Read You Must Go and Win: Essays Online
Authors: Alina Simone
You Must Go and Win: Essays (17 page)
My favorite line in
Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom
also serves as a succinct summary of the book itself: “The Skoptsy are difficult to love.” I could understand why people felt that way, and yet for some reason
I
didn’t find the Skoptsy difficult to love at all. True, mine was a love tinged with pity and muddled with horrified fascination—a cloudy, caipirinha kind of love. I loved the Skoptsy because they were creative free-thinkers. Unwilling to accept the strictures of the Russian Orthodox Church, they demonstrated a very bootstrappy, can-do attitude by simply inventing
their own religion from scratch. Then, instead of just running about and proclaiming their weirdness, the Skoptsy quietly became successful farmers and traders, well known for their sobriety and diligence. Unwittingly, I found myself considering the benefits of self-castration. Didn’t all of us have certain urges we wished we could just walk away from? I started to think about what I might accomplish if, for example, I wasn’t so distractible, so easily scuttled by things like castrati research. Having banished physical desire, the Skoptsy in Bucharest were able to apply their newly acquired laser focus to cornering the horse-powered cab market. The possibilities, in other words, were endless.
Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom
also serves as a succinct summary of the book itself: “The Skoptsy are difficult to love.” I could understand why people felt that way, and yet for some reason
I
didn’t find the Skoptsy difficult to love at all. True, mine was a love tinged with pity and muddled with horrified fascination—a cloudy, caipirinha kind of love. I loved the Skoptsy because they were creative free-thinkers. Unwilling to accept the strictures of the Russian Orthodox Church, they demonstrated a very bootstrappy, can-do attitude by simply inventing
their own religion from scratch. Then, instead of just running about and proclaiming their weirdness, the Skoptsy quietly became successful farmers and traders, well known for their sobriety and diligence. Unwittingly, I found myself considering the benefits of self-castration. Didn’t all of us have certain urges we wished we could just walk away from? I started to think about what I might accomplish if, for example, I wasn’t so distractible, so easily scuttled by things like castrati research. Having banished physical desire, the Skoptsy in Bucharest were able to apply their newly acquired laser focus to cornering the horse-powered cab market. The possibilities, in other words, were endless.
But dedicated as the Skoptsy might have been to their cause, it was not difficult to poke holes in their theology. Even as far back as 1819, the first tract Tsar Alexander I commissioned to discredit the Skoptsy did a pretty good job by pointing out their failure “to realize that evil inhabits not the body but the soul.” The Skoptsy clung to some obscure bits of scripture to justify their antigenitalia stance, and pointed to Origen, an early Christian father who was supposedly castrated, as a role model, but all in all, I tended to agree with the tsar. Wasn’t it kind of cheating to just lop off one’s offending parts and sashay right up to Heaven? Moreover, even if the Skoptsy
were
right about castration as a means of purification, the question remained, why stop at the privates? I mean, what about one’s covetous eyes and troublemaking mouth? Why weren’t fingers, which are very versatile and potentially evil appendages when you stop to consider them, included in the toolkit of sin? Maybe it was this failure to think through all the details that made the Skoptsy so endearing to me. After all, I too was a person resistant to analytic thinking and prone to making reckless decisions. And yet, becoming a Skopets was not like buying an armless mannequin at a sidewalk sale or trying out for a strip club in Pigalle on a dare. Becoming a Skopets
is forever. You cannot hit Control-Z. You can’t undo. And because I had a keen sense of my own capacity to get very excited about something and then make irreversible, potentially disastrous decisions, when I considered the Skoptsy I did not feel at all self-righteous. Instead I thought: There but for the grace of God go I.
were
right about castration as a means of purification, the question remained, why stop at the privates? I mean, what about one’s covetous eyes and troublemaking mouth? Why weren’t fingers, which are very versatile and potentially evil appendages when you stop to consider them, included in the toolkit of sin? Maybe it was this failure to think through all the details that made the Skoptsy so endearing to me. After all, I too was a person resistant to analytic thinking and prone to making reckless decisions. And yet, becoming a Skopets was not like buying an armless mannequin at a sidewalk sale or trying out for a strip club in Pigalle on a dare. Becoming a Skopets
is forever. You cannot hit Control-Z. You can’t undo. And because I had a keen sense of my own capacity to get very excited about something and then make irreversible, potentially disastrous decisions, when I considered the Skoptsy I did not feel at all self-righteous. Instead I thought: There but for the grace of God go I.
