Maria Roginska

ON A WAY HOME: SOME ASPECTS OF THE HOLY AND THE "WORLD'S PICTURE" IN RUSSIAN ORTHODOX NARRATIONS FROM XX AND XXI CENTURIES.

[FOCAL INTERLUDES WITH A 'COMMUNAL MIND'].

The epoch of Soviet 'housing disorder' not only has left the signs in the scenery of Russian city, but in its inhabitants' minds as well. The Soviet flats' tenants - the whole generation of people used to living in confined spaces - have lost the memory, itself, of the sacral order of household. People's habits have been formed by the cluttered up surroundings where entirely non-holy chaos has ruled. Stuffy climate of these flats has been superbly presented by an art. director in a Petersburgian play in which he created scenography of multilevel collection of wardrobes, chairs, beds, tables and doors. In the play the tenants "like bed-bugs" moon about in disorder, loom up from behind the wardrobes' doors, worm their way through the radiators and desks, jump from a bed on a chair, clumsily climb onto a table, standing on a piano, deliver the monologues. In the located on a few metres conglomeration of things and ideas, they quarrel, give birth to children, write anonymous letters, and fight with the enemies of the proletariat. It used to be like that a dozen or so years ago, but the post Soviet housing - even though nowadays inhabited by one family only - has kept that style as inheritance. Bought once, for poverty or conviction, cheap furniture and gathered for years odds and ends, never are thrown away by owners. Like in the past, accidentality and chaos govern there...

Soviet aesthetics of every day life very early stopped respecting a sacral aspects of housing space. Ideological effort was even directed on its further desacralisation. It concerned both the particular flats and the whole city whose arrangement, fashioned from milliards of human beings, seemed blasphemous to the new authority. In the 20^th years of the past century the architects submitted a thesis that a traditional centre is preposterous in a Soviet city, and they insisted on destroying a borderline between a centre and outskirts. In the mid-30^th the word " outskirts" was eliminated as humiliating to "the leading party" of society. The bravest designs of the capital city reorganisation took into account even complete destruction of Moscow and its reconstruction as a city of a new kind¹ .

Desacralisation of a flat was intensified in Khrushchev times. Architecture of that period was thought as a 'summary intervention', and in urban geography strengthened its gloomy temporariness. That time, however, it was occurring in the scenery "of liberation" ideology. After the 20^th congress of the Party the thaw came, and in the architects' minds, free from a fixed composition of the new districts, a location scheme was joint with the idea of freedom itself. Freely scattered estate buildings were not particularly sophisticated: they were to be cheap and useful, not pretty. Towards the end of the 60^th freedom appeared to be a delusion. The roofs started to leak, and together with them, the myth of "free" architecture vanished. Laicisation of architecture did not do it any good, and together with the builders unreliability

and the inhabitants poverty, it made that chaos a basis of Soviet style of living. A typical flat of that period was a large housing settled down by a few families - so called "kommunalka". [On "kommunalkas" and cultural self-fashioning see, for instance a monograph study by Svetlana Boym: Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Harvard, 1994.- Ed.]

It is rather difficult to find a scheme more incompatible with traditional semantics of a home which especially in Slavonic region is related to ancestry and family. Unlike the flats shared together what has occurred in the West, kommunalka did not functioned on a principle of voluntarily. The State was the owner and the State settled it, according to the norms of space for one person. For that reason kommunalka was settled by strangers belonging to different social groups, and very rarely they were able to create domestic atmosphere. In that way the space where intimate development of personality should have occurred, was changed into a place of common use.

The final aim of the regime was to deprive the whole nation of the universe of private life, with the social sphere as the only reality left² .However, it failed because in man's feeling chaos should be restrained. Accumulation of things became a Soviet way of private space sacralisation. Emptiness in the shops made precious any trinket (" everything would be of use - if not to me, to my children"). That is why collections of classical books and boxes from used up cream were accumulated with the same dignity. Cult of things arose from the lack of understanding their real value - that is one more result of non-authentication of Soviet culture. Hopelessly cluttered up, closed and stuffy flat has become a dump, and its owners suffer from agoraphobia.

However all those desperate actions cannot satisfy the dream of a true Home. True Home is not a vain whim of an owner having some over funds, but a severe necessity of human existence - especially in consciousness of a post-Soviet man whose sense of stability ( even physical stability) is being disturbed by the whole state crisis. The world of a post-Soviet man lasts on a borderline of extermination whilst nostalgia for a Home reaches the highest spiritual intensity, comparable with only a prayer effort.

In fact, the origins of the nostalgia should be searched in religious consciousness (as could be seen in Mircea Eliade's understanding of religion). 'Nostalgia for a Home' arises from a need of finding own place in cosmos and of being placed in the point of hierophantic intensity of a personal being. Religious connotations of Home has already appeared in Soviet discourse. From the beginning of the 90^th a home as a subject appears regularly in the texts of various kinds of preachers, both traditional and of the new movements leaders. Even Russian spiritualists are interested in the problem of the post-Soviet housing troubles. One of the mediums, for instance, asks " Isaac's spirit" for advice and hears: "buy things that you enjoy. Choose them at your discretion / ... / Out of choice create a bed and a pillow, a table and chairs, and decorate them from your choice because the home where everything is yours is your home"³ .

