The peasant nanny was without a doubt the main source of these superstitions, and such was her importance in the nobleman's upbringing that they often loomed much larger in his consciousness than all the teachings of the Church. Pushkin's upbringing, for example, was Orthodox but only in a superficial way. He was taught to pray, and he went to church; but otherwise he was a Voltairean who held firmly to the secular beliefs of the Enlightenment throughout his life.60 However, from his nanny he inherited superstitions that had their origins in the medieval age. He was struck down by foreboding when a fortune-teller told him that he would be killed by a tall blond man (true, as it turned out), and he was notoriously superstitious about hares (a fact that may have saved his life in 1825 when a hare crossed his path on his estate near Pskov and made him superstitious about travelling to Petersburg to join the Decembrists on Senate Square).61
Superstitions about death were particularly common in the aristocracy. Gogol never used the word 'death' in his letters, fearing it might bring about his own. This was, in fact, a widely held belief. It may perhaps explain why Tolstoy gave the nameless pronoun 'it' to the idea of death in those brilliant passages where he explores the experience of dying in
Orthodox and pagan - yet a rationalist: an educated Russian could be all these things. It was part of the Russian condition to master such conflicting strands within oneself and fashion out of them a sensibility, ways of living, of looking at the world that were perfectly at ease with each other. Stravinsky, for example, though more chameleon-like than most, found an intellectual home in French Catholicism in the 1920s. Yet at the same time he became more emotionally attached than ever to the rituals of the Russian Church. He attended services at the
Orthodox Church in Paris on a regular basis from 1926; he collected Russian icons for his home in Paris and faithfully observed the Russian rituals in his private worship there; he even planned to build a Russian chapel at his house. There was no contradiction in this combination -at least not one that Stravinsky ever felt. Indeed, it was quite common for the cosmopolitan elites into which Stravinsky had been born to live in several different faiths. Some were drawn to the Roman Church, particularly those (like Zinaida Volkonsky when she moved to Italy in the 1830s) who found its internationalism more in keeping with their own world view than the ethnocentric Russian Church. Others were more drawn to Lutheranism, particularly if, like many of the aristocracy, they were of Russian-German parentage. It is difficult to say what was more important in the evolution of this complex religious sensibility, the relatively superficial nature of the aristocracy's religious upbringing which allowed space for other beliefs or the multinational influences on that class, but either way it made for a culture that was far more complex than the type we might imagine from the mythic image of the 'Russian soul'.
In 1878 Dostoevsky made the first of several trips to Optina Pustyn. It was a time of profound grief in the writer's life. His favourite child Aleksei (Alyosha) had just died of epilepsy, an illness he had inherited from his father, and, on the urging of his wife, Dostoevsky visited the monastery for spiritual comfort and guidance. The writer was working on the last of his great novels,
at the monastery.66 The novelist was struck by the charismatic power of the elder and, in one of the novel's early chapters, 'Devout Peasant Women', he re-creates a scene which takes us to the heart of the Russian faith. Zosima gives comfort to a desperate peasant woman who is also grieving for a little son:
