Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/29

 the feeling and thought of Old Russia. We see this already in the monasteries of Petrograd, but we see it yet more clearly in remoter monasteries and hermitages. Russia, Old Russia, is the Russian monk. During my first visit to Russia I had a vivid experience of this. In Moscow I was moving in circles where intellectual development was most advanced, but withdrawing one day from this Europeanised environment, I paid a visit to the Troicko-Sergievskaja monastery. With its institutions, its treasures, and its relics, this monastery takes us back into fourteenth-century Russia; but in the dependent monastery Bethany, and yet more in the hermitage of Gethsemane, we find ourselves in an even remoter historical epoch. In the centre of the forest stands the hermitage, with an ancient wooden church—a veritable Gethsemane! The contrast was all the more striking seeing that the previous day I had been debating religious problems with Tolstoi and his friends. Brandes, too, chanced to be visiting Moscow at the time, to expound his literary views in lectures delivered in the French tongue. Now I found myself at the hermitage of Gethsemane, with its catacombs, its wonder-working relics, and its icons! One of Tolstoi's friends, a man of position, had given me a letter of introduction to the head of the monastery, so that I was able to see everything. Never shall I forget the man who showed me round the hermitage. This monk was about twenty-five years old. He had grown up in and for the monastery, and his mind was entirely dominated by its Orthodox ideas. To him the world seemed something altogether foreign, whilst I was an emissary from, a part of, the outer world, from which he was a refugee. Now he was to accompany me through the catacombs and to explain what I saw. The things which to him were objects of the most devout contemplation were to be elucidated to the nonrussian, the European, the heretic, the mere sightseer! I could not fail to note and to be sorry for my guide's distress, but I must admit that his uneasiness was a trifle irritating to the European in me. He genuflected before every relic and every icon, at least before the principal ones; he was continually crossing himself; kneeling down he touched the holy precincts with forehead and lips. As I watched him closely I perceived that alarm was gaining on him, that he was obviously terrified, momentarily expecting that Heaven would punish me for my wickedness and unbelief. But punishment was withheld, and