Из воспоминаний Н. Т.

The first time I saw Father John was with my aunt, Countess Tiesenhausen. The old woman lived in the mezzanine of the Winter Palace with her niece Nina Piller, who was hopelessly ill. Father John was invited to pray for her recovery, and he made a strong impression on me. He addressed the sick woman and then those present with a speech, urging them to rely entirely on the will of God and surrender with submission to His good Providence. After that, he invited everyone to pray for the sick woman and began to read an impromptu and heartfelt prayer that moved everyone to tears. The sick woman cried, those present cried, and Father John himself cried. After the prayer, he blessed the sick woman, promised to pray for her again when he served the Liturgy, and encouraged all her loved ones. He advised everyone to pray, but not to expect a miracle and not to see anything terrible in the Christian death, but to everyone to always be ready for death, as long as it was a righteous death. Soon after this, three weeks later, the sick woman died, and Father John served a memorial service for her, and again touched everyone with his kind pastoral words. Anyone who has ever seen the Kronstadt shepherd up close will never forget his meek gaze and his soft, warm voice when he uttered words of consolation. There was a sense of spiritual peace from him and one could feel a special power of grace in his speeches. He made an irresistible impression, and I remember how one of my relatives, who was keen on Lord Radstock and the false teachings of a Stundist nature that were fashionable at that time, having met Father John in our house, rushed to kiss his hands, and one look from Father John was enough for him to stop his passion and express a desire to go to Kronstadt to confess and partake of the Holy Mysteries, which he had not begun for more than ten years. After this, he became a sincere believer and ceased to shun the Church and its ministers. The more Father John's fame grew, the more difficult access to him became. I remember that during my mother’s illness I wrote and telegraphed to Father John in vain, and my call did not reach him. Then I went to see General Bogdanovich, who knew him closely, the father of my corps comrade, and he wrote me a telegram, forcing me to sign: “Page of His Majesty’s Court,” and this time the telegram actually arrived. In response, Father John himself came and prayed for our dear patient, who was dying from an incurable illness. When I was a page, I went to see Father John in Kronstadt with a friend. When we boarded the ship in Oranienbaum, it turned out that Father John was returning to his place with the same ship, to whom we immediately approached and had the good fortune to talk with him all the way and learn from his instructions. When the ship landed at Kronstadt, it turned out that Father John was already waiting there. On the street adjacent to the pier, beggars stood in two rows of trellises, about two hundred people. Father John, coming ashore, approached them and began to give them alms. At the same time, we were lucky enough to be eyewitnesses of Father John’s foresight. One of the passengers near us, a young intellectual of a rather cheeky type, whispered to his neighbor, a student, in a low voice, pointing to Father John, distributing money at the other end of the street: “Encouragement of parasitism!” When Father John finished the distribution, he returned to the pier, where those young people were still standing, waiting for the cab driver, and said, turning to them: “We should all be merciful to the poor, for it is said in Scripture: blessed is he who looks upon the poor and needy, on the day of cruelty the Lord will deliver him, but we, priests, are obliged to take even more care of the poor, since it is also said there that the poor are left for you to eat!” And, having uttered these words, he walked away, leaving the young people in great confusion. In front of Father John's house there was a crowd through which it was impossible to squeeze through. Therefore, we did not dare to penetrate there, especially since we had already had the good fortune of seeing Father John and talking with him, and we headed to St. Andrew’s Cathedral, where there was also already a mass of people, since we expected that Father John would come there to serve vespers. After some time, Father John arrived, and the people rushed towards him with such force that, if the police had not stood there, the priest would have been crushed. After Vespers, Father John blessed the people for a long time, and we witnessed the following scenes: a decently dressed gentleman comes up and informs Father John that he is ruined and faces shame and prison, since he wasted other people’s money. At this time, some poorly dressed woman in a headscarf passes some white bundle to the priest over the heads of others. Father John takes the bundle and, without looking at it, hands it over to a decently dressed gentleman. The woman screams: “Father, there are three thousand here!” Father John addresses her with the words: "After all, you sacrifice to God? The Lord accepts your gift, and your money will save a