# The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 6

In a sense the tavern is also a theatre or a church. It is a place of life.
"I am glad you've come," said a friend to me. "Keep your ears open; this is the very bottom; everything springs from here. This is the changing-house of the ideas of the common people."
There is no "bar," in the English sense. On the long wooden counter are bottles and glasses, and plates of sausage and ham. But you do not lounge there and gossip over your glass. The Russian public-house is all tables and chairs, like the accommodation for a smoking concert. But such dirty chairs and tables!
You sit down; you are attended by a waiter. There is an army of waiters serving for 30s. a month and no tips. They are in white blouses, white trousers, and white aprons, and they look as if they had strayed into the filthy hall in their night attire. On one wall is a square candle-lantern with the word traktir printed on it in decayed brown; ​on another wall is an immense gilt ikon. The doors creak heavily to and fro, admitting customers unreadily—how unlike the little swing doors of the American saloons, so easy to open that you may slip in as it were by accident. At almost all the tables are working-men and women drinking tea, vodka, or beer, talking loudly. There are many cabmen in their round fur hats and voluminous blue cloaks; many market-women in their cottons, with soiled coloured kerchiefs on their heads. You see twenty people drinking tea to one drinking vodka—they pour the tea into the saucers, hold the saucers to their hairy mouths, and guzzle at the gratifying golden drink. But if you look about you will notice vodka-drinkers, some asleep, with their unkempt heads on the table (looking like tramps asleep in a free library); you see also men with red cheeks and fiery eyes not yet overcome by liquor, but ready to bawl and make a scandal at the least provocation The atmosphere is heavy with the smoke of the vilest tobacco in the world (makhorka). A blind musician is playing the concertina, several people are singing, hawkers with pies, with Bibles, with shirts, with pencils, with old clothes, are going from table to table offering their wares. There is tremendous bargaining and long-drawn-out haggling on the part of people who, it would seem, do not really intend to buy, even at the last. There are beggars, cripples, blind men, dwarfs, asking for alms ​in the name of Christ. There are drunken hooligans trying to get drinks for nothing, There are antediluvian pilgrims hundreds of miles from home, not going to a shrine, but collecting coppers throughout all Russia for the building of a new church in their far-away native villages. You may even see upon occasion a peasant carrying a great church bell. You ask him why. He tells you the church of his village was by the will of God destroyed by a fire, and that only the bell remains, and he is collecting alms to build a new church and hang up the bell again.
Throughout the whole tavern all day and almost all night is a clamour of talking and an animated scene of gesticulating, unwashed, ragged men and women. Almost all the small business of hawkers, stall-keepers, and little traders is accomplished over vodka or tea in the traktir, but indeed the successful, even the millionaire, peasant merchant will step without a ruffle of dignity into the most miserable tavern of the city, and not be too proud to answer the taunts or questions of ragamuffins. That is part of Russia's strength.
Then, the home is not all-absorbing in Russia, and even the poorest people like to spend the whole evening in the tavern drinking tea, talking, talking, talking. No one would reproach a Russian for lingering thus away from his wife and little ones. Not much money is spent, man for man. In three or four hours it often happens that a man spends no ​more than five copecks (a penny farthing), and has only purchased a little teapot of tea and a big teapot of hot water, the tavern's substitute for the samovar.
Kuprin tells the tale of a tavern in Odessa famous for one of its ragged musicians, Sasha. He filled the public-house with the strains of the violin, and every night the place was packed with men and women. Every table was occupied, there was tea or beer or vodka everywhere, all the men were smoking makhorka, the windows were all shut, and the air was of that warm, dense, suffocating character that the Russian people like. A din as of Babel pervaded the hall, and no one except those near the music could hear Sasha's tunes, yet every one felt that they were hearing.
Sasha would come in in the early hours of the evening, when people were few, would take his first mug of beer and then begin to play, mournfully, melancholily. His were sad, heart-aching tunes, full, as it were, of a world's sorrow. He sat in his accustomed place and brooded over his violin, seemingly uninterested in everything but the soul of music.
