Chapter 7, Art. 63 of the military regulations: “Whoever makes himself

ill or breaks his limbs and thus unfits himself for service is liable to have his nostrils torn, and be condemned to forced labour.”

* * * * *

From the laws of Tsar Alexis Michailovitch, Chapter 22, Art. 6: “And in the case of a son petitioning against his father, no judgment shall be given; but he, having been flogged for such petition, shall be delivered up to the father.”

This is unjust, for though children are dependent upon their parents’ will, yet they must not be treated like dumb animals. The natural law is not fulfilled by the procreation of children alone; humaneness forms also part of a father’s duty.

* * * * *

I hear that the author of my days hates houses being built in Moscow, for it is his will to live in Petersburg.

* * * * *

It lies not with one man alone to change national customs. The country which changes its customs cannot endure. The Russian people have forgotten the water in their own cisterns, and have begun to slake their thirst with the turbid waters of strangers.

* * * * *

Job, the Archimandrite of Novgorod, told me: “Evil awaits thee in Petersburg, yet I feel God will deliver thee. Thou wilt see what will happen.”

* * * * *

God has so willed it with us sinners that foreigners do with us just as it pleases them. We all suffer from a mania. This fatal illness is a mad passion for foreign things and people, which has infected our whole nation. Truly says the prophet Baruch: “Let a stranger come near thee and he will destroy thee.” The Germans boast and have a saying, ‘he who wants to eat bread without work, let him go to Russia.’ They call us barbarians and choose to reckon us among the beasts instead of men. They try to make us out before other nations as worse than dead dogs. It would be as well to stop some of these foreign antics; they don’t come natural to us and we only make a muddle in meddling with them. The foreign way becomes with us the fool’s way. We degrade ourselves, our language, our nation; and we expose ourselves to the ridicule of every one.

The intrusion of foreign languages has spoilt the purity of the Slavonic tongue. I know not what need we have to use foreign words. It must be only to make a boast of, there is little honour in doing it. Sometimes they speak in a way that neither they themselves nor others can understand.

* * * * *

Sit not down under a stranger’s hedgerow. Rather among nettles if they are thine own. A stranger’s wit forsakes thee at the threshold. Keep thine own counsel; thine own counsellors. Pleasant is the sound of the tambours beyond the hill; but when brought hither they are but baskets of bast.

* * * * *

Foreigners are far beyond us, I grant you, in knowledge; yet in natural quickness of wit our people are, thank God, not worse equipped than they, and they do wrong in railing at us. I am persuaded that God created us Russians not inferior to other human beings.

* * * * *

I doubt whether it be really true that man’s welfare standeth on knowledge or the sciences alone. For folk used to learn much less in the old days, and were happier than we to-day with our much learning. It is possible with much culture to be a rascal. Learning in a depraved heart is a powerful weapon for evil.

* * * * *

We Russians can do without bread. We devour each other, and are satisfied.

* * * * *

The boyars are great withered trees; their massive trunks hide the people from the Tsar. My father is exceedingly intelligent; yet Ménshikoff is always hoodwinking him.

* * * * *

All administrators, whether young or old, are greedy of gain. The ancient laws have fallen into desuetude: the new ones also count for nothing. What a number are decreed! and to what purpose? Nothing is really changed. I don’t see that much good will come of these reforms in the future.

* * * * *

A sovereign’s duties:

Not to trust in one’s brilliancy of mind, but to be zealous to protect the people, the land and the villages, and to love, be zealous for, interested in the lesser brethren of Christ and to know their needs. Severe shall be His judgment upon the great and mighty ones! The little shall be forgiven, but torment awaits the mighty ill-doers. This I should do well to remember, should God grant me to become Tsar.

* * * * *

On St. Eustace the martyr’s day we held high fête and got grievously drunk. Our faces were well pummelled; Jibanda had a blow in the eye, the Lasher lost a tooth. I don’t remember anything, and I hardly know how I got away. I was exceedingly filled with the gifts of Bacchus.

* * * * *

In Roshdestveno I remained at home alone. The days flowed by like water; nothing save utter stillness.

