Anathema

"Anathema" by Aleksandr Kuprin is a poignant exploration of love, sacrifice, and moral dilemmas set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Russia. The story revolves around the passionate and tumultuous relationship between the protagonist, an artist, and a beautiful woman, highlighting the conflicts between personal desires and societal expectations. Kuprin masterfully delves into themes of obsession, idealism, and the human condition, offering readers a deep and reflective narrative that captures the essence of the era. The book is notable for its rich character development and Kuprin's lyrical prose, making it a significant work in Russian literature.

• Novel

								
"Father Deacon, you're wasting the candles," said the deacon's wife.
"It's time to get up."

This small, thin, yellow-faced woman treated her husband very harshly.
In the school at which she had been educated there had been an opinion
that--men were scoundrels, deceivers, and tyrants. But her husband, the
deacon, was certainly not a tyrant. He was absolutely in awe of his
half-hysterical, half-epileptic, childless wife. The deacon weighed
about nine and a half poods[1] of solid flesh; he had a broad chest
like the body of a motor-car, an awful voice, and with it all that
gentle condescension of manner which often marks the behaviour of
extraordinarily strong people in their relations towards the weak.

[1] A pood is 40 Russian lbs., about 36 lbs. English.

It always took the deacon a long time to get his voice in order. This
occupation--an unpleasant, long-drawn-out torture--is, of course,
well known to all those who have to sing in public: the rubbing with
cocaine, the burning with caustic, the gargling with boracic acid. And,
still lying upon his bed, Father Olympus began to try his voice.

"Via ... kmm! Via-a-a! Alleluia, alleluia. ... Oba-che ... kmm....
Ma-ma...."

"There's no sound in my voice," he said to himself. "Vla-di-ko
bla-go-slo-ve-e-e.... Km...."

Like all famous singers, he was given to be anxious about his voice. It
is well known that actors grow pale and cross themselves before they go
on to the stage. And Father Olympus suffered from this vice of fear.
Yet he was the only man in the town, and possibly in all Russia, who
could make his voice resound in the old dark cathedral church, gleaming
with ancient gold and mosaic.

He alone could fill all the corners of the old building with his
powerful voice, and when he intoned the funeral service every crystal
lustre in the candelabras trembled and jingled with the sound.

His prim wife brought him in a glass of weak tea with lemon in it, and,
as usual on Sunday mornings, a glass of vodka. Olympus tried his voice
once more: "Mi ... mi ... fa.... Mi-ro-no-citsi.... Here, mother,"
called he to his wife, "give me re on the harmonium."

His wife sounded a long melancholy note. "Km ... km.... Pharaoh and his
chariots.... No, no, I can't do it, my voice has gone. The devil must
have got into me from that writer, what's his name?..."

Father Olympus was very fond of reading; he read much and
indiscriminately, but paid very little attention to the names of the
authors. His seminary education, based chiefly on learning by heart,
on reading "rubrics," on learning indispensable quotations from the
fathers of the Church, had developed his memory to an unusual degree.
In order to get by heart a whole page of complicated casuistical
reasoning, such as that of St. Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Basil
the Great or St. John Chrysostom, it was quite sufficient for him
to run his eye over the lines, and he would remember them. It was a
student from the Bethany Academy who brought him books to read, and
only the evening before he had given him a delightful romance, a
picture of life in the Caucasus, of soldiers, Cossacks, Tchetchenians,
and how they lived there and fought one another, drank wine, married,
hunted.

The reading of this tale had disturbed the elementary soul of the
deacon. He had read it three times over, and often during the reading
had laughed and wept emotionally, clenching his fists and turning his
huge body from one side to the other in his chair. He continually
asked himself, "Would it not have been better to have been a hunter, a
trapper, a fisherman, a horseman, anything rather than a clergyman?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He was always a little later in coming into the cathedral than he ought
to have been. Just like a famous baritone at a theatre. As he came
through the south door into the sanctuary, on this Sunday morning, he
tried his voice for the last time. "Km ... km.... I can sing re," he
thought. "But that scoundrel will certainly give me the tone on doh.
Never mind, I must change it to my note, and the choir will be obliged
to follow."

There awoke in him that pride which always slumbers in the breast of
a public favourite, for he was spoilt by the whole town; even the
street-boys used to collect together to stare at him with a similar
veneration to that with which they gazed into the immense mouth of the
brass helicon in the military band on the boulevard.

The bishop entered and was solemnly installed in his seat. He wore
his mitre a little on one side. Two sub-deacons stood beside him with
censers, swinging them harmoniously. The clergy, in bright festival
robes, stood around. Two priests brought forward from the altar the
ikons of the Saviour and the Virgin-Mother, and placed them on a stand
before the people.

The cathedral was an ancient building, and had a pulpit of carved oak
like that of a Catholic church. It stood close up to the wall, and was
reached by a winding staircase. This was the deacon's place.

Slowly, trying each step as he went, and carefully resting his
hands on the balustrade--he was always afraid of breaking something
accidentally--the deacon went up into the pulpit. Then, clearing his
throat and nose and expectorating, he struck the tuning-fork, passed
deliberately from doh to re, and began:

"Bless us, most reverend Father."

"Now, you scoundrel," he thought to himself, apostrophising the leader
of the choir; "you won't dare to change the tone in the presence of the
bishop." At that moment he felt, with pleasure, that his voice sounded
much better than usual; it was quite easy to pass from one note to
another, and its soft depth of tone caused all the air in the cathedral
to vibrate.

It was the Orthodox service for the first week in Lent, and, at first,
Father Olympus had not much work. The reader trumpeted out the psalms
indistinctly; he was a deacon from the academy, a future professor of
homiletics, and he snuffled.

Father Olympus roared out from time to time, "Let us pray." He stood
there on his raised platform, immense, in his stiff vestment of gilt
brocade, his mane of grey-black hair hanging on his shoulders, and
every now and then he tried his voice quietly. The church was full to
the doors with sentimental old peasant women and sturdy grey-bearded
peasants.

"Strange," thought Olympus to himself suddenly, "but every one of these
women's heads, if I look at it from the side, reminds me inevitably
either of the head of a fish or of a hen's head. Even the deaconess, my
wife...."

His attention, however, was not diverted from the service. He followed
it all along in his seventeenth-century missal. The prayers came to an
end: "Almighty God, Master and Creator of all living." And at last,
"Amen."

Then began the affirmation of Orthodoxy. "Who is as great as the Lord,

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