The windows of the tavern were crusted with ice or clouded with steam, and the shadows of men and ​women passed incessantly, some lingering, some hurrying. But Sasha did not heed them, nor notice how many came in at the dark and dirty doorway from the street. Only when there got to be a crowd he began to put aside his own repertory of songs, and take up those that were suggested by the customers, that were shouted in his ear—
"Sasha, play Maroosia."
"Sasha, play The Nightingale, play Spring has passed by."
Then, till the small hours of the morning, he would play what people wanted him to—sad songs, gay songs, marches, dances, country measures—dances, dances, dances, every dance in Russia he played, and the tables were crushed back and a space made and the people danced.
Every night, every week, every month Sasha was there, and the crowd and the music and the air thick with makhorka smoke. Not that the nights were always the same. Events in the town, in Russia, had their echoes there. In the time of the South African War Sasha played twenty times a night the March of the Boers. During the festivities of the Franco-Russian Alliance he played the Marseillaise, which was fearfully popular with the dock-labourers. When the Japanese War broke out he played all those sad tunes about far Manchuria and fighting in a strange land.
Alas, the Japanese War made a great change ​in the tavern. Sasha was taken for a soldier and disappeared from ken. For a year and a half no word was heard from him or of him. He was given up for dead, and the tavern lost its old attraction. At last, however, one night in came Sasha, the same as ever, unhurt, untouched. He had been captured by the Japanese and held a year as a prisoner at Nagasaki. He had learned Japanese music. Not that anybody wanted it.
"Play us the old tunes, Sasha; play Maroosia, play To Odessa we sailed on the sea." Sasha played that night all the old tunes.
The tavern became as of old.
But there was storm in the air. Every one was talking of revolution. Sasha began to play the Marseillaise again, and now with a different note from that in which he had played when friendship with France was being honoured. In came the police and stopped him. They forbade the playing of any Anthems whatsoever.
There was a pogrom in the town; hired ruffians appeared in the streets inciting the population to the murder of the Jews. Not once or twice Sasha himself was taken for a Jew and attacked.
Into the tavern came the same ruffians, and tried to stir up the drunkards to pillage and violence. Sasha was playing a tune of his own fancy when suddenly one of them, a converted Jew, jumped up and cried:
"The National Anthem! Brothers, the National ​Anthem in honour of our adored monarch. The National Anthem!"
"Anthem, Anthem," cried his mates.
"No Anthems whatsoever," said Sasha, repeating the words of the police-officer.
"What do you mean, you don't obey, you filthy Jew?" answered the man.
"And you?" said Sasha.
"I? What do you mean?"
"I'm a filthy Jew. All right, what are you?"
"I'm Orthodox."
"Orthodox! And for how much?"
The whole tavern laughed.
"Brothers," said the ruffian, "shall we stand the blasphemy of this Jew against Throne and Church any longer? . . ."
There was a rush at Sasha. But he jumped up, and lifting his fiddle in a rage, smashed it on the head of the first who came up to him.
So Sasha was arrested as a revolutionary, and once more he disappeared. This time every one thought he had gone for ever. It would have seemed proper to wear mourning for him. The tavern changed in atmosphere. In Sasha's place came another musician, one of those who had sat and listened to him in the old days and learned of him. One night, however, when they were playing the old tunes and the violin was gently crooning the song Expectancy, a voice from somewhere cried out nervously:
​"Brothers, Sasha!"
All turned, and there stood the twice-raised Sasha, bearded, gaunt, and pallid. The people flocked around him and cried to him and called on him to play. But the same nervous, frightened voice cried out again:—
"His arm!"
All grew silent. Sasha's left arm hung broken and twisted and nerveless from his shoulder.
"What is it, brother?" asked one.
"Muscle dried up, that's all," he answered.
"So—o."
"Then that's an end to Chaban," said one of the crowd, referring to one of the most popular dances that Sasha played.
But Sasha took out of his pocket with his right hand a queer black wooden instrument which he had either made in prison or had had given to him, and he put it to his lips and began to play.
Then every one began to dance, and Sasha sat in his place, and all was as before. As Kuprin says at the conclusion of his tale, "Man is for Life, but Art is For Ever."
