Mysterious World, My Ancient World… A Physicist’s View on Ancient Orthodoxy. -Turova
Every year, some poor soul of unsound mind, calling himself an Old Believer, starts acting foolish in public. Either he wanders off into the taiga, or buries himself in the ground… Those lying scare-stories, once invented to oppose the schism, are eagerly reproduced by some modern writers who portray Old Believers as half-crazy religious fanatics. It works effectively on the gullible and those prone to losing their minds. But in reality, of course, it’s all nonsense. The kerzhak-Old Believer was healthy, sober, clean, hardworking, fruitful, thought clearly, and was exceptionally disinclined toward any foolishness.
They themselves were not surprised by it. It was only later, when they had all been completely wiped out, that people began to wonder. How could they live without shouting, without orders, just by themselves? How could they raise children without beatings? How could they sow bread and reap it without commands? And how did they even think with their peasant minds?!
And since no one could understand it, they all together accused the kerzhaks of conservatism, inertia, and stubborn adherence to outdated traditions. It’s laughable to even hear. What outdated tradition?! Cleanliness, family values, and the expediency of all life? Where in Russia, one wonders, did such a thing ever exist and then become outdated?
Are there still mysteries in the old faith? Yes, of course. Old Belief is an extremely complex historical and social phenomenon. I believe we are still very, very far from a true understanding of this “peasant faith.” And my reflections are deliberately narrowed thematically—this is an attempt to show the natural-scientific aspect of Old Belief. So please do not scold me for failing to cover this or that. Others will cover it. And I will try to present what I, a physicist, think.
Why is it immediately assumed to be an atheistic view? That is completely wrong.
As a natural scientist, I spent quite a long time engaged in experimental physics. That is, in dialogue with Nature, the only creation of the Almighty accessible to us. One and the same throughout the entire Universe, with uniform laws for the most distant galaxies. With infinite complexity in both the large and the small. Such pursuits quickly instill the understanding of how insignificantly weak the human mind is. And how ridiculous is the pride of those who believe they can convey their voice to the Creator, and that their way is the only reliable one…
In the beginning was… what? The WORD? No. In the beginning was the LOGOS (as in the Greek originals). And that, in precise translation, is LAW. (Compare: geo-logy, bio-logy…) And all that is accessible to man is to follow the thought of the Creator (Newton), to comprehend Nature. The laws of the Creator, whose complexity is infinite, unfold in the process of study, and there is nothing that could change them. The Creator is not a State Duma deputy; He did not create laws in order to violate them Himself.
From a physicist’s point of view, the peasant-kerzhak was my colleague: he was in constant dialogue with the Creator, with Nature; he was the same natural investigator as I. But peasants, deprived of access to education and without means of intellectual communication with society, could record the achievements of the mind only in their way of life.
Peasant-Old Believers treated labor on the land with the same fervor and the same awe as prayer. In fact, it was a kind of prayer. The peasant comprehended the great Laws, tried to become a co-Creator, forming a family Universe. House, livestock, field—all of it was arranged in the image and likeness of God.
It is regrettable that the “cultured” part of Russian society looked upon the peasantry with contempt, upon their life—as darkness, backwardness, savagery, and folly.
“They, the demons, are swarming all around, you just don’t see them! At night they look for unwashed dishes, and all sorts of dirt. There they have full freedom, the demons. And they get married, and hold weddings, and give birth to little demons. And if you eat from such dishes, they’ll jump into your mouth and ruin you.” Well, replace the word “demons” with “microbes.” And think: these ideas arose no later than the 15th century. And the “dark, backward” schismatic woman who spoke these words somewhere in the 17th century was far ahead of all Europe, which had not yet created the science of hygiene. Our schismatics, in the time of Catherine II, knew how to resist even the plague, though they did not know the word “quarantine.”
I believe that the strongest alloy of natural-scientific, moral-ethical, organizational, and dogmatic principles was the result of a collective brainstorming, literally a national intellectual feat, later called the peasant faith, ancient Orthodoxy. More precisely, a part of it, and only in the form accessible to the intellect of the 17th century. Through the efforts of the ideologists of the schism, folk knowledge, as sociologists say, was verbalized and rationalized: turned into a coherent worldview. And at least in that form, the intellectual achievements of our ancestors became known to society. Without the schism, no one would have known.
