon Switzerland, or hike in the mountains. You meet German tourists everywhere. The Germans have a whole science of traveling. And everything is reduced again to a template. Often it was downright funny for me to look at the traveling Germans. They are very funny in their stupid complacency. A German will certainly wear a special suit for the trip. In cities there are special shops with things for tourists. If a tourist is going to the mountains, then the comedy begins in the plains. The feet are wearing shoes made of thick leather with iron spikes on the soles. Next, high, above the knees, thick stockings. There's a bag on my back. The whole figure is covered with a cloak; in his hands is an impressive stick with a sharp iron end. It seems that the tourist is going either to the North Pole or to the top of Mont Blanc. And what an important view! So everyone says: “Look, I’m going to travel, terrible dangers await me, but I will overcome everything!” The German, it seems to me, travels rather for hygienic purposes, to strengthen himself, lose fat, increase blood circulation, work up a good appetite and sound sleep. For him, admiration for the beauty of nature is also valuable, among other things, because it promotes digestion. One of my widely traveled relatives very angrily ridiculed the German way of traveling. “The Germans,” he said, “can see signs on mountain paths: “Here you need to stop and admire the view to the right,” “Here you need to express your delight with an exclamation,” etc.” The German travels so that his saved marks are not wasted. He tries not to miss a single view, not a single attraction. A German tourist always has a guidebook in his hands. Not seeing something mentioned in a guidebook is a misfortune for a German. Of course! For his money, he could have seen it and didn’t see it! And the money is spent! So, my friend, a German and a Russian travel differently. For a Russian, the journey itself is caused by the breadth of nature, wanting to embrace and accommodate as much as possible. Even when traveling, a German is petty, calculating and boring. As I was sailing along the Rhine, my attention on the steamer was attracted by the figure of a Catholic clergyman. I see: a shaved face in a cassock. Isn't he a Catholic student? – a thought flashed through my mind. I sat down next to the companion who interested me and started talking to him. It turned out that he was not a student, but Pfarrer, a rural priest from Bavaria, that is, a no less interesting person. We talked for a long time on various issues, even had dinner (forgive me, Lord!) together, although my companion was not particularly talkative. He graduated from the University of Munich, but apparently broke with science immediately after finishing his university course. It turned out that I was no less familiar with German theological books than the Bavarian rural priest. I also didn’t notice any particular intelligence or good manners in my interlocutor. His stories about church affairs, the life and activities of the Catholic clergy were interesting to me. After graduating from university, it turns out that you cannot immediately get even a rural position. Those who wish take holy orders and live with the bishop for three years, participating in divine services, preaching, and performing some pastoral duties. The bishop gets to know the young priests closely and, based on his personal acquaintance, later determines whom he considers more suitable. Parish priests receive a government salary, although not a particularly large one. Single people, of course, need incomparably less than married people. The village priest celebrates a short Mass every day without a sermon. The Mass lasts half an hour. About fifty people attend this mass every day. On holidays there is a mass with a sermon. Yes, my friend, a lonely priest somehow lives more by the spiritual interests of his parish, because he himself has few personal worldly interests. I have always thought that the class and obligatory family nature of our clergy greatly interfere with church life and activities. Catholic celibacy is, of course, an extreme. Church canons allow freedom for the priest to be married or celibate. Mandatory family life for a priest is also, in my opinion, an extreme, and an extreme that is hardly useful. A family is better the more selfish it is, and pastoring is essentially self-denial. It is incomparably easier to renounce oneself than to renounce one’s family. However, in these arguments I can hardly find sympathy from You, my Friend! In Cologne my journey along the Rhine ended. Even from afar, Cologne Cathedral caught my eye. I have already written to You about him, my dear Friend. From my Cologne impressions I remember the evening ceremonial service in Jacobskirche, especially the sermon at the end of the service. In the pulpit, a kind of artist towered over the crowd of worshipers. In