Such is the orgy unrehearsed. So a tavern can be a popular theatre. It can also be a church, a place of searching after God. In England you sit ​down in church but stand in the public-house; in Russia you stand in the church but sit in the tavern; it humanises it, makes it more like a home, makes it possible for the tavern to be upon occasion a kind of church.
It is a great national assembly-place.
In Russia you are not allowed to hold a public meeting without the special authorisation of the police and the presence of a police-officer. But in the tavern is a great informal accidental meeting; and a great deal is enacted there that the police have no power to stop. Thus, for instance, in recent years several sects have used the tavern as the place for their prayer meetings, and have had something equivalent to a Salvation Army gathering, not "round the corner," but actually inside the public-house itself. The religious conspirators have come as it were accidentally, one by one, have ordered their tea, and have started an animated conversation into which, sooner or later, the whole houseful was drawn.
The most famous public-house in Moscow is the "Yama" (The Pit), in the street called Rozhdestvensky, a public-house which Tolstoy much wanted to visit, a tavern frequented not only by the common people but by scholars and seekers, especially by those who style themselves Bogoiskateli, seekers after God. Here appeared at times such well-known Russians as Solovyov, Bulgakof, Chertkof, Velikanof—it was the last who asked me to the "Yama," and ​through whom I was able to hear a multifarious collection of the common people discuss religion and Russia and ghosts and the eternal questions.
From the "Yama" have sprung several interesting sects, for example, the Bezsmertuzkz, or deathless ones. Their doctrines, promulgated by a wretched consumptive who had both feet in the grave, was that it was possible to escape death. He held that health was faith in life, and that disease was faith in death. Death came simply from lack of faith. There were people living eternally but we did not know where to find them. The Bezsmertniki make pilgrimages to the East to seek those who have been living for ages. Alas! the founder died before the eyes of his followers. "He lacked faith," said they, and the new religion continued. One of the most ardent of them is a frequent visitor of the "Yama," Alexey Yegorovitch, a stocking-hawker.
So much trouble came from the discussions in the "Yama" that the public-house was closed by the Government. But as in the case of Sasha, so in the case of the "Yama" and the God-seekers. You can kill or mutilate the body, but you cannot kill the soul, the thing in itself. The "Yama," crushed in one tavern, broke out in another.
I visited the "Yama" one Sunday. It was resuscitated in the "Bay" public-house in Malo-Golovinskaya by the Candlemas Gate. We sat down in the tavern at 12 o'clock, and over two glasses of tea talked for six hours and a half—​our only other sustenance being occasional hot cabbage pies brought to us in trayfuls by a little serving-boy from the kitchen. The tavern swarmed with religious characters, home missionaries, propagandists, Bible-hawkers. There was a strong detachment of Old Believers; an old Baptist hawker of women's hose; many stall-keepers from Sukareva Market; Velikanof, a friend of Pereplotchikof; Victor Karlovitch, greasy and fat, who believes in evil spirits and feels attracted to Theosophy.
The talk went on evil spirits and was enlivened by many stories. A mad woman had been taken to the New Jerusalem monastery near Moscow, and had had a fit in church. After the fit she was found to be in her right mind, and it was said that the unclean spirit had been caught as it came out of her, and was now preserved in a jar of spirit and exhibited to pilgrims as one of the sights of the monastery. Were there evil spirits or were there not? Was it not said that they passed out of Legion into the swine? Did not the devils cry from the bodies of the insane, giving witness to Christ as He passed them by?
Velikanof told an amusing story of two peasants and a steam-engine. One of them held that it was an unclean spirit that made the engine go foward; the other said it was just steam, no more, he knew.
"It is an unclean spirit," the former repeated; "I'll bet it is an unclean spirit."
​"How will you prove that it is?"
"I'll bet you a quarter the engine won't be able to pass the ikon of Mikhail the Ugodnik."
"Very well; done!"
