At first I remained untainted and did not take part in any of this. After all, I had been told that none of this existed. I only looked on in horror. In the fall, I watched how boys my age stole watermelons from the produce shop, smashed them and swore. So, was it that my parents had deceived me? Or did I just have the misfortune of living in a bad courtyard full of degenerates? That was probably the case. Surely in all the other courtyards, all of them except our own, there lived good, conscientious children of good, conscientious parents. But the older I became, the more bad exceptions I encountered. As it was in our courtyard, so it was at school, the Pioneer camp and the village outside Moscow, where we rented a dacha in the summer. Nothing was as my parents or the books said it was.
And then I thought, it couldn’t be that I always encounter only exceptions to the rule. So they must not be exceptions, but the norm? And so it was. My parents and those books had been deceiving me. My parents’ faith showed fissures. But only so far as everyday matters were concerned. I simply convinced myself that the time when my ideals would be realized was still a long ways off. I remained an ardent communist and dreamed of universal brotherhood. I only lamented that I saw no principled people around me for whom an idea could take precedence over their own personal interests.
In 1954, when I turned fourteen, my mother and I visited the village of Inta in the Komi ASSR [Autonomous Republic]. We went there because in 1943 my older brother had been wrongfully convicted. My parents explained to me
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that there had been a mistake, and that justice would be restored. It was regrettable that comrade Stalin and his aides knew nothing about this, that it was kept from them; for if they had found out, my brother would be freed and those responsible for the mistake severely punished. Justice, however, was slow in coming. Comrade Stalin managed to die by the time my brother’s sentence was reduced from ten to six years (the time he had already served) and he remained exiled in Inta. (Later, after 1956, my brother was rehabilitated.)
And so, since Mohammed wasn’t coming to the mountain, that summer my mother and I went to see him in Inta. Revelations of things hidden from me began on our way there. From around Kotlas onwards there were endless guard towers with sentries. Those were the camps—and only the ones along the railroad. How many more were farther away, out of sight? It was as if the whole country north of Moscow was inhabited by criminals; that there were more criminals than non-criminals.
Inta consisted almost entirely of prisoners and former prisoners in permanent exile. The crowds of women in tattered gray clothes, surrounded by dogs and soldiers with automatic weapons, were a pitiful sight. But I still really considered them enemies. My visit to Inta enabled me to learn personally what most people found out only after 1956. Only I saw it all in a truer and more horrifying version.
I returned to Moscow a totally different person. I had lost all faith in the correctness of our ideas. In school I had been taught to believe that nothing in history happens by chance. From that time on I began to ponder many things. And my thoughts were one darker than the other. I no longer believed that man would ever learn to construct his life in accordance with the laws of goodness and justice.
“It’s not society that is bad, but man himself,” I decided. “No matter how you change social structure, man will always find an opportunity to be selfish and there will always be injustice.”
At that time I despised people. I had an amazing ability to find the bad (the vile, as I put it) in everyone, and had a very high opinion of myself. I considered myself to be better and more intelligent than others and categorized all people as either the chosen few or the masses, placing myself in the former group, of course.
There is something else I must mention. From my earliest childhood I had experienced, not so much thoughts, as feelings, that life was meaningless. I remember, once when I was about six I crawled under a table and wouldn’t come out. My father tried this and that, but I wouldn’t budge.
“Well, at least explain what’s with you,” my father finally asked anxiously.
“What’s the point of all of this, if we die?” I asked.
“What do you mean by ‘all of this’?”
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“Everything,” I said, and made a sweeping gesture with my arms.
“You’re a little young to worry about such things!” father laughed.
Then I really did stop worrying about such things. But now, at fifteen/sixteen years of age, it all came back, and with much greater force. I considered the chosen ones to be those who understood that life was meaningless and did not attempt to dissuade themselves of this. Though man always strives for happiness, he will never be happy; the same is true for individuals as for humanity as a whole. So why go on living and drag out this drudgery? Why endure sixty or eighty years of stagnant existence; is it not better to cut things short at sixteen? I could take that step myself now, before I become stricken with disease or too attached to life. We all die, after all, so what difference does it make whether it’s now or in fifty years? Life is worth living when one has a goal or purpose, but if there is none—then what’s the point? What’s the point of living if people will never be happy; if cruelty and arbitrariness will always reign in human relations? And if humanity should someday achieve happiness—so what? “I’ll still just become fertilizer for burdock.” And death would be harder to bear for a happy humanity than for an unhappy one. So what should one live for—for fame? One tires of fame. For women? But they grow old and die the same as you. It remains only to live as animals: eat, drink, breed and die. That’s how the majority lives, after all. Simply in order to eat and to cover their nakedness, the majority works and attempts to sweeten this bitter life with movies, books, stamps or with their labor.