terms of content, the sermon was nothing remarkable, but it was presented eloquently and delivered artistically. How the preacher controlled his voice, how confident he felt in the pulpit, what expressive facial expressions and gestures! He spoke about the Savior's love for the world. When at the end the preacher began to depict the ingratitude of the world, which crucifies Christ a second time with its sins, tears welled up in the listeners. But the very end of the sermon really stunned me. The preacher began to make rather stupid jokes and tell jokes. Instead of crying, flashes of laughter were heard throughout the church. Having cheered up the worshippers, the preacher left the pulpit. What I saw seemed incredible to me. What is this? What's this fun addition? In order not to send listeners home in a sad mood? This is what they do in theaters, after a heavy drama they perform a frivolous vaudeville. But observing the same thing in the church seemed very, very strange to me. The next morning the train whisked me away from Cologne and the Rhine. But I, my friend, was also in the upper part of the Rhine specifically to see the famous Rhine Falls. On the way from Zurich to Schaffhausen, a little before reaching the latter, I saw from the carriage window a roaring and foaming mass of falling water. As soon as the train stopped in Neuhausen, I headed towards the waterfall. A majestic and formidable picture of nature! A fairly wide river rushes down with noise and roar, and even drops almost vertically near the left bank. The whole river turns white. For a long time after the waterfall, the river seethes and is restless. I wanted to see a wild picture of a waterfall in a wild frame. I imagined a time when everything around was deserted and lifeless: there were no roads or comfortable cities. Probably the waterfall was somewhat different then, but undoubtedly it was even more majestic and formidable. I spent several hours at the raging waterfall. On the way, I learned that I had arrived fortunately: on one of those days when there is special illumination of the waterfall late in the evening. It was already starting to get dark. The picture of the waterfall became more and more eerie. All the details of the waterfall were hidden - only as if wild, hungry, angry animals were roaring in the dark! Such pictures of nature somehow suppress the consciousness, as if you are completely immersed in a sea of ​​noise and rushing around this sea in the complete power of its mighty waves. Already at about ten o'clock in the evening, a rocket soared from Laufen Castle, located on a high, forest-covered cliff on the left bank, cutting through the darkness of the night. Immediately, from the opposite bank, an invisible hand aimed a strong electric spotlight over the entire abyss of the waterfall. Imagine, my Friend, the black masses of the high mountainous banks; only the waterfall itself is flooded with bright light; he is all white in the rays of light; small splashes play and shimmer. Suddenly the waterfall plunges into darkness again - only one castle is illuminated by a spotlight directed at it. Again the rays of light pass to the waterfall. Suddenly the waterfall begins to turn blue, and soon its entire mass is blue. Then one half of it turns red, the other remains blue. Soon the entire waterfall is red. A few more minutes - and fireworks rockets rained down on the waterfall. Rockets are raining down from the castle. Stripes of fire stretch from the sky to the water itself and scatter over the water with multi-colored balls. Rockets even take off from that small rock that has stood in the middle of the waterfall for centuries. The spectacular spectacle captures all attention. It doesn’t last long, maybe only 15–20 minutes, but for these minutes the whole world ceases to exist for you; The whole soul is filled with an incomparable spectacle, in which one surprise replaces another. I sat for those twenty minutes on the bank of the river opposite the waterfall, as if I was in some kind of fantastic dream. Such sights are never forgotten! Finally, everything went dark. Suddenly everything around me suddenly became uninteresting. It was as if I had been transported from the mysterious world of dreams and dreams into boring everyday life, and it seemed cold and uncomfortable on the dark night on the river bank. Immediately the entire crowd of spectators left the waterfall. The prudent Germans brought in a whole electric train and took us to Schaffhausen for the night. At first it seemed surprising how such a spectacle could be organized for free, but you soon realize that even if the spectacle is free, the residents do not lose out. You never know how many travelers will travel an extra hundred miles for the truly outstanding spectacle of the Rhine Falls. The night illumination of the waterfall will force all of them to spend the night somewhere nearby, live almost