Likewise modern Orthodox discourse has not omitted the subject of a home. It is not only a question of home symbolism in the Bible (Shekhina: God's Place, God's home, 'House of Israel', house built-on-a-stone, etc.), or frequent patriotic motifs in Orthodox writings (e.g. "Russian Home", "Russia, God's Mother Home" etc.). Orthodox Church treasures memory of a home-sanctuary which not long ago was ordinariness not only in the country, but among pious citizens as well. A house built under sacral rules, with a red corner (domestic iconostas), a home whose threshold one could cross only with a prayer, was a model of universe and of microcosmos. Such a home had its place in macrocosmos as well. It used to designate the

trajectories of the household's lives, and increased one's self-consciousness as an individual being.
If we'll prone to agree with the phenomenologists of religion that nostalgia for a Home is a religious phenomenon, and with the Russian philosophers that Orthodox Church is the root of Russian culture, then the conversation about a home should be stopped for a while in this area. And this is what I am about to do, trying to study my collection of nearly 900 of Russian Orthodox narrations dating from the turn of centuries.
In my search the texts from magazines and newspapers of the Orthodox Church have been used. ("Pravoslavnaya Beseda", "Zhurnal Moskovskoy Patriarkhii", "Moskovskiye Yeparkhialnyye vedomosti", "Moskovskiy Tserkovnyy Vestnik", "Russkiy Dom", "Vstrecha", etc.) printed in Moscow with agreement of the Patriarch. The stories, themselves, I understand as the text units, presenting a chain of events joint together logically, and having a plot structure (an initial situation - complication -reaction - resolution)⁴ . Just structure has been one of the criteria of the stories selection. In most cases the stories are in some measure the separate fragments of larger texts (articles).

The study of the stories let us understand many questions that are fundamental for Orthodox Church, but do not arise from theological or socially-oriented texts. The form of story is a natural medium formula of religious experience and is used in hagiographies, sermons and parables. The story contain a typical for believers interpretation of the links between the events, in this way showing their ideas about cosmos functioning. Moreover, the mode of interpreting based on authority causes of the events, (usually made by a narrator) bring closer myths and stories. From a pragmatic point of view the narration includes only those events which are recognised as the important ones, and owing to that reveals the map of the experiences and concepts that are the most important for the Orthodox believers. At last, the fictions comprise a thread of complication which is a miniature model of a crisis situation. Thus we observe the Orthodox believers reaction to crisis, and we create a typology of phenomena seen by them as threatening (later on we will see that above all secularisation is seen as a danger).

Another criterion of selection has become time of the texts origin - the last decade of the 20^th and the begin of the 21^st century. That was a decisive period, the period of "the explosion" of the 1991 year (Jury Lotman's semiological term) into stabilisation that, as I assume, took place in 2000 year. The time of crisis and appeasement, time of the old myths destruction and creation of the new ones. It was the time of the end of the last millennium and eschatological expectations, when in the believers imagination all the possible powers of the good and bad sacrum have been activated.

Therefore the question is: what position in the world's model has that epoch fixed to home?

***

Orthodox narratives of the centuries turn appeal to a certain classical mythological scheme-templates. However, their main tension is not created by a typical for a myth struggle between a divine and devilish elements. This narration is a polemics with secular culture which tries to ignore the religious reality; it is ordinariness that constructs a germ of a story introducing confusion in the state of the initial calm. Many times it happens in a spectacular way. Sometimes it is an old woman who has washed the oil-paints of a holy picture with washing

powder - then there is a need of the saint powers effort to correct the error in a miraculous way. Some other time a manager of a market has an accident that happens in order to incline the man to renounce his improper occupation. In another story it appears a nouveau rich who persuades himself that worldly splendour is nothing but paltriness. Action of the story goes on the axis of sacrum vs profanum, and as profanum are red all the signs of secular ordinariness. It is the same in the narratives about home. Homestead - the basic sphere of man's functioning, the sphere which is to "ensure direct communication with heaven" ⁵- is seen as the most exposed to profanation. It is not by chance that in that context a plot of a reach owner of a house appears.

Despite the Slavonic semantics of money which relates the wealth with the 'beyond world', the phenomenon of a 'new rich' generates a common association with the world of holistic delinquency. However, this segment of "pure" profanum hides strange non-indifference to sacrum. Paradoxically just the houses of the new riches fulfil the sacral canon of buildings' structures. Apart from general orientation to the environmental rituals, a fire place as a hearth and the collectors' rooms, these houses distinguish considered placement of each object and entire lack of disorder so characteristic to the previous period. Finally, their most important sacral attribute is the fence which, according to Moscow's advert for a luxury fence, turns a home into a citadel.

Gratings, a wall, a fence or, at least, a safely locked door are the strategic elements of a real house. A border line marks the edges of privacy, separates order from chaos, closes the domestic microcosmos. But on the other hand, the fact of the border's existence, encourages to intervention. Just as in the 20^th of the last century Bolshevik propaganda appealed to a conquest of the city centre - hostile territory of "exploiters"( in the press of that time the metaphors of the battles for the city were frequent)⁶ .

Also nowadays an eye of a vulgar Russian looks suspiciously at the locked borders of the secular space which, in accordance with its morphology, should be qualified as sacral. This ambivalence and balancing on the edge of profanum causes that the interference is made by of the story sacral powers, as well.

