Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/136

120 and national life, and which constitutes a terrible menace, not only to the Russian nation, but to the whole world.

The Russian Government never cared to penetrate the depths of the national masses. Indeed, almost like fairy tales are the articles of the well-known Russian publicist, Kondurishkin, who in 1917 brought to light sensational revelations of the villages and settlements in European Russia and in Siberia which have never seen any representative of the Russian Government or Church.

Thus from such villages and settlements spring aboriginal prejudices, superstitions, and witchcraft, which, in the mass of people naturally inclined to dark and gloomy mysticism, quickly spread and became fixed, casting a shadow of mediæval, elemental romanticism, which took crude, primitive, unchristian, and anti-civilised forms.

How else can we explain happenings like those which I remember well from the experience of my younger years?

In the little town of Borovicha, in the province of Novgorod, lived the notorious Pieta, an elderly man imbecile from childhood, but obsessed by a peculiar religious mania, who used to go about summer and winter barefooted and bareheaded, in a thin and dirty linen garment. He used to go about praying hours on end in front of every church or holy ikon, chanting merry tunes and playing with a few splinters which