the whole day, spend a lot of money, which will go from the tourist’s pocket to the residents of the city, where hardly anyone would have visited if it weren’t for the Rhine Falls nearby. Rhine Falls in Switzerland. In Switzerland, at every step you notice how the whole country seems to be selling the beauty of its beautiful mountains, marvelous lakes, amazing waterfalls. The traveler will be transported with comfort everywhere, everywhere he will be fed, watered and calmed down, raised to the region of eternal snow, to the sky-high heights. And at the top of the Jungfrau, where the road was recently built with great difficulty, the tourist will find trade. The whole country turns into a hotel, as it were, where everything is arranged according to the tastes of the rich guests. The richest tourists are English, and hotels with English order, with English servants, stand somewhere on the shores of Lake Vierwaldstätter! It seems that it is not in the nature of Russian people to trade in the beauty of nature. We also have the beauty of nature. But try to get to them, for example, in the Caucasus! You need a lot of determination, you need to prepare yourself for many hardships and dangers in advance. Europeans take advantage of all, even the smallest, features of a place in order to put this feature into circulation and make money. You yourself will gladly pay and will even be grateful to the merchant for helping you on your journey, furnishing you with comforts and serving you. The next day, in pouring rain, wind and bad weather, I sailed on a nasty little steamer along the upper Rhine to Lake Constance. It seemed that everything yesterday was just a dream, because today everything is so uninteresting and unfriendly. Letter eight. Sistine Madonna by Raphael I see, I see, my dear friend, that you are already laughing after reading only the title of my letter! Do you find my very intention of writing about the greatest work of art funny? This, of course, is because You are well aware of my mediocrity in all branches of art. It's mediocrity. There is no gift. God didn’t give... I’m a complete zero in painting. I myself was convinced of this sad truth back in childhood, when I tried to draw houses, horses, dogs and the like. But, my friend, I have never been insensitive to beauty. But I have always been incomparably more attracted to the beauty of God’s world. I am almost indifferent to the beauty of paintings, but some paintings still broke through the wall of my indifference, the ice of my artistic insensitivity melted before them - and I experienced such strong impressions that I cannot forget them for many years. The Sistine Madonna really shocked me, and I want to talk to You, my Friend, about this outstanding experience of mine in the West. When I sat before the Madonna, I involuntarily remembered You and mentally at the same time shared my experience with You. I remember well how, upon returning home and meeting You for the first time, I started talking about the Madonna. You, my Friend, then took my speeches not only lightly, but even with laughter. Several years have passed since then, and now I am turning to You with a letter about the Madonna. Afterwards I tried to comprehend my immediate experience. I want to share with you my thoughts about Madonna. Many people wrote about Her, different people wrote. Why not try to say something about Her to a person who has any contact with theology? After all, this picture depicts the Mother of God, the subject of our religious worship and theological reasoning. But I will talk about my impressions ahead... It was in summer Kazan, on a bright and cheerful summer day, when I headed to the Dresden gallery. Visiting art galleries is a kind of duty for all travelers. This debt has always seemed difficult to me. This is her fault, my artistic mediocrity. What, for example, did it cost me to walk around the endless halls of the Paris Louvre with their thousands of paintings! But someone else would walk around all day and be delighted all the time. I approached the Dresden Gallery with the thought of the Madonna, and, moreover, with a skeptical thought. "The greatest work of art"... Let's see! Maybe all of Madonna's great fame is based on a kind of self-hypnosis of the audience! As soon as I entered the gallery, the usual whole rows of halls began to appear. For some reason I thought that I would see Madonna right away and first of all. One hall, another, a third... There is no Madonna, and the other paintings somehow do not attract attention. I lose patience and turn to one of the gallery employees with the question of how to find the Sistine Madonna. He directed me down a long corridor. I enter a small room. I see a whole crowd of people, but I don’t see the painting, because its back is facing the entrance. I make my way through the crowd of spectators and turn to the painting. She is alone in the whole