At set times of the year, but especially at Easter and Pentecost, it was important for the family to give remembrance to the dead and feed their souls, in graveside picnics, with ritual breads and pies and decorated eggs. Breadcrumbs would be scattered on the graves to feed the birds - symbols of the souls that rose up from the ground and flew around the village during Easter time - and if the birds arrived it was taken as a sign that the spirits of the dead were alive and well.149 Dostoevsky was borrowing from this ancient custom in
One of the last utterances Tolstoy made, as he lay dying in the stationmaster's little house at Astapovo, was 'What about the peasants? How do peasants die?' He had thought a lot about the question, and had long believed that the peasants died in a different way from the educated classes, a way that showed they knew the meaning of their lives. The peasants died accepting death, and this was the proof of their religious faith. Tolstoy meant to die in that way, too.151 Many years before, he had written in his diary: 'When I am dying I should like to be asked whether I still see life as before, as a progression towards God, an increase of love. If I should not have the strength to speak, and the answer is yes, I shall close my eyes; if it is no, I shall look up.'152 No one thought of asking him the question at the moment of his death, so we shall never know how he crossed the frontier which had brought him so much agony and so much doubt. There was no reconciliation with the Church, despite Tolstoy's flight to Optina. The Holy Synod tried to win him back and even sent one of the Optina monks to Astapovo, where Tolstoy became stranded, too ill to go on, after he had left the monastery. But the mission failed - none of Tolstoy's family would even let the monk see the dying man - and so in the end the writer was denied a Christian burial.153
But if the Church refused to say a mass for the dead man, the people said one for him in another way. Despite the attempts of the police to stop them, thousands of mourners made their way to Yasnaya Polyana, where amid scenes of national grief that were not to be found on the
death of any Tsar, Tolstoy was buried in his favourite childhood spot. It was a place in the woods where, many years before, his brother Nikolai had buried in the ground a magic stick on which he had written the secret about how eternal peace would come and evil would be banished from the world. As Tolstoy's coffin was lowered into the ground, the mourners started singing an ancient Russian chant, and someone shouted, in defiance of the police who had been instructed to impose the Church's excommunication of the writer to the end, 'On your knees! Take off your hats!'154 Everyone obeyed the Christian ritual and, after hesitating for a moment, the police kneeled down too and removed their caps.
overleaf:
Before he turned to art Kandinsky thought he might become an anthropologist. As a student reading law at Moscow University, he had fallen ill in his final year, and to recuperate he had set off on a trip to the remote Komi region, 800 kilometres north-east of Moscow, to study the beliefs of its Finno-Ugric tribes. Travelling by train as far as Vologda, where the railway stopped, he then sailed east along the Sukhona river, entering the forests of 'another world', as he recalled, where the people still believed in demons and spirits. Anthropologists had long marked out the Komi region as a meeting point between Christianity and the old shamanic paganism of the Asiatic tribes. It was a 'wonderland' where 'the people's every action is accompanied by secret magic rituals'.1 The trip left an indelible impression on Kandinsky. The shamanism he discovered there became one of the major inspirations for his abstract art.2 'Here I learned how to look at art', he would later write - 'how to turn oneself around within a painting and how to live in it.'3
