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A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

This was the song of certain heretics, the raskolniks called—“The Coffin-liers.” “Seven thousand years after the creation of the world,” said they, “the second coming of Christ will take place; and should it not happen we will burn the Gospels themselves; as for the other books it is not worth believing them.” And they left their houses, lands, goods, and cattle, and every night went out into the fields and woods, put on clean shirts and shrouds, laid themselves in coffins hollowed out of tree trunks, and saying mass waited, expecting at every moment the trumpet call of the Judgment. Such was their idea of “meeting Christ.”

Opposite the headland formed by the Neva and the lesser Neva, in the widest part of the river, close to Gagarin’s hemp warehouse, among the rafts, barges, and cargo boats, stood the oak-rafts belonging to Tsarevitch Alexis. They had come from Nishigorod to Petersburg for the Admiralty dockyard.

On the night of the Venus festival in the Summer Garden an old bourlak was sitting at the rudder of one of these rafts; though it was summer he still wore a torn sheepskin coat and bast shoes. They called him “foolish John,” and he passed for a simpleton. For thirty years, day by day, month by month, year by year, he would sit every night till dawn waiting to “meet Christ,” always chanting the same song of the coffin-liers. Sitting quite close to the water on the very edge of the raft, bending over and with both hands clasped round his knees, he looked in expectation on the bits of golden-emerald sky which gleamed through the black torn clouds. His fixed eyes looking from under matted grey hair and his immovable face were filled with terror and hope; slowly swaying from side to side, he sang in a long drawn melancholy voice:—

A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

When the angels blow,

From the graves will go

Those who in them lie,

To God’s throne on high.

Two roads are there to take,

Beware which choice you make!

One leads to heaven fair,

One to old Satan’s lair!

“Ivan! come to supper!” they called from the other side of the raft. A fire was burning there on stones which had been put together in imitation of a stove, and over it hung on three sticks an iron kettle boiling fish-soup. Ivan did not heed, but went on singing. The group which sat talking round the fire comprised, beside the boatmen and bourlaks, the aged schismatic Cornelius, who preached of self-burning and was now on his way to the Kershen forests beyond the Volga; his disciple, a runaway Moscow scholar named Tichon Zapólsky; Alexis Furlong, a gunner, deserter from Astrachan; the caulker Ivan Boudlóff, a sailor under the Admiralty, also a deserter; the clerk Larion Dokoukin, an old woman Vitalia belonging to the “runners,” who to quote her own words “led the life of a bird,” always on the move, soaring everywhere, staying nowhere; her companion Kilikeya the Barefooted, an epileptic woman, who had a “satanic suggestion” in her abdomen; and many other “people in hiding” who had fled to save themselves from the heavy taxation, soldiering, the cat-o’-nine tails, forced labour, tearing of nostrils, beard shaving, crossing with two fingers, or some of the other terrors of Antichrist.

“I feel sick at heart,” said Vitalia, an alert old woman, wearing a dark loose neckerchief who, though wrinkled, was red-cheeked as an autumn apple. “And, I know not why, the days seem so dark; the sun does not seem to shine as it used to.”

“The times are sad, the fear of Antichrist is invading the world, hence this sorrow and heaviness,” explained Cornelius, a haggard old man with a broad pleasant face, pock-marked and, apparently, mole-eyed. In reality he had piercingly sharp sight; he wore a “heretic” cape, in shape somewhat monkish, a black under-cassock which had turned brown, and a leather belt with a thong. And whenever he moved, his iron chain, weighing a hundred weight and made of crosses which deeply scored into his flesh, would clang its links together. “I too, father Cornelius, begin to see that these are the last days,” groaned the woman. “The world’s sands are running short; they say the end will come about the middle of the eighth thousand years.”

“No,” retorted the old man with decision, “it won’t even last as long as that.”

“Lord be merciful unto us,” sighed one of the company, “God knows His own time; all we can do is to say—God have mercy upon us.”

And they all lapsed into silence. Clouds had again covered up the opening of the sky which had become as dark as the Neva. The distant lightning grew brighter and brighter; with each flash the thin taper pinnacle of the Peter and Paul fortress shone forth like a streak of pale gold, and was reflected in the Neva; the flat stone battlements which seemed to be sunken into the banks, and the group of stucco buildings clustering around: mercantile and garrison depôts, hemp sheds and magazines, stood out in black relief. In the distance, on the opposite shore, the lights of the Summer Garden glittered through the trees. As a last breath of the late Northern spring a smell of pine, birch, and aspen was wafted across from the Lake of Keivoussary. The small group of people on the flat and scarcely visible raft, lit up by a red fire, between the black thunder clouds and the dark surface of the river seemed lonely and forsaken, as if hanging in the air midway between two skies and two abysses.