room. Everyone here only looks at her. At first it was a bit of a disappointment. Madonna didn't hit immediately. I look more closely - and there is some kind of anxiety in my soul, which always happens when you see something special, difficult, not immediately understandable. A few more minutes... and the picture seemed to disappear. Before me is Madonna herself. V.A. Zhukovsky said beautifully: “This is not a picture, but a vision.” Yes, and I felt that I was not looking at a picture, but seeing a wonderful heavenly vision. As soon as there was free space on the sofa on the wall opposite the entrance, I sank down onto the sofa and remained in some kind of semi-oblivion for at least an hour. In front of me, on the clouds, a wonderful vision seemed to be moving smoothly and majestically and at the same time standing motionless. Slightly fluttering blue clothes, as if a blanket had been inflated by the wind and knocked to the side, create the impression of movement, but the Mother of God Herself is motionless and seems to be immersed in deep and concentrated meditation. And Her face, Her eyes... How can you tell about them? And what can you write about them in ink? Serious and meek eyes look into the very soul, and the entire beautiful spiritual image attracts you to itself and removes you from the earth. The face of Raphael's Madonna is the face of a dream and an unearthly, heavenly, pure, dispassionate dream. It’s not for nothing that in the picture the papal tiara stands somewhere in the corner, as if it had been abandoned. This tiara represents the land with which the papacy is so closely connected. Heavenly Mother does not look at anything, does not notice anything. And when the wondrous eyes of a wonderful face looked at me, I did not want to see anything except this one face. I cannot understand why others in the picture like the figure of Sixtus even more than the face of the Mother of God (for example, V.V. Rozanov, “Italian Impressions”), why others speak with delight about angels. For me, only Madonna herself existed. I even wanted there to be nothing else in the picture except Her face. The figure of Sixtus positively bothered me, perhaps because it reminded me of the papacy, that historical monster that was disgusting to me in the depths of Christianity. The papacy is a symbol of the materialization of Christianity; in the papacy everything is rude, proud, carnal. And Madonna is all heaven, all spiritual, all meek, noble and heavenly tender. Sixtus is depicted by Raphael in some kind of blissful emotion. And that’s why I somehow can’t believe that it’s dad. I cannot imagine any of the historically famous popes in blissful emotion. I can imagine them in the consciousness and ecstasy of power and might, but tenderness is the virtue and bliss of our ecclesiastical East. Yes, and in front of the Madonna I experienced not tenderness, but some kind of quiet self-absorption or admiration. In the two upper corners of the picture there is a dark green curtain. It’s as if this curtain has been opened, and a wondrous vision has appeared before you. Indeed, when you contemplate the Madonna, it seems that the curtain has been lifted to another life, to an unearthly life, to the region of heaven and heavenly moods. Yes, my friend, my impression of Madonna was very strong. When I went into the next room and saw a whole row of Madonnas, they seemed pitiful and poor to me, unworthy of attention, and soon I left the gallery completely. And the image of the Sistine Madonna lives in me even now and often floats into my consciousness. Don't think that Madonna can be judged by copies or photographs. They won’t say anything to anyone who hasn’t seen Madonna. After all, I had seen a lot of photographs before, but remained completely indifferent. Now I cannot be indifferent. With all my being I felt that there was some kind of miracle here that could attract me from afar. When I was another time relatively close to Dresden (albeit within Austria-Hungary), I was very hesitant about going to Dresden again just to look at the Madonna and immediately leave the city. I already looked at the train schedule, and there was even a ticket to Dresden. But I was not destined to see Madonna again. However, I would not consider it empty and stupid eccentricity if someone traveled, for example, from Moscow to Dresden, looked at the Madonna there and immediately returned back. No, Madonna deserves it. I would even prohibit making copies and photographs of Madonna. I understand Zhukovsky, who did not even approach the painting when he saw “that some figure with a powdered head was sticking out in front of it, that this damned figure was still holding a brush in its daring hand and was mercilessly cursing at the great soul of Raphael.” The same Zhukovsky did not want to buy Miller’s print for himself, because “it, one might say, offends the sanctity of memory.” The Sistine