A significant part of the cultural heritage of the kerzhaks has already been lost, since their way of life is lost, and the intellectual achievements of peasants are still valued at nothing. Because what is ordinary and familiar often seems simple…
Here’s such a simple phrase: the peasant sowed rye. What’s interesting about that?! Well, a peasant. Well, he sowed. And rye—who doesn’t know it? Yet in these three words there are two historical riddles. Let’s start with rye. More precisely, with winter rye. This plant played a huge role in the history of Russia. There is not a drop of exaggeration here.
Winter rye is a weed by origin, everywhere considered merely an ineradicable admixture in wheat. Rye survived in the most unfavorable years, when the main crop perished. And black rye bread was considered the bread of famine years. In the ancient Russian states, winter rye was sown only in the Novgorod lands, the coldest ones, where wheat simply did not ripen. It was precisely through the cultivation of rye that the great northern peasant—the Novgorod peasant—arose, creating what is called the fallow system of agriculture.
Sown in mid-August, rye rises with the autumn rains and sends its roots down to a depth of up to 1 meter; no weeds can trouble it anymore. Rye cleanses and ennobles the soil, coping even with such a villain of fields and gardens as couch grass. It is also important that rye seed does not need to be stored all winter long, protected from rotting, freezing, or rodents. Thus, rye is simply ideal for sowing on newly cultivated lands. It was precisely with rye that our peasant crossed the Urals and Siberia, laying the foundation for life across those vast expanses. Without their own bread, no one could have lived there. The Urals are the zone of the northernmost seed crop production in the world.
Rye, capable of growing even on the poorest and—what is very important—acidic soils (and that is exactly what we have), dramatically increases its yield when manure is applied. If you want a good harvest—keep livestock. Rye sharply boosts productivity when sown precisely at the right time. Not earlier and not later. “Prepare to die, but sow the rye,” the peasants used to say.
Since ripe rye sheds its grain very quickly, it is reaped in the waxy stage—that is, at incomplete ripeness. If cut too early, the grain will be thin, the yield lower, the germination poorer. If delayed—the grain will shatter. So rye is the highest peasant piloting skill; it demands mastery, responsibility, and enormous experience accumulated over generations. And also a certain level of prosperity. A poor man without a proper household will never get a good harvest. In our parts, only the kerzhaks—Old Believers—knew how to grow rye properly.
They also actively used what was called “roshcha,” that is, the same rye, immediately after harvesting moistened and sprouted in the dark. Wheat, right after harvesting, cannot be sprouted that way; it requires vernalization, that is, cold treatment. After all, wheat is supposed to sprout in spring, not in autumn! In this sense, rye is simply beyond competition.
It was rye, for centuries, that formed the basis of the economic independence of the kerzhaks. Roshcha was historically the first—and still unsurpassed—raw material for moonshine. The Vyatka ancestors of the Perm peasants were the creators, and later the main suppliers, of this raw material. The state monopoly on distilling in Russia would tighten or loosen from time to time, but the peasants were always with their own. In our Perm province, moreover, right next door was Udmurtia, where they always distilled their own kumyshka, no matter how many times it was forbidden. The benefit was twofold. First, there was always a market for rye. Second, being fierce abstainers, the kerzhaks themselves did not drink vodka or moonshine; instead they drank rye kvass and braga made from roshcha. These were everyday drinks, liquid bread.
Just think about it: a drink from sprouted grain—every single day! Modern science presents as a sensation that sprouting grain, its sprouts and roots, are enriched with biologically active substances; they are strongly recommended for children’s nutrition as well as for restorative diets. Yet the kerzhaks consumed this unique product—for centuries, every day… Is it not from here that the famous kerzhak fertility and seething vitality come?
Rye still fills its ears in our fields every summer, but most of the other elements of the traditional peasant way of life have now been lost. This includes, for example, such a subtle matter as the moral-psychological and organizational foundations of the Old Believer community. There was no shortage of astonishing things there.
