With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem

by Algernon Blackwood

To have seen the Holy Land as Stephen Graham saw it is a privilege many might desire, but few deserve. He saw it as a genuine pilgrim himself, one among the seven thousand others from the cold interior of Russia; and, in order to do so, he endured no little hardship and privation by the way. Tramps are plentiful today, overdone, in fact; tramping is almost as fashionable a pose as caravanning. But pilgrims are rare. A pilgrim may take as little luggage as a tramp, but where the tramp is a mere wanderer, listless as the wind, the pilgrim has a definite goal, usually difficult of attainment. He has, moreover, faith, and the city he seeks lies hid in that vastest and most puzzling of all strange lands⁠—the heart. These seven thousand Russian peasants, journeying to Jerusalem, months and months on foot, journeyed at the same time to the goal of all their lives, the New Jerusalem. The account is full of a grand and tender pathos; told in few words, with a simplicity almost of Bible language, it is moving and beautiful. Those obvious stage effects that seduce most writers on the Holy Land are contemptuously ignored; except for a few vivid touches the author himself hardly appears at all; one sees only the crowd of aged Pilgrims (there are no young among them), confusion in their minds but ecstasy in their hearts, scornful of pain, discomfort, even of death itself, moving in a body to that Holy City where Christ was crucified and buried, and where He rose again. That, having seen, they may go home to die. Their pilgrimage is over. It is a fortunate thing that the first man to describe this unique and remarkable pilgrimage should be one who could have written A Tramp’s Sketches and A Vagabond in the Caucasus, both of them revealing a type of mind and heart not too common in the army of writing folk today. Only a man of simple, understanding heart, yet with the faith and vision of a poet, could do justice to such a theme. “The adventure of which I tell,” he says in his preface, “was unique and splendid, a thing of a lifetime. The journey of the Russian peasants to Jerusalem has never been described before in any language, not even in Russian. Yet it is the most significant thing in the Russian life of today. In the story lies a great national epic.” And on laying down the story at its close the reader feels these latter words are justified. “There is, unfortunately, no literature of the pilgrimage,” he says elsewhere (page 215). “I find nothing that is historically of the slightest value. No one of any literary ability seems to have ever journeyed with the pilgrims and brought a story home. It is strange that an immemorial national pilgrimage should have remained unsung. It shows how divorced is the interest of the Russian cultured Class from that which is essentially Russian.⁠ ⁠… Certainly, for a great Russian writer there is the outward form and visible expression of greatness lying potentially in the pilgrimage. There is the possibility of a great national epic that would make Europe ring. Of course, it needs a Russian to write it⁠—one can write a national epic only for one’s own nation.”

This, of course, is true. But herein lies the touch of genius that lifts this remarkable book above others of its ilk, namely, that it is written from the point of view of an insider, as though one of the peasants themselves had told it to his family on getting home again. No mere observant outsider travelling with the band could have done this. The insight, sympathy and intimate understanding of the peasant mind vis-à-vis to these realised splendours of his lifelong faith and worship are no common gift.