So, for what purpose do we have reason? And is it worth occupying oneself with art, science, philosophy, technology, just to eat, drink, reproduce, and die? Of course not.
In school at this same time I was learning the basics of Darwinism. The basic law of the animal world, I was taught, is the struggle for survival. The strong devour the weak. Those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. And man, too, is an animal, isn’t he? This means that among humans the basic law is the same: the strong devour the weak; those who adapt, survive, and those who don’t, perish. It then follows, that the accommodating careerists are the most normal of people, and morality is just a fabrication of the weak, made up to console them in their weakness. Yet what if I don’t want to live without morality, only filling my own stomach and taking away my neighbor’s portion? Why the devil would I want such a life? I thought incessantly of suicide, but kept waiting for something and putting it off.
Then I had a revelation. Once, while reading that same textbook, Principles of Darwinism, I came upon a certain passage on coal, about how the ancient vegetation that formed coal absorbed lots of solar energy, and that’s why coal releases so much heat. A sudden spark illuminated my mind. How is it that in nature everything is so interconnected, so well thought-out? Can that
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really be by accident? Now, if a man doesn’t look after his garden, the garden will die. So how come in nature no one looks after things, but everything is in its place, everything reasoned and wise? We need oxygen, so plants make oxygen for us. Plants need humus, so animals die and their decaying bodies provide humus.
From that moment, I concluded that nature was created by a higher intelligence, God, in other words. But this belief was still far from Christianity or any other religion.
“Of course, God is creator of all in the universe,” I thought, “but that still doesn’t mean that people could see Him or that He could give them some sort of commandments. Can we fathom the soul of an ant? Can an ant understand us? In religions, man has simply tried to comprehend God in human terms.”
Then I began to reason somewhat diffe
rently. Of course, the difference between man and God is infinitely greater than the difference between an ant and man. And it’s true that an ant can never comprehend man, just as man cannot conceive the psychology of an ant. But man did not create ants. He himself, the same as ants, was created by God. So why couldn’t God understand His creations? After all, to understand something does not mean to become identical with it. So just maybe, religion is a case of God coming down to man’s level to show him how he ought to live, so that humanity would be better off. The same way we tell children that they shouldn’t play with matches.
In a similar fashion I came gradually to approach the notion of immortality. Well, fine, we die and our body rots, but what about our thoughts and feelings? Surely it cannot be that our thoughts and deeds, our commands to our body, our will and mind, originate in the dead gray matter in our heads— matter which we have named, the composition of which we know and can discuss. What is thought, after all? Something immaterial. You can’t touch or weigh it. And how can something material create the immaterial?
Then I considered that we have something in us that does not decay, because it is not subject to decay. And that this something neither dies nor is born, because birth and death are material categories. Can that which cannot be felt, weighed or measured be born? Are molecules born and do they die?
I no longer believed the theory of evolution.
“Evolution exists, but within certain limitations,” I decided. Certain muscles can be developed with protracted, regular exercise. But no matter how long you flap your arms, even for a million years, they will never become wings—that I could not believe. That would be a miracle, and what miracles can there be without God?
I was now ready for religion, but which was the true one? For truth must be singular, and there are many religions.
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Together with the appearance and development of my belief in God and immortality, I was becoming more and more drawn to Christianity, largely under the influence of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
I was struck by The Humiliated and Insulted, the first novel by Dostoevsky that I read. Everything I had read prior to that seemed either a saccharine depiction of life, or hopeless despair. While here I saw a life full of suffering, people who were humiliated and insulted; yet when I turned the last page, I was filled with joy. These degraded and abused people were not alone; they loved each other and helped others like themselves, or even those more humbled than themselves. These people did not place their faith in any bright future for society, but in God; they loved not society in the abstract, but people as they were. Life was difficult for them, but they were not unhappy.
What makes man unhappy? Wanting something for himself that he is not granted. Others, who also want something for themselves, don’t let him have what he wants, and they in turn also suffer. But what if you are able to forget yourself? To uproot your selfishness, and to make the happiness of others your purpose in life? If your guiding principle becomes not “take,” but “give,” then your happiness will depend on how much good you give others. And this depends, not on fate, but upon you yourself. And misfortunes won’t be able to make you unhappy, because your own injuries won’t matter to you.
With a guiding principle such as this, a person can be happy in the face of any social injustice, inequality, and so on. He won’t be bothered by the fact that others live better than he does—he will be glad for them.
