The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Naturally, we found icon painters in Moscow, and quite artful ones, but what use was that, since all these people were not of the spirit which the tradition of our forefathers tells us about? In olden times, pious painters, when taking up their holy artwork, fasted and prayed, and worked in the same way for big money or for little, as the honor of the lofty task demands. But these paint one slap, another dash, to last a short time, not for long years; they lay a weak ground of chalk, not of alabaster, and, being lazy, they flow the paint on all at once, not like in the old days, when they flowed on four or even five layers of paint, thin as water, which produced that wonderful delicacy unattainable nowadays. And, aside from carelessness in their art, they’re all of lax behavior, and boast before each other, and say anything at all to humiliate another painter; or, worse still, they band together, carry out clever deceptions, gather in pot-houses and drink and praise their own art with conceited arrogance, and blasphemously call other painters’ work “infernography,” and there are always junkmen around them, like sparrows around owls, who pass various old icons from hand to hand, alter them, substitute them, make fake boards, smoke them in chimneys, giving them a decrepit and worm-eaten look; they cast bronze folding icons from old molds and coat them with antiquated patina; they refashion copper bowls into baptismal fonts and put old-fashioned splayed eagles on them as in the time of Ivan the Terrible, and sell them to inexperienced buyers as genuine fonts from that period, though there’s countless numbers of these fonts going the rounds in Russia, and it’s all a shameless lie and deception. In a word, as swarthy Gypsies cheat each other with horses, so all these people do with holy objects, and they treat it all in such a way that you feel ashamed for them and see in it all only sin and temptation and abuse of faith. For those who have acquired the habit of this shamelessness, it’s nothing, and among Moscow fanciers there are many who are interested in such dishonest trading and boast that so-and-so cheated so-and-so with a Deisis, and this one stuck that one with a Nicholas, or fobbed off a fake Our Lady in some scoundrelly manner: and they all cover it up, and vie with each other in how best to hoodwink the trustful inexperienced with God’s blessing, but to Levonty and me, being of simple village piety, all this seemed unbearable to such a degree that we both even felt downcast and fear came over us.

“Can it be,” we thought, “that in these times our ill-fated Old Belief has come to this?” But, though I thought that, and I could see that he harbored the same thing in his grieving heart, we didn’t reveal it to each other, and I only noticed that my youth kept seeking some solitary place.

I looked at him once and thought to myself: “What if in his confusion he decides on something improper?” So I say:

“What is it, Levonty, are you sorrowing over something?”

And he replies:

“No, uncle, it’s nothing: never mind.”

“Then let’s go to the Erivan Tavern in Bozheninova Street to chat up the icon painters. There are two who promised to come there and bring old icons. I’ve already bartered for one, and I’d like to obtain another today.”

But Levonty replies:

“No, uncle, you go by yourself, I won’t go.”

“Why won’t you?” I ask.

“I’m just not feeling myself today,” he replies.

Well, once I didn’t insist, and twice I didn’t insist, but the third time I called him again:

“Let’s go, Levontiushka, let’s go, my lad.”

And he bows meekly and pleads:

“No, dear uncle, my white dove: allow me to stay home.”

“What is it, Levonty?” I say. “You came with me as my co-worker, but you sit at home all the time. I don’t get much help from you this way, my dove.”

And he:

“My own, my dearest Mark Alexandrych, my lord and master, don’t call me to where they eat and drink and make unsuitable speeches about holy things, or I may be drawn into temptation.”

This was his first conscious word about his feelings, and it struck me to the very heart, but I didn’t argue with him and went alone, and that evening I had a big conversation with the two icon painters, and they put me in terrible distress. It’s frightful to say what they did to me! One sold me an icon for forty roubles and left, and then the other said:

“Watch out, man, don’t venerate that icon.”

“Why not?” I ask.

And he says:

“Because it’s infernography,” and he picked off a layer of paint at the corner with his nail, and under it a little devil with a tail was painted on the priming! He picked the paint off in another place, and underneath there was another little devil.

“Lord!” I wept. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” he says, “that you shouldn’t order from him, but from me.”