Madonna is unique and inimitable. This is a sign of her exclusivity. But this is precisely the only phenomenon that almost everyone recognizes it, with a few exceptions. I have come across many descriptions - impressions of Madonna. And here is a remarkable phenomenon: Madonna did not make much of an impression on those people who were organically unsympathetic to me. Herzen said nothing about the Madonna more than that Raphael painted it with his beloved Fornarina. Belinsky called Zhukovsky's enthusiastic letter about Madonna nonsense. “This,” wrote Belinsky, “is an aristocratic woman, the daughter of the Tsar... She doesn’t look at you with contempt - it doesn’t suit her, she’s too well-bred to offend anyone with contempt, even people... - no: she looks at you with cold benevolence, at the same time afraid of getting dirty from your gaze and upsetting us, the plebeians, by turning away from us.” This is truly nonsense, and stupid at that! Granovsky wrote more frankly: “Raphael’s Madonna is too high for my understanding, at least now. I looked at it for a long time, looked with awe, but I think that if it had not been pointed out to me, I would have passed by. And reverence, it seems, was inspired in me not by the picture itself, but by what I heard and read about it.” I brought you, my Friend, these not particularly respectful reviews of the Madonna only to show how different people are and how different they are from each other. It seems to me that Madonna does not exist for rationalists, for whom the living spring of mysticism is suppressed, as if covered with dry sand of rationalistic concepts. And in Raphael’s Madonna I see something, as philosophers would say, irrational, super-rational, mystical. There is some kind of secret in it. Raphael painted Madonnas, it seems, without number, but how many of them are known to wide circles, and not just to one, always close, circles of people knowledgeable in art and even in the history of art? And at the same time, who doesn’t know one of his Madonnas – the Sistine! How many paintings exist in the world, in galleries and museums! But how many of them come to life before the viewer and, as it were, turn into a vision? There are a great many pictures, vividly painted. Some artists will vividly capture a street scene on canvas. In Aivazovsky’s marine views, the waves seem to roll and their turquoise seems to be as transparent as in the expanse of the sea itself. But there is no vision here yet. Vision begins where the veil of the mysterious and invisible is lifted. Every vision is necessarily heavenly. Madonna was a heavenly vision for me. People often wonder: what did Raphael want to express with his Madonna? I think that he did not want to express anything, but directly expressed, perhaps, a secret that was incomprehensible to himself and not realized by himself. There is a legend that Raphael himself had a vision, and he managed to tell the whole world and entire centuries about his vision. A vision is always elusive in its essence. It doesn't happen clearly. In vision, the curtain is only just lifted into the realm of the invisible, and through a small hole one only vaguely feels that behind the visible part there is still a whole infinity. But what did Raphael express in the Sistine Madonna? What is She? Many people answer this: this is the mother! But if She is only a mother, then this image does not refer to the Mother of God. After all, the essence and mystery of the Mother of God is not only that She is a mother. It seems to me that the Madonna reflects the idea not only of the mother, but also of the Mother of God. How is the Mother of God different from a mother? Orthodox theology alone can answer this question, but reason and unbelief can only remain silent here. There is a great mystery here, the only mystery, which is why it is especially attractive. Moreover, this mystery of the Mother of God, as our theology says, is necessary for humanity thirsting for salvation. When I remember the Sistine Madonna, the words of the akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos come to mind: “Rejoice, you who have gathered together the opposite; Rejoice, you who combined virginity and Christmas.” Virginity and Nativity are contrary to each other according to our concepts, but in the Most Holy Theotokos the rules of our sinful human nature are overcome: Her Nativity is virgin. She is Mother and Maiden. In this combination of opposites, in overcoming this, I will say in a wise way, antinomy is the mystery of the Blessed Virgin, a mystery that is necessary for us and dear to us. The name “mother” is dear to man, but humanity needs “Virgo”. That is why Mary, the Virgin and Mother, is endlessly dear to us. Mother... I don’t know another word in the lexicon that would shock a person so much, that would so touch the deepest layers of our being. Nowadays, V.V. Rozanov seems to be the best