When all had stopped talking such silence ensued, that only the monotonous rippling of the stream under the logs was audible, while from the other end of the raft came along the water the same old melancholy song:—

A coffin of pinewood tree

Stands ready prepared for me;

Within its narrow wall

I’ll await the trumpet call.

“Friends, is it true,” began Kilikeya, a young woman with a delicately transparent, almost waxen face, and feet terrible to look at, being black as the roots of an old tree (she always went about barefoot even in the keenest frost), “is it true what I heard to-day in the market, that there is no Tsar in Russia; that the present Tsar is not the right one, neither a Russian nor of royal blood, but either a foreigner or foreigner’s son, or a Swedish changeling?”

“Neither Swede nor foreigner, but a damned Jew of the tribe of Dan,” declared Cornelius.

“O Lord, Lord,” again somebody sighed heavily, “see how the royal race has degenerated!”

They began to discuss who Peter was: whether a Swede, a foreigner, or Jew.

“The devil knows who he is. Whether a witch has hatched or the damp bred him, one thing is certain: he is a were-wolf,” declared the sailor, a young man of about thirty years old, with a wide-awake, intelligent expression on his face, once probably handsome, now disfigured by the branded forehead and torn nostrils.

“Ay! My friends, I know, I know positively everything concerning the Tsar,” replied Vitalia; “I learnt from an old wandering beggar woman, and the choristers of the Ascension told me just the same. When our Tsar, the pious Peter, was abroad visiting foreign countries he came across the Glass Kingdom; this Glass Kingdom is ruled by a maiden, who, making sport of him forced him to sit on a red hot tin, and then, having shut him up in a barrel with nails, cast him into the sea.”

“No, not in a barrel, but he was laid in a trunk,” some one corrected.

“Well, it does not matter whether it was a barrel or a trunk, but the fact remains that he has been lost ever since, neither seen nor heard of. And in his stead the sea vomited up a Jew of the tribe of Dan, born of an ill-conditioned wench, and nobody knew him. And on his coming to Moscow he began to do as a Jew would; he declined the Patriarch’s blessing, would not go to the holy relics in Moscow, aware that the holy place would refuse his approach. Neither did he do honour to the tombs of former pious Tsars, for the simple reason that they were strangers to him and hateful in consequence. He saw no one of the royal family, neither the Tsaritsa nor the Tsarevitch nor the Tsarevenas, fearing they would detect him and say: ‘You don’t belong to us, you are not the Tsar, but a cursed Jew.’ He did not show himself to the people on New Year’s Day, fearing detection, just as Gregory had been detected by the people; he does not keep fast days nor go to church, nor does he wash in the bath-house on Saturdays, but lives dissolutely in a house with the foreigners. Nowadays a foreigner is an important personage in Muscovy; the sorriest foreigner stands higher than a boyar, higher even than the Patriarch himself. He himself, the cursed Jew, publicly dances with foreign courtesans; drinks wine not to the glory of God, but in an indecent ugly way, like a common toper, reeling on the ground and using bad language when drunk. For the amusement of foreigners, or, more likely, for the outraging of all Christian customs, he publicly calls his drink-companions by holy names, one, the most holy Patriarch, others again, Bishop and Archbishop, himself Archdeacon, thus defiling sacred names by applying them to shameful things.”

“The abomination of desolation, predicted by Daniel, has come to pass,” concluded Cornelius.

Other voices from the crowd chimed in:

“And the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, who is shut up in the Sousdal nunnery, tells us: ‘Have patience, keep to the Christian faith, this is not my Tsar—he is a stranger.’

“He is trying his best to make the Tsarevitch imitate him, but he can’t succeed; and that is why the Tsar wants to rid himself of him, and prevent his coming to the throne.”

“O Lord, Lord! what a trouble God has sent—the father rises against the son, the son against his father.”

“What father is he to him! The Tsarevitch himself says this man is neither father nor Tsar to me.”

“The Tsar loves the foreigners; the Tsarevitch does not love foreigners: ‘Give me time,’ says he, ‘and I will soon get rid of them.’ A foreigner once came to him and began to talk in an unknown language. The Tsarevitch burnt his clothes and scorched him; the foreigner complained to the Tsar; ‘Why do you go to him?’ was the answer, ‘while I live you will be unhurt.’”