To give a résumé of this great pilgrimage within the space of a brief notice is hardly possible. “The pilgrimage is not so much to the Holy Land or to Jerusalem as to the sacred stones.” It is a promise the peasant gives to his God. “The peasants feel that when they have been to Jerusalem the serious occupations of their life are all ended. They take their death-shrouds to Jordan and, wearing them, bathe in the sacred river⁠ ⁠… They spend a night in the sepulchre of Christ, and receiving the Sacred Fire (chemically provided by the mercenary monks), extinguish it with caps that they will wear in their coffins. They mostly hope to die in the Holy Land, preferably near the Dead Sea, where the Last Judgment will take place. If they must retum to their native village in Russia, it will be to put their affairs in order and await death.” The obvious chicanery and fraud practised on them everywhere has no effect upon them, whether they buy an actual fragment of the Virgin’s gown or touch a plank that Jesus himself planed, for their passionate belief sublimates all tawdry humbug into beauty, and these details are to them but external symbols of a faith in their hearts which is inextinguishable. Some of them went to see the oak tree under which Abraham entertained three angels unawares. “A tremendous oak,” said one of them. “To think that it has lived all these thousands of years, and that my unworthy’ eyes should survive to see it!” For guidebooks they use their Bibles, which they bring out with them. Some of them have tramped four thousand miles, taking years to reach the seaport where they may embark. From every part of the great Empire they come; and it is no artificial movement organised by priests or clergy. They come because the mandate is in their hearts. For months before the journey begins they set aside crusts of bread to carry with them, and these crusts, yellow, green and mouldy, form the chief sustenance of the larger portion on the way. The procession, as it goes from Jerusalem to Nazareth, is over a mile in length, and though mules are provided by the Russian Palestine Society for those who may succumb, the majority prefer to suffer pain and misery, moving at the rate of half a mile an hour beneath the blistering sun rather than ride⁠—since Christ himself walked and bore a burden too. All bring money, some more, some less, and of this, what does not go to the greedy monks for the saying of prayers goes into the pockets of the shopmen who sell sacred articles of every sort and description at exorbitant prices. A great sale is done, especially in ready-made letters (since the peasants can neither read nor write) written with high-sounding phrases and suitable to send to any friend in Russia, full, moreover, of “pious opinions all written with superb flourishes of caligraphy in gold-coloured ink.”

It is more edifying, as well as better worth while, however, to dwell upon the charity and spirit of kindliness that animated the entire army of seven thousand simple peasants, and to read how they shared their food and money and clothing with each other, tended each other in sickness, prayed and sang and laughed together like a lot of children journeying to fairyland. There is something inspiring in the record, superstitious though the underlying faith may seem to most. With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem is a poem, and a poem to read again and again with deep enjoyment.

It is not fair, I feel, to steal fragments from the text, or one would like to give the account of the effect of “Jerusalem attained” upon these pilgrims, their ecstasies in the Holy Sepulchre, in the Garden of Gethsemane, at Nazareth and Bethleliem, and, above all, on Easter Morning. The scene in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when the Sacred Fire blazes from the wall, and the pilgrims light lamps and candles they mean to carry back alight to their villages, thousands of miles away, is movingly described. The “Bringing out of the Holy Shroud,” and, indeed, the entire Easter Festival will live vividly in the reader’s memory as a picture of solemn and pathetic beauty. This, however, and the details of the tremendous journey, of the appalling voyage by sea from Constantinople to Jaffa, of the sleeping places, mysterious bedfellows, as well as the enchanting accounts of individual Pilgrims, must all be read where they belong, in the atmosphere and setting of the book and in the author’s own simple, thrilling language The farewell address to the pilgrims by the Archimandrite is given in the final chapter. It is a singular and characteristic utterance. He gives thanks to God that all have seen the Holy Land, “the wish of every Orthodox Russian Christian.” Many had died on the Way; he holds them fortunate too. “We have been in Bethlehem where the Child was born, and in Nazareth where He lived thirty years. We have washed our sinful bodies in the holy Jordan streams where He was baptised, have climbed Tabor where He was transfigured, and walked in Jerusalem where He was crucified, buried, and raised from death. The names of the places in which we have prayed have made our very hearts tremble.⁠ ⁠… We have followed in the footsteps of Jesus Christ from Bethlehem to Golgotha.⁠ ⁠… When we go back to Russia we must never forget cur visions.” And then, with worldly wisdom, he adds, finally: “We have seen much that is evil in the Holy Land. Do not let us, therefore, take home tales of evil things seen and heard there. Forget that which was not good.” One feels, too, from the general tenor and character of the pilgrims, that it is only the good they will take home to their remote and frozen villages. “For all these different hearts,” as Mr. Graham says, “ felt each its own particular joy. Each peasant, though in sheepskins, throbbed and glowed in the temple. Not only he, but the village for which he stood, and the family for which ihe stood, had reached Jerusalem⁠ ⁠… and the peasant entering Jerusalem with his prayers brought all these with him. A mighty chorus went up to God of the voices of the human heart, a music not heard by the ear. It was the voice of a great nation in the presence of God.”