person to talk about his mother (sometimes!): “After all, what is the “Angel’s song” that a person “heard and half-forgot, but did not completely forget” before he was born?! Of course, these are only the mother’s moods, which are especially transmitted to the child! The child, even from his dark grave, sees the mother’s soul from such a special side that is not open to anyone, and she herself does not know everything about herself. Everything that we call “innate ideas”, pre-temporal premonitions - God, the afterlife, the final judgment, sin and truth, the ideals of patience and achievement - everything “innate” is simply the mother’s experiences, her thoughts and songs, songs and prayers, which were uniquely reflected on the fetus in her womb, pushing it, caressing it, warming it.” Wonderful words! You, Friend, have noticed, of course, that a person has a special connection with his mother. This connection undoubtedly lies in the mystical depths of our nature. Father is not mother. You have both a father and a mother. With whom are you closer, dearer? After all, with your mother? You, my dear, know that I lost my mother almost twenty years ago. At that time I felt my orphanhood, so to speak, practically, in the everyday sense, and now sometimes I painfully feel my orphanhood mystically. I so want to see and love the mother who gave birth to me! Likewise, the mother is somehow especially connected with her birth. Have you, my Friend, seen a mother losing her child? After all, you can directly feel the shock of the mother’s being to its very depths, you can see how a weapon pierces the mother’s heart and how the mother’s womb is tormented. Something is breaking in the mystical depths... The Most Holy Theotokos is our common Mother, because She gave birth to the “new Adam” and the “new humanity” came from her. After all, now human nature is different than in the Old Testament; now there is “Divine admixture” in our nature. Humanity has been striving for God for millennia in order to unite with Him and thereby be reborn. Mary is the purest fruit of our nature; She is the “Chosen One from all generations,” as if the pinnacle of humanity, having reached the Heavenly King. Through Her the human race entered into a relationship with God. If Christ lives in us, His Mother also lives in us. But this Mother had to be a Virgin. By affirming the ever-virginity of the Mother of God, our theology speaks only of what we need. The corruption of our nature touched our very birth. “I will multiply your sorrows and your sighs: in pain you will bear children, and when you turn to your husband, he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16). Ancient Eve, the ancestor of the old humanity, heard this from the mouth of God. “I was conceived in iniquities, and my mother gave birth to me in sins” (Ps. 50:7). The corruption of nature is at its very root - at birth. The wife’s appeal to her husband, his possession of his wife and birth illnesses are signs of natural “corruption”! And the dust of the earth lay on her, - one can say about the mother. The re-creation of nature - and this re-creation is what salvation consists of - had to begin with overcoming the laws of natural birth. “God sent His Son... born of a Woman” (Gal.4:4), born without turning to a husband, without the possession of a husband, without the diseases of birth. The Virgin gave birth and remained a Virgin, ...eternal femininity now in an incorruptible body he goes to earth. Truly and undoubtedly this is “what nature is waiting for and yearning for,” because this is the beginning of the salvation of creation, with hope awaiting the revelation of the sons of God, when it too will be freed from the slavery of corruption and will come into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. And we sigh within ourselves, awaiting sonship and deliverance for our body, which lacks integrity and incorruption, just as our whole nature lacks chastity (Rom. 8:19-23). Thus, Mary’s ever-virginity is necessary for our salvation. The divine dignity of the Savior is necessary for the actual salvation and renewal of creation, and this renewal began with the fact that the Mother remained a Virgin. The divinity of Christ and the ever-virginity of Mary are inextricably linked, and without them there is no salvation, that is, there is no meaning in life. Western Protestant heretics so vigorously attack the truth of Mary's ever-virginity, incomparably more persistently than the ancient anti-Dicomarianites, they attack with the most advanced scientific tools. I have a whole shelf of their books blaspheming the Mother of God. It's clear! After all, Lutherans need a teacher, like their boring pastors. Well, does it really matter to us who our teacher’s mother was! The ever-virginity of the Mother of God is necessary for those who live by the idea of ​​deification. The West has abandoned this idea. Protestants and