Eventually biology and the unforgiving march of progress wore the Skoptsy down. After the Russian Revolution, they found themselves stranded in an atheist country increasingly hostile to the quaint sectarian holdouts of the previous regime. Thwarted by their inability to procreate and saddled with a membership requirement many would consider a nonstarter, the Skoptsy vanished sometime in the 1930s. The final nail in their coffin was delivered in a series of show trials, punctuated by testimony from creepy Soviet outfits like the League of the Militant Godless. The demise of a self-castrating sect was clearly inevitable, but still, I found the news hard to accept. Because if they were truly gone, it meant that I would never fulfill my new dream, which was to hear the Skoptsy sing.
It was a mindless goal I’d developed after reading the Skoptsy were highly musical, their religious ceremonies filled with fervent hymn-singing. I couldn’t help fantasizing about the vanished Skopets choirs, even picturing myself joining in on a hymn or two. The lyrics to their songs had survived, but the music itself was gone, and it was only the marriage of the two that I believed would create a perfect window into the Skopets soul, a companion guide to their punishing quest for purity. Perhaps there was still some chance, though—all I really needed was one, last, Google-searchable Skopets to form a duo. If there were any Skoptsy still left out there, I figured, they were sure to have an email address, a blog, at the very least, a book agent. But “Eunuch” did not turn up on anybody’s Facebook profile; there were
no Skoptsy Meetups in my neighborhood. Searching @skoptsy yielded nothing on Twitter. My quest was dragging on and I was no closer to singing with a Skopets than I was to becoming one myself. Strangely, it was then, just as I was about to concede and rejoin the twenty-first century, that I came across an intriguing piece of new information.
no Skoptsy Meetups in my neighborhood. Searching @skoptsy yielded nothing on Twitter. My quest was dragging on and I was no closer to singing with a Skopets than I was to becoming one myself. Strangely, it was then, just as I was about to concede and rejoin the twenty-first century, that I came across an intriguing piece of new information.
The Skoptsy traced their origins back to an early spiritual Christian prophet by the name of Danila Filippovich. He was a peasant from Kostroma, a mystic wanderer and committed pacifist who fled the Russian army in 1654. While Filippovich was on the lam, he experienced a religious revelation and declared himself a “living god.” Despite the fact he preached a radical gospel of self-denial, his following grew rapidly. Of course the tsarist regime eventually took notice of Filippovich’s popularity and exiled him to Siberia. Filippovich’s teachings ended up forming the core of Skoptsy theology, but he also influenced a number of other sectarians, including some who eschewed the harsh asceticism in favor of his more huggable practices: nonviolence, honesty, brotherly love, vegetarianism, and song-based worship. There was one such group in particular that caught my interest. They were called the Doukhobors, and unlike the Skoptsy and many other religious dissenters, they avoided being stamped out by the Soviets. Despite torture, exile, and dispossession, the Doukhobors managed to survive. But I was even more intrigued when I learned why.
It was because they were
here
. In Canada.
here
. In Canada.
I discovered that aside from a shared love of singing, the Doukhobors, the Skoptsy, and I all had another thing in common, and that thing was Kharkov—a place we all once called home and that we all left in exile. Apparently the Ukrainian province where
I was born had a long history of forcing the independent-minded to flee. My parents tell me that part of the reason we ended up leaving the Soviet Union as political refugees was that the Kharkov branch of the KGB was particularly nasty. I asked my father once why he thought that was and he replied, because they are assholes. It was like he had identified the Kharkov KGB on some Douchebag Table of Elements. “Because they are carbon,” he might well have said.
I was born had a long history of forcing the independent-minded to flee. My parents tell me that part of the reason we ended up leaving the Soviet Union as political refugees was that the Kharkov branch of the KGB was particularly nasty. I asked my father once why he thought that was and he replied, because they are assholes. It was like he had identified the Kharkov KGB on some Douchebag Table of Elements. “Because they are carbon,” he might well have said.