And then I realized that this way was the only true way to universal happiness and the kingdom of good that I had dreamed of since childhood. Since it’s not society that is bad, but man himself, then however many revolutions you have, it will only be like running in place. The have-nots envy the rich, take their wealth from them and themselves become the rich (“he who was nothing has become everything”), society once again is divided along the lines of rich and poor, and so on forever. Because the very desire for equity is founded on selfishness: a person thinks that he has not received his fair share and undertakes to establish equity. Yet when every person will be glad, when he can give more to another than he takes for himself (as parents are happy, when they give the tastiest bits to their children)—that’s when true justice will come into being. And this universal happiness will not be dependent on universal well-being. Material well-being has never made people happy. But they can be happy in poverty. That’s why the teaching that presumes the establishment of a paradise on earth together with the attainment of universal abundance is utopian. The maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is wrong. It will never be possible to satisfy man’s unbridled desires (recall the fable “The Fisherman and the Fish”).
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There is another thing that I then understood: The only thing that can truly transform a person is to love all people, including the wicked, and to answer evil with good. While in most cases, evil begets evil.
Throughout history, humanity on the whole has lived according to the rule “an eye for and eye”—and what is the result? Endless suffering. Auschwitz and hydrogen bombs. Because an evil plus an evil equals two evils.
My final turning point occurred after Crime and Punishment. In Raskol-nikov I recognized my former self, and in the collapse of his worldview, the collapse of mine. And our savior was the righteous sinner, Sonia Marmeladov with the Gospel in hand.
Dostoevsky brought to me fragments of the Gospel, and these fragments seemed more wonderful than anything I had known. I remember how, when I had read the final page, I went outside. There was a fine, light rain and the wind was blowing. I wandered the streets of Moscow that night and thought about how the next day, I would begin a new life, quite different from the one I had known until then.
But this new belief of mine still was not true religiosity. It was rather a reasoned belief. I simply considered that it was more proper, more reasonable to live in such a fashion (while acknowledging immortality, of course). Without that, this new life was just as senseless as everything else. Having been taught to be rational, I could not grasp the irrational. To me, the rituals of the Church seemed senseless, games old women played. Well, what would possibly occur if I were dunked in water or if I crossed myself? Then once, already as one who acknowledged the teachings of Christ and who sympathized with religion, I dropped by a church—just to take a look. The impression was incredible. Yes, it was all ornate, but the theater can also be ornate. But I was gripped by a feeling that I had never experienced in any theater. Most importantly, after that visit I became much stronger in my Christian convictions, and a simple thought occurred to me: we cannot simply think and feel, we must also express our thoughts and feelings symbolically. Our every word is in fact a symbol. Yet it doesn’t seem odd to us when we, upon greeting someone, say “hello” and shake his hand. The rituals of the Church are also symbols that cannot be dispensed with. Without them the faith within one’s soul will wither.
After that I had no doubts in the necessity of baptism. If the human soul in all its forms senses the difference between good and evil, and, with rare exceptions, a person who commits a vile act knows that he behaves wrongly, not humanely, and since there is nothing more humane than Christianity—it follows that in Christianity there is truth. (Later I became convinced of this in practice. And I think that if every person were to analyze his life without atheistic superstitions and prejudice, he would become convinced of the same.) A
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person can strive only after that which is implanted in him. After all, we don’t try to make ourselves grow tails.
I then told a student acquaintance in the Theological Academy, with whom I had previously spoken only about literature (he, from a reluctance to proselytize, and I from a sense of tact, so as not offend him by mocking religion), that I wanted to be baptized.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Valentin Kataev, A P
aschal Memory
Valentin Kataev was a Russian author who had the rare privilege of going abroad during the Soviet period. On one such trip to San Francisco in the 1960’s he met a woman whom he had loved in Odessa before the Bolshevik revolution. He had proposed marriage to her then, but she declined. He recalls seeing her on an Easter Sunday, Paskha, the central holy day of the Orthodox Church which is celebrated after seven weeks of fasting with great expectation, solemn joy, and feasting. It is customary to kiss family, friends, acquaintances, and others three times on the cheeks this day, one time each for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For timid and shy people, the tradition served as a way of kissing a person one liked. The lit candles which Kataev recalls were traditionally carried home after Saturday night vespers before Palm Sunday and after the Holy Thursday “Passion Gospels,” always celebrated in the evening. In many families, upon arriving home, the youngest child would get to illuminate the darkened house from her candle. Excerpted from Valentin Kataev, Sviatoi kolodets [The Sacred Well]. Moscow, 1979.
[Kataev begins]: “Tell me, why didn’t you marry me back then?” “I was young and foolish,” she answered with an unreflecting and sorrowful lightness as if she had anticipated the question. Then, her head slightly down, she continued to look at me from beneath her brows not wiping her eyes, smiling quietly. On the wall in back of her I noticed a vaguely familiar watercolor. The only item which she managed to take with her from Russia some forty years ago. The painting was of a young woman, almost a girl, in a paisley kerchief carefully carrying before her a Holy Thursday candle in a paper cone lest the March wind blow it out. The candlelight illuminated the girl’s face from below her cheeks with a bright and tender glow. The upper
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