our unfortunate sectarians only sing about Jesus, but they have forgotten Mary Ever-Virgin. Orthodoxy is the bearer of the ideal of deification. Think how the Blessed Virgin is glorified here! After all, perhaps at least half of the hymns in our liturgical books are dedicated to the Mother of God. Open the octoechos, menaion - everywhere, entire canons of the Theotokos, and everywhere individual “Theotokos”. How many holidays we have in honor of the Mother of God! How many churches! How many of Her miraculous icons! But our worship was created in monasteries; It was not the laity who composed it, but the monks. Monks especially honor the Blessed Virgin and Mother. Here is Mount Athos, where no woman sets foot, where only monks live! But this mountain is the earthly destiny of the Mother of God. The Mother of God appears to St. Sergius and tells him about the subsequent increase in the monks of his monastery. This means that this multiplication of monks is desired by the Most Pure Mother! She Herself is the patroness of monasticism. Monasticism is the loudest confession of the truth that people are poor and sinful, that nothing in the world remains unsullied, starting with man at his very birth. The world so often does not want to know at all that sin and death reign on earth. The current life is considered truly valuable, real life. Monks are confessors and preachers of human spiritual poverty, with the recognition of which the process of human salvation begins. They themselves are the children of their mothers, they resort to the cover of the Virgin Mother and call Her the pillar of virginity, not believing the deceptive world. My letter about the Sistine Madonna, dear Friend, somehow involuntarily turned into a theological discussion about the Most Holy Theotokos, about Her place and significance in the matter of our salvation and rebirth. The main and saving secret of the Mother of God is that She is Mother and Virgin. And so, it seems to me that Raphael, in his inspiration, was able to paint on the canvas about this very secret of the Mother of God, to combine in Her wondrous and attractive face two earthly opposites - virginity and motherhood. At least, this is the impression the great painting made on me, and I cannot rid myself of this impression. Of all Raphael's Madonnas, the Sistine is the most icon-like. However, this is not an icon. This is a picture on which only a ray of sky fell. It seems to me simply impossible to take her to the middle of an Orthodox church, place a candlestick with lamps and candles in front of her, sing a hymn before her, or perform incense around her. It would be awkward to simply pray before the Sistine Madonna. There is still a lot of humanity in it in order to become an object of pious worship. For Catholics, it could stand in a church, because Catholics are sensual in their churches. They have Madonnas painted from models, they have statues, sometimes dressed almost in a fashionable dress. I don’t know, my friend, about You, but I organically could not pray in front of a marble statue. Our icons are not paintings, and our worship is therefore spiritual. Our icons are symbols of ideas, symbols of beings. When we look reverently at the dark face of the Iveron or Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, we do not imagine that this is exactly what She was. We don’t even need to know what Her appearance was like in historical reality. For us, She is the Mother of God, Mother and Virgin, Intercessor and Intercessor. The icon is dear to us not for its own merits, but only because “those who look at it asceticly remember and love the prototypes” and “whoever worships an icon worships the being depicted on it.” Our icons do not detain our attention on earth and give full scope to our prayerful ascension to heaven. But as a religious painting, the Sistine Madonna is the one and only work of artistic genius. The impression I experienced in front of the Madonna, this kind of quiet and sublime vision, remains my best memory of the West. I am writing to you, Friend, on the great feast of the Theotokos of the Entry into the Church. With memories of Raphael’s Madonna and thoughts about the Blessed Virgin, I end my letters to You, my pure and bright Friend. Accept them as a small tribute from my heart, devoted to You and trusting every thought and feeling to You. I know how You love the Most Holy Virgin even without being a monk, how you pray to Her, pure and meek, how She illuminates Your beautiful soul, full of the sounds of heaven, with peace, purity and joy. May She, Mother and Virgin, cover You from all evil with Her honest omophorion! Empire of Tsars and Russians (French). Collection of Psalms (German). We are talking about the name day of King Peter I of Serbia (1903–1921) from the Karadjordjevic dynasty. Serbian folk clothing (Serbian). "The Guard on the Rhine" (German). You might be interested in: