Natasha's Dance полностью

There is also reason to suppose that the shamanistic cults of the Mongol tribes were incorporated in the Russian peasant faith, as

Kandinsky and his fellow anthropologists had argued at the end of the nineteenth century (although it is telling that they found no trace of the Muslim religion which the Golden Horde adopted in the fourteenth century).* Many of the peasant sects, the 'Wailers' and the 'Jumpers', for example, used techniques that were highly reminiscent of the Asian shamans' to reach a trance-like state of religious ecstasy.²⁸

The Holy Fool (yurodivyi) was probably descended from the Asian shamans, too, despite his image as the quintessential 'Russian type' in many works of art. It is difficult to say where the Holy Fools came from. There was certainly no school for Holy Fools and, like Rasputin (who was in his way a sort of Holy Fool), they seem to have emerged as simple men, with their own techniques of prophecy and healing, which enabled them to set out on their life of religious wandering. In Russian folklore, the 'fool for the sake of Christ', or Holy Fool for short, held the status of a saint - though he acted more like an idiot or madman than the self-denying martyr demanded by St Paul. Widely deemed to be clairvoyant and a sorcerer, the Holy Fool dressed in bizarre clothes, with an iron cap or harness on his head and chains beneath his shirt. He wandered as a poor man round the countryside, living off the alms of the villagers, who generally believed in his supernatural powers of divination and healing. He was frequently received and given food and lodgings in the households of the provincial aristocracy.

The Tolstoy family retained the services of a Holy Fool at Yasnaya Polyana. In his semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical Childhood, Tolstoy recounts a memorable scene in which the children of the household hide in a dark cupboard in Fool Grisha's room to catch a glimpse of his chains when he goes to bed:

Almost immediately Grisha arrived with his soft tread. In one hand he had

his staff, in the other a tallow candle in a brass candlestick. We held our breaths.

'Lord Jesus Christ! Most Holy Mother of God! To the Father, the Son and

the Holy Ghost…' he kept saying, drawing the air into his lungs and speaking

* Long after shamanism became fashionable, the Muslim impact on Russian culture remained taboo. Even in St Petersburg, a city founded on the principle of religious tolerance, there was no mosque until 1909.

with the different intonations and abbreviations peculiar to those who often repeat these words.

With a prayer he placed his staff in a corner of the room and inspected his bed; after which he began to undress. Unfastening his old black girdle, he slowly divested himself of his tattered nankeen coat, folded it carefully and hung it over the back of a chair… His movements were deliberate and thoughtful.

Clad only in his shirt and undergarment he gently lowered himself on the bed, made the sign of the cross all round it, and with an effort (for he frowned) adjusted the chains beneath his shirt. After sitting there for a while and anxiously examining several tears in his linen he got up and, lifting the candle with a prayer to the level of the glass case where there were some icons, he crossed himself before them and turned the candle upside down. It spluttered and went out.

An almost full moon shone in through the windows which looked towards the forest. The long white figure of the fool was lit up on one side by its pale silvery rays; from the other its dark shadow, in company with the shadow from the window-frames, fell on the floor, on the walls and up to the ceiling. Outside in the courtyard the watchman was striking on his iron panel.

Folding his huge hands on his breast, Grisha stood in silence with bowed head before the icons, breathing heavily all the while. Then with difficulty he sank to his knees and began to pray.

At first he softly recited familiar prayers, only emphasizing certain words; then he repeated them, but louder and with much animation. Then he began to pray in his own words, making an evident effort to express himself in Church Slavonic. Though incoherent, his words were touching. He prayed for all his benefactors (as he called those who received him hospitably), among them for our mother and us; he prayed for himself, asking God to forgive him his grievous sins, and he kept repeating: 'Oh God, forgive my enemies!' He rose to his feet with a groan and repeating the same words again and again, fell to the floor and again got up despite the weight of his chains, which knocked against the floor every time with a dry harsh sound…