* * * * *

Time passes and brings us nearer death; the end of our days approaches; I recognise the frailty of my life.

I await death, but without fear or desire.

* * * * *

A little drunk.

* * * * *

My wife is pregnant.

Eros, Eros, heathen god! Passions have harassed me from my youth up. I accuse others of godlessness, and am myself the most godless of all. Afrossinia! I know my iniquity and have not redeemed myself from shame. Thy hand weighs heavily upon me, O Lord! When shall I come and appear before God? my tears have been my meat, day and night; and my soul fainteth for the courts of the Lord.

* * * * *

I am amazed at my father. Why does he love Theodosius? Is it because the latter introduces Lutheran customs among the people and authorises everything? He really is an atheist, and a deep enemy of the cross of the Lord.

* * * * *

I have seldom seen so subtle a rogue. He is very adroit, he will never do wrong openly. We must be on our guard with him and be careful and stealthy in thwarting him, since we are obliged to live under his orders.

* * * * *

The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up, O Lord. I am sore afraid and troubled lest Christianity perish entirely in Russia.

* * * * *

Theodosius, the heresiarch, and his crew have openly begun to wage war against the Church; they abolish fasts, they treat confession and self-immolation as nonsense; they ridicule celibacy, self-imposed poverty, and change other strait and narrow ways of the Christian life into the smooth broad ways which lead to eternal damnation. They fearlessly teach a debauched self-indulgent life; they recognise no sin, everything is holy, and by their teaching they have brought the children of the world into such fearless voluptuousness, that many take up the mere Epicurean attitude: “Eat, drink, and be merry. There is no account to render after death.”

They call the holy icons idols, the church singing bulls’ roaring. They destroy chapels, and where the walls have remained, they allow tobacco and barbers’ shops to be opened. They take miracle-working icons away on stinking dung carts under dirty mats, thus insolently defiling them before the people. In this way they attack the Orthodox faith, under the pretext that it is not Christianity, but only useless and harmful superstitions which they are trying to uproot. What a number of clergy have been destroyed, unfrocked and tortured under this pretext! If you ask for a reason, the only answer you get is: they were superstitious, bigots, sanctimonious humbugs! He who keeps fast is a bigot; he who prays, sanctimonious; he who adores the icons, invariably (they say) a hypocrite.

All this is done with such cunning, and the intention both to exterminate the Orthodox clergy in Russia, and to introduce their newly invented Lutheran and Calvinistic, priestless sects.

He is truly mad who does not detect in them the atheistic spirit.

* * * * *

The church bells have been altered, they no longer chime, but tinkle as if sounding an alarm. And everything else is changed, the icons are painted, not on wood but on canvas, after foreign models; for instance, the image of Emmanuel the Saviour is quite like a German, fat, as if conceived in the flesh; the fleshy type is preferred, the celestial nature is ignored. The churches are no longer built after the ancient style, but with pointed towers like those in Germany, and the chimes even imitate Lutheran organs.

Poor Russia! Why dost thou set thy heart on German ways and actions?

* * * * *

There are to be no more monasteries; a decree is being prepared which will prohibit the taking of fresh vows; retired soldiers will fill the vacancies in the monasteries. It is written “He who comes to me I will in no wise cast out;” but they consider the scriptures as nothing.

* * * * *

As there is a military code, so now there exists a code of faith.

What sort of prayer can that be, which is enforced by a decree, under pain of punishment?

* * * * *

Beggars are to taken be up, ruthlessly beaten with rods, and sent to hard labour, so that they may not eat their bread unearned. This is the Tsar’s decree, while Christ says, “For I was an hungered and ye gave me no meat. I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink, I was a stranger and ye took me not in, naked and ye clothed me not. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”

* * * * *

The whole of Russia is dying of spiritual famine. The sower does not scatter the seed, the earth does not receive it. The priests do not keep watch over the people who go astray. The village priest cannot be distinguished from a moujik. The moujik ploughs, the priest ploughs. And meanwhile Christians die like cattle. Drunken priests use obscene language and rail at one another within the sanctuary; they wear a pall of gold, while their bast shoes are dirty; the holy loaves are made of black rye flour; the Lord’s holy host is kept in exceedingly vile vessels swarming with bugs, cockroaches, and grasshoppers. Monks have fallen into habits of tippling and stealing.