person." And a man with a bundle in his hands is already kneeling in front of the icon of the Savior and repeating through tears: “Three thousand, three thousand! Exactly the amount that I owe!” After Vespers, Father John received us, blessed us and, giving us a quick farewell, since many were waiting for him, promised to pray for us. We could not stay until another day, since we had to return to the Krasnoselsky camp that same evening, and therefore we left Kronstadt, taking with us the brightest memories in our souls. After that, I often met with Father John when I lived in Moscow, and he came there and visited Prince Dolgorukov. The prince showed the Kronstadt shepherd signs of great attention and respect, each time leaving him to dine with him, and, knowing how Father John valued his time, he put his carriage at his disposal and asked him not to be shy and to leave immediately after the end of dinner if he had no time. Once the prince instructed me, at that time a young officer, to escort Father John to the Nikolaevsky station and order that the front rooms be opened. There was a huge crowd at the station, so the carriage had to walk at a walk, and when leaving the carriage I barely managed to guide Father John to the doors of the front rooms, so crowded were we. Since they feared that there would be a similar crush on the platform, where the crowd surrounded the first-class carriages, the station master ordered Father John to be led slowly across the track and seated in the carriage on the opposite side. To divert attention, gendarmes stood in trellises on the platform in front of the carriage, as if awaiting his arrival, and the public surrounded them. At the very moment the train departed, the gendarmes dispersed, and in front of the astonished public, a curtain rose in the carriage window and the face of the beloved shepherd appeared, who, smiling tenderly, blessed those present. The prince laughed a lot when I reported to him how we managed to get Father John into the carriage. That the danger of a crush was not a joke is shown by the fact that on Father John’s previous departure from Moscow, the station crowd crushed him to such an extent that they bent his golden pectoral cross. Father John, while in Moscow, visited the commander of the troops, General Kostanda, and once, having arrived there in the second week of Easter, he said Christ with everyone present, since, according to him, Easter had not passed, but to greet each other with the words: “Christ is risen!” – you can do it not only all Easter, but all year round. Once I was lucky enough to travel with Father John from Petrograd to Moscow on a fast train in the same carriage. Having learned that Father Archpriest Sergiev was traveling in the compartment next to mine, I knocked on his door, and he kindly invited me in and allowed me to spend several hours unforgettable in my memory in his edifying community. The next morning, approaching Moscow, Father John invited me into his compartment, and we continued yesterday’s conversation, which ended only when the train drove under the glass canopy of the Nikolaevsky station of the capital. The last words addressed to me by the loving Kronstadt shepherd were a promise to remember me in prayer during the Liturgy and an exhortation - I was already a priest at that time - to perform the Liturgy as often as possible and mutually pray for him. I met Father John one more time in the Crimea, where he came in the fall of 1894, summoned to the painful bed of the Tsar the Peacemaker, and was honored to be invited by him to concelebrate in the Yalta Cathedral. First, Father John served Matins, and he himself read the troparia of the canon, and at the end of Matins he delivered a sermon. After the Liturgy, Father John, as usual, despite the concelebration of the deacon, consumed the Holy Gifts, and then performed a prayer service for the health of the Sovereign Emperor Alexander III. Father John's modesty was amazing. He never cared about himself personally, never tried to move forward, never attributed the received mercies of God to his prayers, but always said that healing is given by God according to the faith of the sufferer himself and through the prayers of all those who prayed with him, and not just him. The more he expressed Christian humility and efforts to conceal himself, the more the Lord brought forward His righteous man and glorified him. I remember such an incident. When he first appeared to Prince Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov, no one from the Governor General’s servants knew him yet: he was taken to the hallway and left there to wait. Nobody noticed him; officials walked past him into the reception room, not paying attention, and no one even thought about reporting him to the prince, and he himself did not remind anyone of himself, standing modestly in a corner, in a cassock and kamilavka. In this form, I found him in the hallway and immediately told the official on duty about him, who hastened to report him to the prince, and the prince immediately ordered him to be brought to him. From then on, the prince constantly invited him to his place and showed signs of respect; I remember