Kharkov gave both the Doukhobors and the Skoptsy their own endless share of trouble. Mass arrests in a major Skopets settlement in Kharkov Province resulted in a famous trial, news of which even made it into
The New York Times
. “Skoptsy Members on Trial,” read the headline on October 13, 1910: “Russia Trying Hard to Suppress an Extraordinary Sect.” Noting Russia as “a country of strange religious associations,” the article described the trial of “141 adherents of the eunuch sect, including 67 women …” Remarkably, many of these Skoptsy were eventually acquitted, for while there was no physical doubt the defendants may have been a few fries short of a Happy Meal, there was little proof as to the cause of their disfigurement. Most simply denied membership in the sect and blamed their missing genitalia on … something else. One swore his injury was caused by a horse. Another claimed he’d accidentally blundered into a scythe. A third insisted a knife-wielding weirdo attacked him while he was guarding a melon field. (You know, those thieves who start out hankering for some fresh melons, but spontaneously decide a detached penis might do just as well.) The defendants used fire, childbirth, and war as fig leaves for their injuries. A few even opted for a hey-these-things-happen approach, claiming they had no idea where their privates had ambled off to. Eventually, a handful of unrepentant Skoptsy were found guilty and exiled to Siberia, the Haight-Ashbury of the Russian empire.
The New York Times
. “Skoptsy Members on Trial,” read the headline on October 13, 1910: “Russia Trying Hard to Suppress an Extraordinary Sect.” Noting Russia as “a country of strange religious associations,” the article described the trial of “141 adherents of the eunuch sect, including 67 women …” Remarkably, many of these Skoptsy were eventually acquitted, for while there was no physical doubt the defendants may have been a few fries short of a Happy Meal, there was little proof as to the cause of their disfigurement. Most simply denied membership in the sect and blamed their missing genitalia on … something else. One swore his injury was caused by a horse. Another claimed he’d accidentally blundered into a scythe. A third insisted a knife-wielding weirdo attacked him while he was guarding a melon field. (You know, those thieves who start out hankering for some fresh melons, but spontaneously decide a detached penis might do just as well.) The defendants used fire, childbirth, and war as fig leaves for their injuries. A few even opted for a hey-these-things-happen approach, claiming they had no idea where their privates had ambled off to. Eventually, a handful of unrepentant Skoptsy were found guilty and exiled to Siberia, the Haight-Ashbury of the Russian empire.
The Doukhobors were similarly scorned and driven out of Kharkov. They first appeared in the province sometime in the 1730s and endured persecution, then exile, throughout the latter half of the 1700s, until Alexander I issued an edict pardoning them. Alas, the tsar’s gesture did nothing to change the attitudes of the Doukhobors’ neighbors in Kharkov. When the first group of exiles returned, the villagers at the way station of Saltovo-Ternovo refused to let them into their homes. Their long-awaited homecoming consisted of being forced to stand in a field for more than twenty-four hours. The harassment only continued from there—landlords refused to rent to them, villagers accused them of heresy, and the district authorities persisted in interrogating and imprisoning them. Eventually, the tsar forcibly relocated the dissenters to a patch of land in the fancifully named Milky Waters region at the outskirts of the Sea of Azov. And like my family, once removed from Kharkov, the Doukhobors thrived. They cultivated the land, lived communally, and built a parish center that was given the prophetic name Patience. It was their golden era. But just because the Doukhobors had managed to create some measure of stability and order in their lives did not mean that anyone else found them either stable or orderly. The spring of 1819 marked a new chapter for the Doukhobors—the beginning of their complicated relationship with the West.
The Doukhobors were often referred to as “Russian Quakers” because of their pacifist beliefs. So it was no great surprise when two bona fide members of the Society of Friends made their way to the village of Patience. One was William Allen, a well-to-do English scientist and philanthropist. The other was the French missionary Stephen Grillet. But despite their shared commitment to nonviolence, the Doukhobors differed from the Quakers in almost every respect. Allen and Grillet both found the Doukhobors guilty of extreme vagueness. According to Allen’s
diary, the trouble began when they asked the Doukhobors to explain their religious practices:
diary, the trouble began when they asked the Doukhobors to explain their religious practices:
[W]e wished to know from themselves what were their religious principles. It soon appeared, however, that they have no fixed principles; there was a studied evasion in their answers, and though they readily quoted texts, it is plain they do not acknowledge the authority of scripture, and have some very erroneous notions … My spirit was greatly affected, and I came away from them much depressed.
Grillet was similarly dismayed:
They however stated unequivocally, that they do not believe in the authority of the Scriptures. They look upon Jesus Christ in no other light than that of a good man. We inquired about their mode of worship. They said they met together to sing some of the Psalms of David … an old woman … began by singing what they call a Psalm; the other women joined in it; then the men … each bowed down very low to one another … then the old woman, in a fluent manner, uttered what they called a prayer, and their worship concluded; but no seriousness appeared over them at any time … We left them with heavy hearts and returned to Altona.