The whole monastic and priestly system calls for thorough reform, as there hardly remains a trace of the true priest and monk.

We are guilty of neither keeping our religion, such as it is, nor maintaining our clergy in decency, but of living almost like brutes. I doubt whether in Moscow one in a hundred knows what the Orthodox belief is, or who God is, or how to pray to Him, or how to fulfil His holy will.

There is no sign of Christianity left to us except the name.

* * * * *

We have all lost our senses, we tremble in our faith, like a leaf on a tree; we have gone astray in strange and diverse ways, some incline towards the Roman faith, others towards the Lutheran; we, baptized idol-worshippers, are maimed in both legs. We have forsaken the paps of our mother Church; we are seeking nourishment instead from all kinds of foreign and heretical sources. We are like blind puppies which have been thrown away, we err in all directions; but where we shall finally arrive, no one knows.

* * * * *

Fomka the barber, an iconoclast, has split up the image of St. Alexis the Metropolitan with his iron axe, because he did not revere the holy icons, the life-bringing cross, nor holy relics; the holy icons, said he, and the holy cross are merely the work of man; and he did not believe that relics brought pardon for his own transgressions. Neither did he accept the Church dogma and traditions, nor did he believe the Eucharist to be the true body of Christ, but simply bread and wine.

Stephen, the Metropolitan of Riazan, handed Fomka over to the church anathema. He was burnt at the stake in the Red Square.

Then the gentlemen of the Senate, having summoned the Metropolitan to Petersburg to account for his action, gave satisfaction to the heretics; the iconoclast, Dmitri Tveretinoff, a physician, whose disciple Fomka had been, they pronounced innocent, while driving Stephen, the saintly bishop, with great contumely from the Judgment hall. He went out weeping and saying:—

“O Lord Christ, our Saviour! Thou hast said: ‘They will persecute you, even as they persecuted me.’ Now I am driven out, but not I, it is Thou whom they are persecuting. Thou, who beholdest all things, wilt see that their judgment is unjust; judge them Thyself!”

And when the prelate came out of the senate into the square, all the people were moved with compassion towards him and wept. The anger of the author of my being against Stephen has grown more intense.

* * * * *

The Church is more powerful than the Tsardom; but nowadays the Tsar rules the Church.

The ancient Tsars bowed to the ground before the patriarch; now the occupant of the Patriarchal throne signs himself in his letters to the Tsar, thus: “Your Majesty’s slave and footstool, your humble Stephen, the little Shepherd of Riazan!” The head of the Church the Tsar’s footstool!

* * * * *

Demetrius, the Metropolitan of Rostov, was a very saintly man; when the author of my being made him drink Hungarian wine, and began questioning him on clerical affairs, the saintly old man did not answer at all, but silently and repeatedly blessed the Tsar with the sign of the holy cross, and thus he succeeded in escaping.

The priests say, “It is impossible to swim against the stream; the whip cannot break the axe.”

But the martyrs for the sake of the faith did not spare their lives!

* * * * *

The Tsar keeps his table for the bishops. “He whose bread I eat, his man I am.”

* * * * *

The ancient Russian prelates stood up for their country, but the prelates of to-day do not seek to obtain justice from the Tsar, but aim rather at flattering and corrupting his pious rank and power.

* * * * *

If the people sin, the Tsar can divert God’s wrath; if the Tsar sins, the people are helpless. God visits the sin of the monarch upon the whole country.

* * * * *

Lately at a drinking feast, the “little Shepherd of Riazan” said to my father: “You Tsars—gods on earth—are like unto the Heavenly Tsar,” and the Kniaz-Pope, a drunken fool, reviled the prelate: “Though I,” said he, “am but a mock patriarch, yet even I would not have spoken such words to the Tsar! God is greater than the Tsar,” and the Tsar praised the buffoon for saying this.