The ikon was brought to the railway lines. Presently thrum, thrum, thrum, the post-train left the village railway station. The first peasant stood himself on the lines and held the ikon in front of him with both hands. The other stood by and watched. The train came on, but when the engine-driver saw the peasant barring the way and apparently flagging the train, he brought his machine to a standstill and cried out to know what was the matter.
"You see," said the peasant, "the engine dare not pass the ikon. The quarter is mine; let's go and have a drink."
Another visitor to the tavern told a sort of Ingoldsby legend of a ten-pound black cat whose favourite way of entering a house was by coming down the chimney. Another, a peasant workman, made the astonishing statement that if you make a candle from human fat and light it you can see all.
A long discussion was started on the difference between a man and an animal. The sole criterion set by Christ was, "By your fruits are ye known." A man is he who can sacrifice his life to an ideal. An animal hungers and at once looks about to satisfy his hunger. But upon occasion a man says ​to his hunger, "No, I shall fast." A man feels blessed when he suffers for conscience sake, but no animal feels blessed through suffering.
A contrast was drawn between Napoleon and Christ. Christ was offered the empire and crown of the world and knew that in Himself He had the power to take it, but He preferred to deny the world. In that He showed Himself the highest type of man. They of the world nailed Him upon the Cross and cried up to Him, "Save yourself." He could have saved Himself, but He did not. He preferred to deny life. But Napoleon on the mountain fell down and worshipped Satan, and took for his portion the empire of the world. Napoleon was an animal taking what his stomach whispered to him.
The conversation went on—Russia's great destiny was to carry the banner of the ideal, to sacrifice the material ends of life for the mystical. "Directly you make a step nearer to God you become aware of contradictions in terms in the life you see about you; when you get really near to God you enter into such a maze of contradictions and paradoxes that it is almost too much for the human brain," said Velikanof, quoting from a book that was being widely discussed in Russia, The Pillar and the Foundation of Truth, by the priest Florensky. "It is for Russia to explore these contradictions and paradoxes."
"Russia has long dwelt in these paradoxes," said ​another. Russia offers to the world glorious paradoxes:—
"As a substitute for success it offers failure.
"As a substitute for fine clothes it offers rags; and for fine mansions it offers taverns and log-cabins.
"As a substitute for rich men it offers beggars.
"Instead of the march music of Progress it offers the choir dance of the Mystery.
"Instead of Progress itself it offers Communion."
I told them my belief that Russia is the hope of Europe, that we are all looking to her, that she is the living East, the pole of mysticism, in opposition to America, the living West, the pole of materialism. This pleased the Bogoiskateli very much. They made quite sure it was not simply a compliment, and then one of them added:—
"Yes, Russia is the hope of Europe, and Moscow is the hope of Russia." And another, an Old Believer, added to that:—
"And beyond the Preobrazhenskaya Zastava is the hope of Moscow"—it is there that the Old Believers have a vast and important settlement.
At half-past six the discussion broke up in the central part of the tavern and was left to be prolonged in separate groups. Perhaps later it again became general. I went out, and eight who accompanied me suggested that we go to another tavern two streets off and drink another glass of tea. This we did, and the talk went on and on as it goes on ​every day and hour in Russia, in every town or village—talk about God and the idea of Christ and suffering, of what is necessary and what not.
Russia is considered a country where speech is not free, and, indeed, listening to such meetings as ours there are often plain-clothes detectives. But the police could no more stop the mouths of the Russian people or the current of popular opinion than they could drain or hide the water of the ocean. In the monastery hostelry, in the third-class waiting-rooms, in third-class carriages, in the muddy and crowded market-square, in the tavern, the Russian is always to be found eagerly asking, seeking, informing, emphasising, making points of exclamation. All priests, policemen, post office officials, schoolmasters, squires, commercial travellers, and Russian-speaking foreigners will bear witness to how they have been pestered with simple Russians asking for an explanation of passages in the Bible, or asking questions about God. So Russia shows herself alive. Even the taverns, in which there is so much drunkenness and debauch, the Russians have made into something like free churches or open debating societies.
* ↑ Since the War vodka has of course disappeared.
* ↑ From Gambrinus, Kuprin's Works, vol. iv.