Model status of some of those kind stories is seen in their allegoric poetics. A story is to prove that secular civilisation delude itself thinking that it has at its disposal a power of establishing borders. "Once lived a man who had the excellent security guards and many thousands of dollars. He bought himself many flats. He built a fortress", relates a narrator. Perfect welfare, in the initial situation, described by V. Propp, is however spoilt. A nouveau rich feels the growing melancholy, whose meaning is uncovered by a mystical event. The nouveau rich has a collection of icons on the first floor of his "palace". The ground floor and the first floor are therefore in a classical antinomy of the up - down: the sinful orgies downstairs cannot be reconciled with the sanctity of upstairs. During one of the numerous parties the house shakes and a scared dog, passing round a tight shutter, in a strange way gets to the first floor. The nouveau rich converts, shocked by a miracle ⁷.

The logic of a miracle therefore does not consist on an enlightenment assisted by the God, even if it would be the shortest way to conversion. The pragmatist aim of the story is achieved with the help of the spectacular breaking of the borders and by "making fun" of the secular welfare which was to be their guarantee (the expensive locks appeared useless).

A groundless border is all the more dubious because in the Orthodox model of the world it can indicate the anti-sacral character of a place. Trying to illustrate this situation we wil

l convince ourselves that the anti-houses appear very often in our texts. Stories about the anti-houses do not carry on a controversy with a secular context because the dispute for a territory occurs between the God and the Satan. A semiotic studying the picture of 'anti-houses' in "Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov, states that a pseudo-flat in that book "is not a space of life but of death". In the anti-houses happen frightening thins. Everything what is holy is turned upside down and misshapen"⁸ .

The symbols which usually engender a need of a cult, in the anti-house are interpreted as diabolic. In one story a pilgrim who, at the malicious guides fault, finds his way to a cottage of a pseudo-old man, sees only uselessly deaf fence and the crosses showed from behind it, and they seem to him shady. In fact, he is right because after a while he finds out that at night from the nearby forest come to the house six old men, usurpatory bishops, to say a diabolic mass.

The examples of the two types buildings appearing in the stories - anti-houses and houses threatened by profanum - illustrate not only the importance of the outer morphology of a house, but what happen on the both sides of a border line, as well: a temporal aspect of domestic life, sounds, lights, events, uttered words, customs and even the household's clothes. The deceit of the old man is just revealed by his clothes, inadequate to a sacral place - a worn out truck-suit and a sports cup. In Bulgakov's anti-house instead of a live piano melody, a mechanic gramophone sounds. On the other hand in the cell of a holy pop (batiushka) there is "light and a stove and icons", and "from behind the open door a glimmer of an oil lamp attracts /guests/"⁹ ...

Not less important are surroundings. An anti-house is a contrary of a family home and it is closer to nature than to culture. The narrator says that the cottage of the old fake-man is surrounded by a wild forest - traditionally an ominous area of nature, in the Slavs' representation settled down by dangerous and odious monsters. Compared to a home-centre forest is the terrifying outskirts. This undefined sphere or, using Toporov's expression, "a non-guaranteed area", enters a cult hero, having left a safe shelter, and he passes by a borderline where entropy is at the zenith¹⁰ . The ambivalent features of forest constitute an appropriate background to the third type of story building which is an hermit's hut.

Pilgrimage to the old men's cell account for the central motif of the Orthodox discourse already since the 19^th century what makes it somewhat hermetic. However, even there you feel a tension between the religious and laic reason: the old men's shuts are a divine mainstay in the ocean of profanum, whereas a hero coming from the profanum side is often sceptical and he converses owing to a complete metamorphose of his philosophy of life. The ambivalent environment emphasises a titanic character of the shut's inhabitants. C.G.Jung would permit us to say that in the 'forest the old people stand face to face with their non-consciousness' whilst in the Orthodox tradition a forest is a presumable hermitage, and it "tempts", just as Christ and ancient hermits were numerously been tempted. This kind of separation from the world favours the prayer of the "staretz" (old holy man) for the virtual redemption of the mankind.

If the place of residence of a saint has to comply the criteria of holiness, then in the moment of a miracle such criteria are the more obligatory. The issue of a border shows here some interesting regularities. For instance, it can be noticed a certain linkage between the category of borderline itself, and the type of a miracle which has come into being within it. Some particular requirements seem to apply to the vocal revelations, visions and miraculous dreams. We can notice that a revelation more often has a vocal form as far as an everyday closed

space is concerned (family home, hospital) and when an addressee of a revelation does not have a sacral status. The hero hears a voice, but he or she does not see its source, whilst a vision or combination of a vision and a voice is experienced when a background is formed by wide open spaces (indefinite outside, field, forest) or by the space of dreams.

The Orthodox narratives bring several examples of the vocal revelations within and visions outside the borderlines. Many times staying in a dungeon or a dark cell a hero hears a voice. It is striking that statistically an enormous part of the stories telling about revelations occurs in prison (!). It is no way not to relate that fact to a border as a constitutive attribute of prison space. In one story a prisoner who wants to go to the prison hospital tries to hurt himself and just then he hears that he should not do it: "Don't do it"¹¹ . The hero of another narration, archbishop locks himself in an underground cell of his own free will. He asks the God's Mother for revealing him how to help Russia in the fight with the fascists. In this perfectly closed room he spends three days without food when God's Mother appears to him. He experiences the vision which is possible thanks to a spectacular borders suppression: "the ceiling of his stone cell opened and a column of fire gleamed and inside it God's Mother appeared"¹². The next narration tells about a vision of an Ukrainian villager who not only had to go out, himself, but he made the effort of leading out his family to observe in the sky the figure of a monk going towards Russia...¹³

However, the most frequent sort of revelation is a dream. One can have an impression that a story resorts to a dream when the situation is of too little importance to evoke a visual vision. A dream can be compared to the open space - it is a quick transfer to the boundless ocean of divine reality... In a dreamy vision an old man foretells a coming minister a death (as it appears later it concerns the "death" for the world). Some other time in a woman's dream appears an icon, showing her where it should be placed¹⁴ etc.