“This is so! they all say when our Tsarevitch comes to the throne then the Tsar and his company will have to do their best to save themselves.”

“Truly, truly, it is so,” affirmed several voices cheerfully, “the Tsarevitch dearly loves the ancient ways.”

“A righteous man!”

“Russia’s Hope!”

“Many old women’s tales pass current among our folk nowadays; they cannot all be believed or trusted,” began Ivan Boudlóff, and at once his calm matter of fact words riveted the attention of the whole group. “But I must say, be he Swede or foreigner or Jew—the devil knows best—one thing is certain, ever since God sent him to rule over us we have seen no happy days; life has become hard; there is no peace. Take us mariners and soldiers. It is fifteen years since we began fighting the Swede, we have not disgraced ourselves anywhere, but have shed our blood freely; and yet to this day we see no peace. Summer and autumn we are sent to roam on the seas, the winter is spent among rocks, we are dying of sheer hunger. And the country is ruined to such an extent that in some places not even a sheep remains to the peasant. They say: ‘A clever head, a clever head.’ If he were clever, he would be able to understand his people’s needs. Where does he show his cleverness? He gave us a proof in his civic laws, the institution of the Senate. Yet what good comes of it? Not only more wages are wanted; but ask the people with law-suits if any one of them has been promptly attended to—— Ah! what is the use of talking? The whole nation is outraged. He so arranges matters as to drag the last bit of Christianity from our souls, the last bit of life from our bodies. How is it that God tolerates so much cruelty? But this is not happening in vain; a change will come, sooner or later, the blood will come over them.”

Suddenly one of the audience who had remained silent all this while, a woman named Elena with a simple, kind face, started defending the Tsar. “We don’t know how to express it,” she said, in a low voice, as if to herself, “but we continually pray—O Lord, bring the Tsar back to our Christian faith!”

Her timid attempt was silenced however, by indignant voices crying:—

“He is no Tsar! only a mock-Tsar; he has squandered himself, goes about as if beside himself.”

“He has become quite a Jew, he can no longer live without a sip of blood from time to time. The day he drinks blood, that day he is content and merry, but the day he gets none he can neither eat nor drink.”

“Glutton! he will have eaten everybody soon, for himself there is no extermination.”

“May the earth engulph him!”

“Fools! Curs!” interposed with fury the gunner Alexis Furlong, a red-haired man of huge height, with a face now suggesting a beast, now a child, “fools, for not knowing how to defend yourselves! All of you are doomed soul and body; you will be mashed up like worms in a cabbage. As for me nothing would please me better than to cut him up into little bits.”

Elena weakly sighed and made the sign of the cross; these words, she confessed afterwards, made her feel hot all over. The others looked with terror at Alexis, while he, fixing his bloodshot eyes on one spot, and clenching his fist, added slowly as if lost in thought,—and there was something yet more terrible in this measured tone than in his fury:—

“I am surprised that no one has finished him off before now. He is always about alone. There are plenty of chances to cut him up half a dozen times over.”

Elena grew pale, she wanted to say something, but her moving lips could not articulate a sound.

“Thrice have there been attempts to kill the Tsar,” said Cornelius, “but every time has failed: evil spirits attend and protect him.”

A fair, puny soldier, with an idiotic, haggard, sickly face, quite a boy, a deserter named Petka Jisla, began to talk hurriedly, stuttering and sobbing like an infant. He told them that three ships had brought branding-irons from abroad to brand people with. Strict watch was kept over them, nobody was allowed near; sentinels being stationed by them on the Cotline island.

These were the new recruit marks introduced by Peter, about which the Tsar wrote in 1712 to the general plenipotentiary Prince James Dolgorúki:—“to mark recruits, prick a cross with the needle on the left hand and rub in powder.”

“The marked men receive bread, those who have no marks go without, no matter if they starve. Ah! brethren, brethren, it is a sorry business.”

“Famine will bring us all unto the son of perdition to worship him,” affirmed Cornelius.

“Some have been already marked,” continued Petka, “I among them, lost man that I am.”

With evident difficulty he lifted with his right hand the left which hung powerless at his side, brought it to the light, and showed the recruiting mark, stamped with the government stamp.

“When stamped, the hand at once began to wither, first the left only, now the right has began; try as I may to raise and bless myself with it, I cannot.”

