For a long time Grisha continued in this state of religious ecstasy, improvising prayers. Now he would repeat several times in succession Lord, have mercy but each time with renewed force and expression. Then he prayed Forgive me, OLord teach me how to live… teach me how to live, O Lord so feelingly that he might be expecting an immediate answer to his petition.
The piteous sobs were all that we could hear… He rose to his knees, folded his hands on his breast and was silent.29
Writers and artists portrayed the Holy Fool as an archetype of the simple Russian believer. In Pushkin's and in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov the Holy Fool appears as the Tsar's conscience and as the voice of the suffering people. Prince Myshkin, the epileptic, Christ-like hero of The Idiot, is called a Holy Fool by the rich landowner Rogo-zhin; and Dostoevsky clearly wanted to create in him a genuinely Christian individual who, like the Holy Fool, is driven to the margins of society. In his painting In Russia (1916) Mikhail Nesterov portrayed the Holy Fool as the unofficial spiritual leader of the Russian people. Yet the Fool's untutored and largely improvised sacraments probably owed more to the Asian shamans than they did to the Russian Church. Like a shaman, the Holy Fool performed a sort of whirling dance with strange shrieks and cries to enter into a state of religious ecstasy; he used a drum and bells in his magic rituals; and he wore his chains in the belief, which was shared by Asian shamans, that iron had a supernatural quality. Like a shaman, too, the Holy Fool frequently employed the image of the raven in his rituals - a bird with a magic and subversive status in Russian folklore. Throughout the nineteenth century the peasants of the Volga region saw the Cossack rebel leaders Pugachev and Razin in the form of giant ravens in the sky.30
Many common elements of Russian clothing were also Asiatic in their origins - a fact reflected in the Turkic derivation of the Russian words for clothes like kaftan, zipun (a light coat), armiak (heavy coat), sarafan and khalat.31Even the Tsar's crown or Cap of Monomakh -by legend handed down from Byzantium - was probably of Tatar origin.32 The food of Russia, too, was deeply influenced by the cultures of the East, with many basic Russian dishes, such as plov (pilaff), lapsha (noodles) and tvorog (curd cheese) imported from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and other eating habits, like the Russian taste for horsemeat and koumis (fermented mare's milk) no doubt handed down from the Mongol tribes. In contrast to the Christian West and most Buddhist cultures of the East, there was no religious sanction against eating horsemeat in Russia. Like the Mongol tribes, the Russians even bred a type of horse specifically to eat or (in the Volga region) to
milk for koumis. Such practices were practically unknown in western Europe - at least until the nineteenth century, when French social reformers began to advocate the eating of horsemeat as a solution to the problems of poverty and malnutrition. But even then there was something of a stigma attached to eating horses. The practice of breeding horses for meat was regarded as barbaric in the West.33