A dream is the effective mean of a fast liberation from hermetic sensuality. Looking in an Orthodox tradition for a parallel of this phenomenon we come across some other examples of equally sudden transformation. The devotional hesychast closes himself inside the aureole of his body, while performing a prayer (cf. "umnaia molitva", resulting in "umnoie delanie").

Then he deeply goes down to its very centre, to the 'heart', into the right bottom, into prenatural darkness - to contemplate there the light of 'Tabor' suppressing all the possible mundane boundaries. But in that moment of understanding he is on another level, the higher one. Similarly the closed room of presbytery separated by the iconostas opens widely during the Eucharistic canon. Still more meaningful illustration is a tomb, nailed down and hidden from people's glances deeply under the ground, the tomb in which lies stiffened body's vessel. Its utmost stagnancy is overcome by a revival. Here we deal with the intuition that in the highest point of being locked some other rules are obligatory. The nearer the centre the more petrified (as Toporov puts that) is the action field. There rules - as more petrified - hearing, not eyesight ¹⁵. After having reached the climax, the boundaries open, and the eyes (also the spiritual ones) gain some new possibilities.

Eyesight is hierarchically higher than hearing, even due to the fact that it gets a transmission in "one piece", whereas hearing divides it into words¹⁶ . In many cultures eyesight has sacral connotations. When gods punish someone for profanation of a sanctuary by taking them eyesight, blindness degrades the guilty to the level of the four lower senses

and closes the most important "inlet" of human sensuality making the inner environment of a human being more petrified. However, this situation creates the conditions for regaining a new, spiritual eyesight, and Russia knows no one holy blind man.

The metaphor of eyes as "inlets", windows in the body - and vice versa, the comparison of the windows to the eyes - refers to the picture of a "chink" in a boundary. In an Orthodox world's model a window retains its archaic symbolism of a "passage" into a different reality.

The "passage" is open for wanted and not wanted creatures what explains the perceptible fear of this being out of control leak. Full of anxiety interpretations of the symbolical meaning of a window appears in the radical signs of traditional religions, and still more legibly in the texts of eschatological and apocalyptical types of the disposed sects - especially in the latest decades when a danger of a window was multiplied considering its new connotations. While in Bulgakov Voland's eyes are simply the windows of a house, in the visions of new religious movements "the windows
from the hell"¹⁷ or the eyes of devil observing and manipulating the household are the screens of computers and television sets. Also Orthodox priests claim that the television is an instrument in devil's hands and the cause of unexplained illnesses which "constrain a soul and hypnotises"¹⁸ . It is very characteristic that windows are almost absent in Orthodox narration and in the description of a boundary it mostly uses the metaphor of door which as a passage under control can both open and close the border.

Life's organisation in an average post-soviet flat where a TV set takes up the place of a hearth and the other heart is a room with a computer (often "the only window to the world") where the element of needless things fills up life space - fills an Orthodox with horror. Many Orthodox people throw away from their houses all sorts of "secular" objects: paintings, technical devices, adornments. In many sermons of the Orthodox Church one can hear restless intonations appealing to objection against a secular style of life. Ascetic rooms are more preferable as well as the ascetic style of life should be led in these interiors. "A good interior is such an interior where there is anything useless. I presume that such simplicity proves God's presence" an Orthodox priest persuades the journalists of a magazine about interiors, and he adds that a term "an ascetic interior" is a nonsense, "contradictio in adjecto" because what a present day language means by a notion of "interior" has not too much common with the ascetics¹⁹ .

Therefore it is better to have a scanty interior decorations than to be under power of things. It is better not to know what is going on in the world than to be taken in by Satan - eyesight and hearing should be left clean and protected from the secular "noise". Even secular culture admit that such noise can be dangerous. A character of a 'popular' in Russia cartoon-film, Masiania, watches TV "without any reflection, smoking a joint because only thus, in a state of different consciousness, you can perceive the world of TV: chaos"²⁰ .

A post-soviet home not only does not fulfil the qualifications of a 'sacral arrangement' of a space but in Orthodox consciousness it is presumably an abode of sin; not only it uncovers a human being in the Satan eyes but it is also not being able to defend a man from the growing entropy.

***

Very rarely you can find an archetypical house organised after the sacral rules nowadays. However, a house institution still has a constant position in man's life. It is an element of persistence, a point of a cyclic return, a break in the rhythm of privacy. It is a halt on the way of life, and together with the Way it is one of the most important conceptions in all-world culture. The myths of ancient India, Greece and Near East, Taoism and the legends of the North American Indians are concentrated on the subject of migration in looking for the home.