His companions looked terror-stricken at the dark spot, which seemed like a number of pock marks on the pale yellow, withered, lifeless hand. This was the human brand, the black cross of the crown.

“That is it, quite right,” declared Cornelius, “the sign of Antichrist. It is written: ‘he will mark them on the hand, he, who receives this mark, will lose the power to bless himself with the sign of the cross; yet his hand will be paralyzed not by chains, but by an oath, and no repentance shall be granted unto such.’”

“Brethren! brethren! what have they done unto me? Had I but known in time they should never have had me alive. They have spoilt a human body; marked a man like cattle.” Petka sobbed convulsively, and large tears rolled down his childish pathetic face.

“Friends,” ejaculated Kilikeya, as if struck by a sudden thought, “all this seems to point to one fact, that our Tsar Peter is himself the——”

She did not finish, the terrible word seemed to die on her lips.

“And what did you think?” Cornelius looked at her with his little sharp piercing eyes. “He is that very one Himself.”

“No, never fear, the veritable one has not yet appeared. He might be his forerunner,” tried to put in Dokoukin. But Cornelius stood up, the chain of iron crosses clanking; he lifted his hand, raised his two fingers in the “schismatic” way, and triumphantly announced:—

“Listen ye Orthodox, this is He who reigns, who has had dominion over you since the year 1666, the year of the Beast. In the beginning, the Tsar Alexis together with the Patriarch Nikon renounced the faith, and in so doing became the forerunner of the Beast. Now following in their footsteps Tsar Peter has finally uprooted all piety; he has annihilated the Patriarchate; claimed the Church and divine power, and, against our Lord Jesus Christ, has declared himself supreme head of the Church, the absolute pastor. And vieing with the supremacy of Christ, about whom it is written:—‘I am the first and the last,’ he called himself Peter the First. In the year 1700, on the first day of January, the new year’s day of the ancient Roman god Janus, at a firework entertainment he proclaimed on a screen—‘My time has now come.’ And he assumed unto himself the name of Christ, in the hymn sung at church in memory of the Poltava victory over the Swedes. And on his return to Moscow, he had young children in white robes placed on triumphal arches and taking part in the procession, to glorify him and sing, ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest. Lord God appear to us!’—as by God’s will, the Jewish children had praised our Lord Jesus Christ on his entry into Jerusalem. Thus by his title he had elevated himself above every Name of God. For it has been said: under the name of Simon Peter there will appear in Rome the proud prince of this world, Antichrist, and in Russia, which is the third Rome, that Peter has appeared who is the son of darkness, the blasphemer and enemy of God, that is Antichrist. And as it is written: in all things will the false prophet strive to resemble the Son of God, so also does the aforesaid Peter, glorifying himself, say: ‘I am a father to the fatherless, a shelter for the wandering, a helper to those in trouble, a defence to the oppressed’; he has built hospitals for the sick and the aged; schools for the young; the simple and ignorant Russian people he has in a short time made shrewd and clever, and in all knowledge equal to other European nations. He has expanded the Empire, he has reinstated what was stolen, restored what had fallen to ruins, glorified what had been humbled, renewed the old; he has roused those sleeping in ignorance; and has created what was not. ‘I am gracious, meek, and merciful. Come unto me, and worship me, the living and Almighty God, for I am God, there is none other God but me.’ Thus the Beast feigns goodness; he about whom it is written, ‘That Beast is terrible and is like unto none.’ Thus a cruel wolf, masked under a sheepskin, will one day spring forth and swallow everyone. Listen then, ye Orthodox, to the word of the prophet: Go, go forth, go forth from Babylon, oh! my people and save yourselves, for there is no salvation in cities for the living; flee, persecuted faithful ones, who have no present abode, but are seeking the Coming. Flee into the woods, the deserts, hide your heads under the earth, in hills and caverns, in the earth’s abysses; for brethren you yourselves see, that we have reached the utmost evil. Antichrist himself has come, and with him the world is ending. Amen.”

He finished. A blinding flash of lightning suddenly lit up the man from head to foot, and to those who were looking at him, the small man seemed almost a giant in this glare, and the roll of the dull, as if subterranean thunder, seemed to be the echo of his words, which had filled heaven and earth.

He finished, and all around him remained silent. Again was heard the dreamy ripple of the stream under the logs, and the languid melancholy song of Ivan wafted across from the other end of the raft:—