* * * * *

When in the course of the same feast, the bishops began to talk about the widowed state of the Church and the need of a Patriarch, the author of my being in great wrath unsheathed his short sword; all were terror stricken, thinking he was going to kill them; he struck the table with the flat of the blade, and shouted: “I am the Patriarch; Tsar and Patriarch in one!”

* * * * *

Theodosius is trying to persuade the author of my being to assume the title of Emperor, after the example of the ancient Roman Caesars.

* * * * *

In the year 1709, during the celebrations of the Poltava victory, the clergy erected on the Red Square in Moscow an imitation of a Roman temple with an altar, consecrating it to the virtues of the Russian god Apollo and Mars, that is in honour of the author of my being, and over the ancient temple ran the inscription:—“Basis et fundamentum reipublicae, religio.”

But what religion? Faith in what God, or gods?

There was also represented an “Apotheosis of the Russian Hercules,” that is, the author of my days slaying many animals and peoples, and, at the end of these feats, being borne up to heaven in Jove’s chariot, drawn by eagles along the Milky Way, with the inscription:—“Viamque affectat Olympo.”

In the pamphlet, written by the arch-monk Joseph, the Prefect of the Academy, the Apotheosis is described in the following words: “It should be known that this is neither a church, nor a sanctuary built to a saint, but a political or civil ceremony.”

* * * * *

Theodosius is trying to persuade my father to insert in the decree, which ordained the holy Synod, or in the Russian oath of allegiance itself, words declaring that, “The people should honour their ruler’s name as head and father of their country equally with the name of Jesus Christ.”

* * * * *

Men want to usurp God’s glory and the honour due to Christ, the Eternal and only King of kings. It is in the Roman Laws that these impious sacrilegious words are found: “The Roman autocrat is the Lord of the Universe.”

* * * * *

We confess and believe that Christ alone is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and there is no man Lord beside him.

Jesus Christ, the wondrous Rock, struck and destroyed the Roman Empire and smashed its feet of clay. And we create and build up what God has shattered. Does not this mean that we defy God?

* * * * *

Look at Roman History. The Emperor Caligula saith: Everything is allowed to Caesar, “Omnia licent.” _Not only to Roman Emperors, but nowadays to all knaves and servile creatures and quadrupeds, is everything permitted!_

* * * * *

Nebuchadnezzar the King of Babylon saith, “I am God,” and he became a beast.

* * * * *

On Basil Island, in the house of the Tsaritsa Prascovie, there lives an old monk, Timothy Arkhípich, he is the refuge of the desperate, the hope of the hopeless, a mad man in the eyes of the world, yet he is intimately acquainted with the griefs and hearts of men. I went over to see him a few nights ago and had a talk with him. Arkhípich says Antichrist is a pretender—a veritable cursed one—and that he is on his way. I read the Metropolitan of Riazan’s _Signs of the Coming of Antichrist_, and a great fear thereupon possessed me.

In Moscow, Gregory of Talitsa was burnt because he spoke to the people about the coming of Antichrist. Talitsa was a man of great intelligence. Basil Levin, a captain of the Dragoons who was with me on my way from Lvoff to Kiev in 1711, the priest Lebedka, chaplain to Prince Ménshikoff the clerk Larion Dokoukin, and many others think in the same way about Antichrist.

* * * * *

A Raskolnik spilt Christ’s sacrament and trampled it under foot.

* * * * *

Near Lubetch a flight of locusts appeared; from midday to midnight it was passing—“God’s Wrath,” the superscription on their wings.

* * * * *

The days are short and gloomy; old people say the sun shines no longer as it used to.

* * * * *

I was drunk; we drank a large quantity of vodka. The Lord knows it is fear which makes us drink, in order to forget ourselves.

* * * * *

The fear of death has come upon me. The end is at hand, the axe is at the root, death’s scythe is over our heads.

* * * * *

Lord, help Russia! Thrice-pure Mother of God protect and intercede for us!

* * * * *

O martyrs of these latter days, Christ is about to rise again! Christ is, and will dwell within you, and you will say, Amen! to His Kingdom.