It seems that in the man's world a 'mythologem of home' will always have its own position. Is it that indeed? Does not the oscillation on the background of the scenery devoid of any structure, presented in the Nomadic project as a presage of the future, does not it make that home institution becomes the rudiment, a sort of fossil, the effect of a delay of a new civilisation - Nomads civilisation? This style of reasoning sees in the longing for Home simply a psychiatric phenomenon: the unconscious desire of being hidden in the crust of a stable order is a sign of the melancholic personality, the so-called tipus melancholicus, with its phobia tendency to hide oneself from the new challenges. Being settled down, the attachment to the local rights, can be seen as a symptom of the "close mind", an attribute of totalitarian thinking.

Besides, the Way does not constitute either the world picture painted in the colours of the post-modernism whose the only absolute parameter is incessant drifting. The archaic metaphor of the way refers to structurally more clear symbolism of the world tree striking its root in the sky. But a post-modern man, as the late French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari could well insist, "is tired of trees" and "they should not believe trees any more"²¹ .Therefore the Way as the natural environment of a culture hero is seen as a privilege of the past.

A hero whom we mostly meet on the way is an Orthodox wanderer, a pilgrim (strannik), following the way without any specific geographic aim. However, the accidental character of his rout is delusive. In Orthodox consciousness the life itself is a way paved to eternity and a text written by the Creator. This is why, as opposed to a post-modern Nomad who comes and goes in the immensity of possibilities, the apparent nomadism of a strannik does not know any accidentality.

Undoubtedly a character of a strannik is a central component of the Russian world model, particularly interesting in the context of a conversation about a home and a way. The ideologists of "a Russian soul" introduced strannichestvo in the cannon of the national peculiarities. Strannik is the "freest man on the Earth" admires Nikolay Berdiayev. "Russia, he writes, is a country of the infinity freedom and of spiritual distance, the strannik's country, the country of the exiles and searchers" who "are not known to the West"²² . Also nowadays the "prophets" (e.g. Porfiriy Ivanov) in their biographies relate to the topic of migration, and the intellectuals create a picture of a strannik-messiah who, as the only one, can lead out the present day from the blind alley of technocratic civilisation. Since he is a type of a man with the "post-materialistic needs", searching not for a private success but for the truth²³ .

Strannichestvo is being retained in Orthodox subculture but long before now it stopped existing in the secular environment. [On the topic of "kaliki perechoshiie" one may find a vast bulk of interesting material from the 1910 and early 20^th centuries. See, for instance a concise brochure: Mokletsova, I. V. "Khozhdeniia" v russkoi kulture i literature X-XX vekov, Moskva : MGU M.V. Lomonosova, Fakul'tet inostrannykh iazykov, 2003; Let us distinguish, moreover, the cultural orthodox paradigm of "stranniki-kaliki" from the important literature of various Russian "khozhdeniia" - the most renowned by "kupetz" Afanasij Nikitin. See, for instance a marvellous book by Michel Evdokimoff: Pelerins russes et vagabonds mystiques, Paris : Cerf, 1987. As well as the penetrating work of Ewa Majewska-Thompson: Understanding Russia : the Holy fool in Russian Culture, Lanham, MD : University Press of America, 1987. - Ed.]

This structurally essential item of Russian spiritual universum is more or less empty at present. While the state of homelessness of a post-Soviet man we have called the longing for Home, the nostalgia which is full of romantization of strannik's popular "icon" (not only among Russian people) indicates probably something what we shall call a longing for the Way. "Where are there those leisurely heroes of a folk song, the longer wandering from one mill to another one and sleeping in the open? - asks Milan Kundera. - Have they disappeared together with the cart-tracks, with the meadows and clearings, together with the nature? A Czech proverb qualifies their sweet idleness with a metaphor: they study the windows of the good God. The one who studies the windows of the good God, is not bored, he or she is happy. In our world the idleness has transformed into inactivity that is something completely different: an inactive man is frustrated, feels dull and is still looking for missing him motion"²⁴ . The way of moving in the space of life has its simply shift in the style and quality of life. Moving inside the 'Nietzschean emptiness' in which we go down "both backwards and sideways and forwards, in all the directions'²⁵ , leads to the existential desperation of a man steeled hierophantically. For it the figure of a strannik is so attractive. He is a sage of movement. He is a guide on a way and thanks to him the turnings of the way began to uncover their logic.

How does the story strannik accomplish it and what is the way he strides forwards? We can guess about it taking in account his halts - homes. Each physically accomplished pilgrimage functions in Orthodox narratives as a section of a generally conceived way of life whilst its accidental quasi-whim that materialized a strannik in this and not that home, appears to be a turning-point in the householders lots. "Where does he come from, this unexpected pilgrim, a Russian man, at autumn night at home of a Lutheran pastor - asks the narrator of one of the stories. The pilgrim tells the pastor about the holy Russia, and from that moment on in the pastor's life it starts his turn towards the Orthodox Church²⁶ . After conversation with a newcomer life's trajectories of the householders change sharply their directions: the happy marriages are contracted and those unpleasant to the God disintegrate; someone feels a vocation to become a monk, someone else being thought a Jesus prayer becomes himself a pilgrim.

That is why just a spiritual conversation is an invariable ritual of entertaining a strannik. Russian ethnographers of the 19^th century notify that hospitality towards the pilgrims was compulsory in Russia, especially towards the stranniks who stand one step nearer the Blue Realm and they fulfil a common mission, praying for the whole world²⁷ .