once, in the presence of Archbishop Ambrose, the prince approached Father John for a blessing, and he did not refuse to give it to him, although it is not customary for priests to bless in the presence of a bishop. Father John’s relationship with the people who turned to him for help was touching: he suffered with the suffering and cried with those who wept, but he sternly and angrily denounced stubborn heretics and sectarians, like Leo Tolstoy and his followers. For this, the latter hated him with the same irreconcilable hatred with which Satan hates the angels of light. Meanwhile, Father John of Kronstadt could not at all be called a narrow fanatic, since he did good to both Orthodox and non-Orthodox people alike, and I know of such a case just in the Crimea, when Father John advised one sick person who called him - a Pole who had not been to confession for a long time - to confess and partake of the Holy Mysteries with his priest, and when he followed the advice of the priest, he recovered. I know that Father John did good even to Jews and knew Jews who highly respected him and considered him a saint. Abroad, the fame of Father John has increased since Vanutelli wrote about him in his book about Russia, and compared him with his namesake, the parish priest of Ars, John Vianney, who lived during the Napoleonic era, and canonized by the Catholic Church. Leo XIII was also very interested in the personality of Father John and asked me a lot about him. Both the French and the English (Protestant) clergy were interested in him in the same way, and when I was abroad and in Paris, and in London, and in America, I constantly had to talk about the Kronstadt shepherd as an ideal priest. Once, at the request of passengers, I gave a whole lecture about Father John on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, and his name often appeared in my sermons among non-believers. Unfortunately, I must say that even in Russia there were people who had a negative attitude towards Father John. Thus, one revered hieromonk of a suburban monastery, which I deliberately do not name, expressed himself in a conversation about John of Kronstadt: “He is not in use among us.” It seems to me that this was indicated by a certain kind of monastic jealousy that such an ascetic did not belong to monasticism, but adorned the ranks of the white clergy. I often had to speak out in defense of Father John, especially when he was reproached for precisely the things that he most avoided. They reproached him for his expensive velvet cassocks, which he never ordered for himself, but wore because admirers gave them to him so as not to offend them - once, and secondly, because his son remembered the lesson taught to him by the late Metropolitan Isidore, when he came to him in a simple woolen cassock. “Is it really possible,” said the Metropolitan, “that you show up at the palace in such a cassock?” In response to the fact that this was his best going-out cassock, the Metropolitan remarked to Father John that appearing in such simple clothes to high-ranking persons shows a sign of insufficient respect. Just after this, Father John was given a new cassock, and he began to wear it when he had to visit high-ranking persons. In the same way, Father John could not be considered responsible for the fact that he was surrounded and looked after by his admirers, whose veneration was later expressed in the ugly form of a special adoration of a sectarian nature. In essence, it was the same feeling that surrounds every respected priest in the parish, but brought to its apogee due to the charm of the very personality of Father John and his ever-increasing popularity. No monarch in the world received as many letters and offerings as Father John: these piles of letters and telegrams were sorted by those around Father John, and only the most important, in their opinion, were transferred to Father. Here, of course, there were abuses, but Father John himself had nothing to do with it, since he could not personally, with a lot of things to do, re-read several hundred letters a day. Subsequently, he got himself a secretary, and then things went smoother and the abuse stopped. In conclusion, I will say that I saw Father John for the last time after my return from abroad, shortly before his righteous and peaceful death. He treated me as sympathetically and kindly as before, gave me his “Life in Christ” as a souvenir and blessed my works, which I most respectfully offered to him. Father John has always been my ideal of a good shepherd, and when I served in the parish, just like many of my comrades in the ministry at that time, the same admirers of Father John, like me, we tried to imitate him and always set him before us as a model of all pastoral virtues and often in difficult cases we asked ourselves what Father John would have done in this case, and tried to do the same. Father John has left us, but his memory and example are alive among us, and we can confidently hope that the soul of this good shepherd now stands for us before the throne of the Most High and his prayers for us, sinners and sorrowful ones, have become even more effective than they were during his lifetime.