An outsider, if allowed into a peasant izba, would see crowding: so little space in the house, yet so many people. The man himself with his wife, and the old woman, and however many children—four or maybe eight. Yet it was not crowded! And there is nothing surprising in that. After all, fingers on a hand are not crowded, are they? So too the family was not crowded. The house was the dwelling of a single many-headed being—the kerzhak family. Everyone had their place. Day and night, at prayer and at table. Just like fingers on a hand.
As soon as a child could stand on his own two feet from the cradle, they would put him in the round dance at a holiday. The little person would grab hold of his sisters and brothers, and from then on they could never be separated for the rest of his life. And there was work for everyone to do. And each one knew and saw for himself what needed doing. And if fate carried someone far from kin (to soldier’s service, for instance)—they would write a letter at the first opportunity. One is amazed today, reading those letters. Practically the entire letter consists of greetings and bows. “We bow to you, sister Maremyana, from our white face down to the damp earth…” And then more greetings and bows to all the family, from the old grandfather to the infant in the cradle. “And does our dear uncle Aleksey Filimonovich come to us? Give him my greeting too.”
In Russian artistic literature there has always been a certain perplexity: just where is folk wisdom located? Strangely enough, modern information technologies provide substantial help in understanding this. Namely, the concept of “distributed knowledge.” Modern computer networks are distributed databases—that is, a collection of relatively low-powered computers united into enormous systems. Our Russian intellectuals could never understand why no single peasant gives the impression of being a great sage, yet the wisdom of the people somehow exists?! And that is precisely the informational power of the network.
Look: in Russia the authorities persecuted Old Believers for centuries as best they could. The diaspora—whether in the Baltics, Canada, or Brazil—lived as it wished. In Russia, people of Old Believer origin form a constellation of brilliant names among merchants, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists… The Ryabushinskys, the Morozovs, the Tretyakovs are well known. In our parts—masses of merchants, brilliant inventors at the Demidov factories, the very creators of the steam locomotive, the Cherepanov brothers, and so on.
The greatest economist, Nobel Prize laureate Vasiliy Vasilyevich Leontyev (lived in the USA from 1930. All his life he dreamed of making Russia happy, but Russia did not want it.) Grandfather—an Old Believer peasant; father already a St. Petersburg merchant.
Ivan Yefremov, the famous science-fiction writer, thinker, major paleontologist. His grandfather, Khariton Yefremov, from the Volga Old Believers, was taken into the Semenovsky regiment for his stature, ended up in St. Petersburg, and stayed there. Ivan’s father was already a respectable merchant. And Ivan, with all the kerzhak energy and indescribable giftedness, went off into completely different fields of activity.
Whom did the foreign Old Believer diaspora produce? Seemingly no one.
Collectivization destroyed the very foundations of traditional peasant life, including Old Believer life… The destruction of kerzhakdom will be understood for a long time yet. And it will not be understood until the minds of those who understand are cleansed of arrogance. Of the certainty that they themselves, educated people, are of course on a higher level of development compared to these bast-shoe toilers. That the hierarchical pyramid of one person’s subordination to another, and of many people to one—sometimes established by force, sometimes with blood—is the constantly progressing form of Russian life. Atomized by individualism and armed with personal freedom, Western society is seen as an utterly unattainable ideal. Whereas family concord and the community built upon it are archaic, antediluvian—in a word, primitive.
This arrogance has become so deeply rooted in the minds of domestic thinkers that neither centuries of economic success nor a people healthy in body, mind, and morals convince them. A people capable of instantly rising to the level of any intellectual achievement of humanity, mastering it, developing it, and adapting it to themselves. The doom of “archaism” raises no doubts in anyone. And the fact that in Russia it was finally destroyed is seen in such a context as a sad but inevitable affair. They say the old always perishes when it collides with the new.
In reality, what perished was a complex, subtle system of human relationships, centuries of social experience in self-government.
This structure was destroyed by something far cruder, primitively cannibalistic. Well, such things have happened in history before. And the fact that the village land has become depopulated, the people have gone wild, degenerated, and perished—there is nothing new in that either. There are many places on earth where only the wind blows sand across the ruins of vanished civilizations, and somewhere even the ruins are no longer known, buried deep under the sand.