A folk Orthodox Church for a long list of the places that stranniks roll by - mythical and real places - perceive them as "vieduns", marked with secret knowledge and a link with the other world²⁸. Their words are therefore listened to with a close attention, for them the important matters are postponed.

In the moment of a strannik's arrival a home becomes a crossing of the lines relating to the destinies of different people. What are their private ways? Are they pure possibilities or necessary trajectories traced out by God? Is it worth to start on a way? Perhaps it is better to trust the tried out domestic passivity?

Characteristic for Christianity combining of a way and time makes that in Orthodox stories a way is connoted with a linear motion. The way is divided in spaces of time: minutes and hours, days and years which are counted with the use of a backward chronometer, starting up from the date of the death (comp. "to the last minute of life"²⁹ ). We meet a persuasion that those elements of time are linked together quite loosely, they can be even "amputated"³⁰ . Here and there it appears a metaphor of a film reel on which life's stages are registered in accordance to the chronological order and which is usually showed to a dying³¹ . Arranged with such blocks a way-life in most of the stories function as a ready text (e.g. text of a calendar³² ), what creates a particular ethics of passiveness: because everything is already written we only have to wait until it fulfils (comp.: "time has not come yet"³³ , "everyone has their age"

³⁴ , " the time given by the Master"³⁵ , "your time has arrived"³⁶ , "as if he reached the appointed time"³⁷ ). The text of a life cannot be read in advance (the providential sense was hidden till the time"³⁸ , " time will be pointed by the Master"³⁹ , "now inconceivable -later will be understood"⁴⁰ ), and it is a particular virtue to wait in humility for its uncovering through a natural course of events.

Thus a story way is presented as a line fixed by the Providence; however, it appears that it is found in this form only as long as it is read a recourse (from the perspective of an accomplished fact). In other cases the way appears as an uncertain venture (it is easy to loose the way), and life as "a life exile"⁴¹ . It is not eschatologically indifferent being 'got lost' on the way, and therefore it is inadvisable. When you "loose your bearing" you need some "pastoral guidance", "salutary conduct of the Orthodox Church"⁴² . Man feels indistinctly that "a serious aim is necessary in life"⁴³ , and it is not only the question of a final purpose, that is to say, posthumous redemption. We find that most of the story migrations finish far too early and last shortly. After having accomplished an aim any movement cease, and it seems that a character until the end of his or her days stays in some sort of a blessed statics. Compare

that to the noteworthy instances of the ways leading to the Orthodox Church, namely to "a monastery", or to "the faith". To make the way as little winding as possible, a piece of advise offered by a holy man (strannik, an old man- staretz, etc.) is useful. The holy man knows the text of life and his advice is able to direct someone to the peculiarly right way.

What is surprising, one can follow the life way not only forwards but backwards as well. There it is an opportunity for undoing one's life mistakes. This movement relates not to any sort of acting but to the translocation in space. Some fragments suggest that everyone has his place on the way line and he should stay where he is. If, as a result of a mistake you have left your place, you should take it again. Thus having left the successful relationship but not accepted by her spiritual father, an Orthodox girl goes back to the place set to her by God (it means to the former fiance). It suggests again that not the dynamic of a way but the statics of a place is a preferable life strategy.

The aims of stopping the movement are various. Sometimes they are accompanied by sophisticated turning points of a plot. The motivation of leaving one's house can be a desire of living next to a holy place and sometimes such a place is directly called the home ("I felt as if I came back home" )⁴⁴. Sometimes a holy man tells in a dream to come to the monastery called after his name⁴⁵ , or a character overcomes the troubles of a way in searching for an old man advice⁴⁶ - but always a final aim refrain the hero from making any further activity. It is like that also when parents "lead their children to independent life in their own family"⁴⁷ (after having achieved that goal they seem to stop) or, at last, when a man dies (death is a recapitulation of one's life way⁴⁸ ).

It is so seen that in the question of the way the matter is how to achieve the right status of space. Life pilgrimage does not occur in dynamics but in static, or in dynamics of a particular kind, obligatory within some boundaries. A bright example of that rule is "a way to a monastic order" when both static and boundaries' close reach their apogee. Here static becomes irreversible because "there is not a return way to the world any more"⁴⁹ . Moreover, a monastery symbolically accelerates the end of life migration, after all a monk "dies for the world"⁵⁰ .

Perhaps it is not by chance that there is so strong inclination to monasticism among Orthodox confessors. They often consider a monastery vocation for the most certain way of salvation. Not a way but a home (and all its modifications: body, monastery etc.) is the most favourable place for spiritual work. The borders of a home refrain its undisturbed by the outer events static, protect a soul from dispersing in order to enable its another, spiritual journey. Just as strengthening of borders is a phase previous to their annulment, in a religious act the most effective movement comes into being in consequence of movement contradiction. This kind of movement is a person standing in front of God's face.