Before leaving, though, Allen and Grillet begged the Doukhobors to recognize the sanctity of the scriptures and the divinity of Jesus. This entreaty was met with blank stares. The Doukhobors believed that the spirit of God already existed within all living things, which is why they abhorred violence and saw no need for icons or church hierarchies. To the straitlaced Quakers, the
Doukhobors’ religious ceremonies resembled a tailgate party; to the Doukhobors, the practice of psalm singing was regarded as deeply spiritual—the commingling of voices a means of purification and communing with God. The Quakers left Russia confused and disappointed by the Doukhobors. The Doukhobors remembered the Quakers’ visit fondly for decades.
Doukhobors’ religious ceremonies resembled a tailgate party; to the Doukhobors, the practice of psalm singing was regarded as deeply spiritual—the commingling of voices a means of purification and communing with God. The Quakers left Russia confused and disappointed by the Doukhobors. The Doukhobors remembered the Quakers’ visit fondly for decades.
And yet years later, when the Doukhobors were once again subject to torture and exile—this time for disobeying tsarist military orders to take up arms against the neighboring Armenians—the Quakers would be instrumental in helping them leave Russia. In the late 1890s the revered author Leo Tolstoy, also well known as a devout Christian and pacifist, learned of the Doukhobors’ plight. He was so deeply moved that he donated all the profits from the publication of his novel
Resurrection
to helping them emigrate to Canada. Much of the remainder of their passage was funded by the Quakers.
Resurrection
to helping them emigrate to Canada. Much of the remainder of their passage was funded by the Quakers.
I was also moved by the Doukhobors, who believed many of the same things I did, but were ever so much better at it. Was I not also a singing vegetarian originally from Kharkov Province? Yet when confronted with a moral decision no weightier than a hot bowl of
tom yum kung
with a tasty piece of shrimp floating in it, my lofty convictions quickly melted away. Without a dorsal nerve cord or a cerebral cortex, can this decapod crustacean really feel pain? I would ask myself, the first steaming spoonful already halfway to my mouth. And while I could never quite fully commit my life to music, the Doukhobors sang with the full-throated passion of true conviction. They sang as they prayed. They sang as they toiled in the fields. They sang as they burned their guns in protest. They even sang as they were buried in pits up to their necks and tortured to death. They may not have believed in churches or priests or sacraments of any kind, but they did believe in singing. One of the earliest known Doukhobor psalms reads like a manifesto for a musical revolution: “Singing
of Psalms is an adornment to our souls … It is like the grace of the saints; it adds to one’s faith, hope, and love; it covers one with light like the sun. It cleanses one with the water, it burns one’s sins like fire, it covers one with holy oil. It puts the devil in one to shame and makes one aware of God.”
tom yum kung
with a tasty piece of shrimp floating in it, my lofty convictions quickly melted away. Without a dorsal nerve cord or a cerebral cortex, can this decapod crustacean really feel pain? I would ask myself, the first steaming spoonful already halfway to my mouth. And while I could never quite fully commit my life to music, the Doukhobors sang with the full-throated passion of true conviction. They sang as they prayed. They sang as they toiled in the fields. They sang as they burned their guns in protest. They even sang as they were buried in pits up to their necks and tortured to death. They may not have believed in churches or priests or sacraments of any kind, but they did believe in singing. One of the earliest known Doukhobor psalms reads like a manifesto for a musical revolution: “Singing
of Psalms is an adornment to our souls … It is like the grace of the saints; it adds to one’s faith, hope, and love; it covers one with light like the sun. It cleanses one with the water, it burns one’s sins like fire, it covers one with holy oil. It puts the devil in one to shame and makes one aware of God.”
Dimly I recalled that transcendent time when singing was something that lifted me out of my body, saving me from the grim march of calendar pages and the dark thoughts that come at you in those lonely little anterooms where the mail is collected. In high school, I remember skipping lunch every week to sneak off to empty classrooms so that I could sing by myself. I was always singing back then; in elevators, on subways, walking down the street. But how long ago had that been? Long before I started giving public performances for strangers in exchange for sixty dollars and a pair of drink tickets. Before I learned the countless superficial reasons not to sing, reasons like “this monitor is crackly” or “I’m afraid your cheap microphone has given my mouth an unpleasant little shock for the last time.” I wasn’t always singing now. I was on the internet. I was spending a lot of time in cars, trying to avoid death-by-Italian. Reading about the Doukhobors singing, I felt more than a twinge of guilt. And jealousy. I performed regularly, and yet somehow they made me miss singing.
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