V.N.Toporov is defining this state as: "… physical immobility of a standing person is as if (...) compensated by a higher dynamism of spirit, its sensitivity, helpfulness, energy, activity and suggestiveness of expression (even in case of its zero form, or significant silence)". Standing is a base of serious self-communion (comp. "To stand in the truth") face to face with something higher - God truth. "This state means experiencing the intensification of stamina that prepares so to say penetration in a sphere of being", as Toporov aptly formulates that. Hence comes opposed to the horizontal movement, designated by many notions, Slavonic root

of "d(b)vig(a)ti" which means only a movement upwards, a shifter-change of a position in a vertical one in consequence of a sudden effort, an exertion of rising. The horizontal movement (weak, circular, of secondary importance whose goal is to maintain status quo on the borderlines of a system and prevent the entropy) is a principal of the cosmological dynamics, whilst a vertical movement ( strong, intensive, sacral, always new and "single") is the transcendention crossing own boundaries and limits, transcendention to the Other⁵¹ .

Christian's assignment is the self-improvement in a vertical movement facilitated through the state of "horizontal" inertia. In that context the status of a strannik seems to be very special. In fact, lack of attachment to one place qualifies him as a borderline figure. Stranniks are often people of a social margin - invalids, orphans, blind people. "In such disability , writes a folklorist, appear the powers of chaos which make that a border between "this" and "that" world becomes permeable"⁵² . The hero of a famous tale, "Pilgrim's story"(in original "Rasskaz strannika"), a one-hand victim of fire, prefers "not-guaranteed" tracks, he chooses forest and cart-tracks, and he mostly goes at night ."⁵³ However, we discover that in his heart also he dreams about a home of his measure: "I envy you, he tells a forester, that you can live comfortably in a cosy cottage, far from people, not like me - to moon about from one place to another⁵⁴..." However, even the way has mercy on him (f. ex. for some time he is living in a forester's dug-out which with love he calls his grave). But it does not last for long. The place does not keep him: the wood is soon rooted out and strannik is turned adrift in the way.

His relationship with a borderline signals a fundamental difference between a strannik and a post-modern nomad. "Living a nomadic life" strannik emphasises a boundary, in other words, a limit of cosmos. His horizontal migrations in a sense protect system against entropy, his trajectory merges into one all the points of a human's being intensity - meetings, homes - giving a structure to the sacral universe. Therefore the nowadays man has an intuitive believe that a strannik's movement is an ideal movement: right, high, full of sense, proper hierophantic. At the same time the inner reality of a pilgrim has nothing in common with these epithets because to strannik not movement itself is essential but a retreat, far from people's world, the prayer's self-communion. He does not own a house and any outer borders. He communicates with people in a spiritual conversation only sometimes. The rest of his time he spends in hesychast silence, without admitting any vibration of a strange thought. Thus the most important strannik's movement occurs not inside his person but in the deepest darkness of heart where he stands in front of God. That is his inner home, home of his soul, the place prepared for the Master. From this place it starts another pilgrimage, ruled by another rules and another guide persons and forces.

***

Confined locum and a static home is, seemingly, the most optimal environment of a religious individual. In Orthodox narratives it is always connoted positively. Lack of home is a sufficient reason for asking Master's holy people and they help with a good heart. It is easy to recognise the realities of those stories. For instance, "house troubles" and "ineffective appeals to Government" appears in them. In one of the stories a miracle causes that a price is understated⁵⁵ , and in another one a priest who wants to obtain a flat from the secular authorities, in a prayer rationalises that he and his five children are to share "the housing space with another family"⁵⁶ . Non-Orthodox origin of the housing disputes emphasis again a polemical character of the text against a secular context.

Family is a further argument for a story hero becoming an owner of a house. Not only because family is a vocation of everyone who did not take the frock. The Orthodox model of the world joins a home and a family in one ball of thread of private lots. Being a crossing of the householders life ways, home ties them so strongly that it is even possible to talk about a family line's lot.

The likeness between the family and the house should be established more evidently. Russian literature where the 'home' theme is a litmus-paper showing the society attitude towards an individual, created many illustrations of it. Thus, for instance, nautical relations between people, with a Russian kitchen in the background. A master of a home has died and his wife is left in company of her mother-in-law. At night, mother and wife - each apart - go to the kitchen in order to drink some water. Both suffer very much but they do not have a word. And this is the way it was always before: all their lives they have lived in little space and they have disturbed one another. But there were not a possibilities to part. They are not guilty - after all, quoting Bulgakov, "they are people like all but only a housing question has worsen them". In some other story, a modern one, written by Ludmila Ulickaja, entitled "Medea and her children", Medea is a Crimean Greek who posses a huge detached house. Crowds of closer and more distant relatives come to her house - Greeks, Russians, Hebrews, Lithuanians. Someone's children, wives, uncles, all related in various degrees of kinship in such an intricate way that a reader gets confused from the beginning of the story. All of them are welcomed, nourished and liked by her. At the end of her life Medea finds out that her believed husband betrayed her with her beloved sister. Although desolated, she forgives everything because the home needs her. She cannot let her family down, and she doesn't. To the Crimea still go the guests creating this large and warm family.

Like home like family, and like family like its members' lot. Memory of this truth is retained in the language (compare e.g. "род" which refers to the ancient cult of pagan god Rod) as a designation of "the dead realm" inhabited by the ancestry⁵⁷ who used to take care of their progeny's destiny. The ancestry link with the destiny in Russian culture is also revealed in modern studies of family narration. Its constant topoi are part of the ancestral place, "grand-fathers house" around whom it is organised family space and where happens common family history. A family lot is described here as over-personal, pitiless power which assumes similarity of the personal lots, "their rhythmical accord within the sphere of kinship". Not by chance writes a folklorist that the texts of the narratives are built on a rule of accumulation: "In our family lots recur...."⁵⁸ .

Tatiana V. Cyvijan pays attention that the ancestral lot functions in The Russian model of the world ("kartina mira") as defined and decided, been opposed to an undefined individual lot. We can add that the former is perceived as static and safe whilst the latter as dynamic and risky. Not everyone has the courage to leave the family shelter and set out on the way of their personal lot, without a guide, tete-a-tete with their own freedom. On the other hand folk consciousness provided home with the guardians, the deceased householders. The deceased

parents are gifted with unusual possibilities, and to save their children they are even able to appear in their bodies⁵⁹ ...
Feeling of safety within a housing space, certainty of moving in the life, lack of fear before one's own lot - these are the next advantages of the sacral model of the world which are not present in the secular culture. Sacral world is anthropocentric but a man is dependent on holy powers. Secular world is disposed towards an individual that think that he or she is independent. They try to be the architects of their fortunes and stand face to face with their dangerous secret that they can depend on them only. A religious man does not know his or her end but they are not scared of it. A secular man is scared of it, prefers to know his or her end, tries to run away from it - "run away from the lot"… A religious man quietly goes the way fixed by God, unites its dynamics with the statics of the home, profits by the help of spiritual guides and reaches the ocean of divinity in the vertical motion of a prayer. A secular man loses himself in the ocean of profanum. He is a sovereign of everything but he does not know where to go. "The fact that everything is in his hands has also its reverse: if he fails who will defend him, who will rid him of solitude?", asks Tatiana Cyvijan⁶⁰ .

The Orthodox people react with dismay to the changes happening in the secular environment. A post-soviet man has no privacy but even among the omnipresent neighbours he feels lonely. Here everyone hysterically tightens the borders, closes the doors against the intruders distrusting the strangers (even if they are the holy 'stranniks'). Moreover, wandering around the, identically, pushed to the realm of profanum, being far away from the city centre labyrinths of blocks of flats, one can loose himself literally and figuratively.

Unreal, disordered, not own houses, barren, fruitless families, lack of sign-posts in the universal chaos of space and time, and at the same time another, irregular, a new order where everything is counted, identified, formulated in identification numbers, codes, computer files - for the Orthodox people these are the signs of satanic omnipotence. Orthodox subculture keeps to what is certain, the 19^thcentury models remains mentality of a siege fortress, and together with all the Russian discourse assimilates a military picture of the world. "Homeland", "Russian Home" are the notions that in the Orthodox narratives occur almost exclusively in the context of an enemy. The state open frontiers cause fear because of their dangerous influences coming from the West. Not only the small home is in danger but the big one, too.

An Orthodox man feels homeless and they say that it should be like that. But even he has the right to his nostalgia, to his dreams.

From the latter part of the 17^th century it dates a small script "Son's letter to his father from a hidden monastery...⁶¹ , popular with the old confession believers and the Orthodox people from the region of Nizhniy Novgorod. It is a moving testimony of the hope that in spite of the authorities' lawlessness, all the social perturbations and other whims of history, still exists on the Earth this place - safe, secluded, hidden and holy - where any unquiet soul can rest in God.

A young man writes to his parents that they should not consider him for a descent as he lives in the Earth's paradise, with the saints. There is silence, joy and delight where he stays - spiritual, not sensual. That place is a miraculous city Kitezh. The mysterious city lies under water, as some people say. Some others assume that it is under the local hillocks. There are also people who believe that it rises on its former spot, but not everyone can see it. It became

invisible when it was captured by a vile pagan, godless Khan Batiy. The old men live there, and their prayer is so powerful that at night columns of fire going out of their mouths are seen. A pilgrim going to Kitiezh has to renounce the Earth's attachments, give away his property, pray and fast. He has to follow the Batiy's road with humility, without a bag and a button. And if he arrives at this land with a pure heart - then the gates of the city open. The old men, dressed in the luminous clothes, will greet him, and from the orthodox church Easter bells will ring. But a dishonest man will be greeted by "a wood and an empty place"⁶² .

Still at the beginning of the 20^th century crowds of pilgrims arrived at Svietloyar. They prayed, drank clean water of the lake. They said that a pious man here was being rocked to sleep by the watersides. The inhabitants of the nearby villages saw once the crosses of churches shining through the water when the weather was fine. The Russian fin-de-siecle intellectuals were also deeply interested in the site of Svietloyar. Merezhkovskiy and Gippius, Prishvin, Korolenko, Mel'nikov-Pecherskiy were visiting it. Later the lake was studied by the geologists. They also wanted to find the longed-for city but they found nothing.

The nostalgia for Home belongs to religious experiences just as religious is a motif of owning a Real Home. The way leading to such a home is narrow and winding, vertical as the one leading to Kitezh. Each Orthodox believer knows it. This is a spiritual axiom, in the other way one can reach only "an empty place". The invisible city is also a spiritual reality. Such a belief has been retained till now in the Orthodox stories. However, secular scepticism has reached even there, and there are not many who want to assume the trouble of the spiritual expedition. Already in 1900 Korolenko wrote about it: the secret Kitezh started to evaporate, there are less and less threads linking the visible world with the invisible one. "Many people arrive at the watersides to hear the bell of invisible city from the holy profundity. And they do not hear"⁶³ .