* * *
'Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee, from me this cup from me, but not what I want, but what thou wilt'.
(Matthew 14:36)
Before Ignatius the question acutely arose: what to do next?
He was increasingly alienated from the world, everyday's bustle and conversations no longer affected him.
He did not know how to behave.
One day before confession with absolutely sincere repentance asked Denis to forgive him 'for everything'.
Concrete Denis suddenly burst into tears and ran to her room.
And in the morning without saying goodbye she disappeared without a trace.
Ignatius was already dreaming of a solitary cell in an Orthodox monastery somewhere on the Mount Athos, and he nearly got this blessing from father Peter who confession to confession repeated with a sigh:
'You are avoiding people, Ignatius. Pray that the Lord has granted you compassion...
And once in second-hand book store Ignatius open at random a battered volume of Gogol:
'Your Monastery is Russia!'
Put on yourself mentally a cassock of a monk and kill you for yourself, but not for it, go and act in it.
It now calls its sons even closer than ever before. Already its soul was is, and a cry of mental illness is heard.
My friend! Maybe, you have an unfeeling heart, or you do not know what to Russia means to a Russian.
Recall that when trouble comes yo it, then monks came out of the monasteries and became in the ranks of other rescue it.'
And further:
'Awake! Night blindness is in your eyes!
You will to get love to your soul. You will not love people up until you serve them.
What a servant can bind to his master who is far away from him and for whom he has not worked yet it personally?
For this reason a baby is loved so much by its mother that she wore it for a long time in itself, use all for it, and he suffered because of it.
Wake up! Your Monastery is Russia. "
* * *
After 134 years since the publication of Gogol's appeal Ignatius returned.
In the most flourishing of the stagnation.
The return of the famous artist-immigrant was a sufficiently rare and extraordinary event.
But Ignatius was able to avoid public propagandistic flogging, passing almost all his possession, including pictures, to health care.
He was able to leave and arrive in secret, in English way.
'Why have you come for us again, Darenov?' asked him handsome man in civilian clothes in a conversation face-to-face. In the subtext it meant:
'Are you really mad or do you have something under the guise of a blessed person?'
Ignatius who took as his rule, if possible, not to lie, referred the same to the influence of Gogol's letters to the Count A.P.T., which written 135 years ago.
The officer turned to be a cunning one and send for Gogol's book.
However, it turned out that 'Selected Places' were not so easy to get because they seem not to be published under Soviet rule.
Finally, they brought pre-revolutionary edition and found the needed lines.
And it calmed down the official because it was a real document.
And when it turned out that Gogol was mad too, and for that reason those letters were not published, the ends come together.
The handsome man completely imbued with the confidence to Ignatius.
And when, having received proper signatures, Ignatius back to the office, he found him reading seditious 'Letters'.
'A publisher has the surname Marx,' embarrassed to say Sergei, as though he justified.
Ignatius adored this Sergei. He wanted to hug them all for speaking Russian. Beginning from that crowd at the airport, one and all.
Who transferred meaningless words, swore, made noise...
Native speech sounds poured upon him in blissfully life-giving streams.
He never thought what lived in him; it turned out that it was ravenous hunger for this Russian noisy crowd.
His was moved to tears, that he could understand all. He wanted to respond to all the shouting, give all the help, all in a row to shake hands...
He suddenly realized that he returned home.
That in a few kilometers away Joanna was not asleep yet, forty-years old autumnal Joanna. In her face there was some challenging nakedness, as branches with fallen leaves.
He recently saw her so in a shot of chronicles of the Moscow Film Festival.
He could easily dial her number in that booth.
'I'm back, Joanna...'
And spring Joanna who was febrile with a blue plastic ring on top behind her hair, going to Denis by an evening electric train.
To Denis who shared the intended one way of life on two parallels, like rails or unconnected lines...
And eternal Joanna as a bright face behind a carriage window with flying in the blue twilight hair, parted in surprise baby mouth.
She was either looking in reality, or calling the place to yourself.
On the other side of life.
And summer Joanna... Their separated body that were separated ages uncontrollably falling into a blissful abyss with each other.
Joanna's burning face in a halo skinny of pillows, her cry.
'And Adam knew Eve his wife...'
He forbade himself to think about summer Joanna and alive Joanna, palpable only a few kilometers from the hotel room.
He called Gleb.
And when the taxi rushed him to the other end of Moscow, eternal Joanna with leather cord in improbably long hair will, finally, tooka place nearby, on the other side of the glass.
He felt weightless her hands on his shoulders of and calmed down.
And he enjoyed tales of a driver: let talk anything, if only in Russian.
He was greedily imbibing, scroll back to the memory of the familiar serpentine streets of Moscow, the in this dank, gray October day seemed particularly wretched to Ignatius who returned from abroad.
He will enjoy this very poverty, at first laughing at you, it was nostalgia for the native swamp!
But when the driver stopped at the roundabout at the petrol station, Ignatius, leaving the car, stared at a little village nearby: either a rivulet, or a ravine.
Gaggle of unremarkable single-story, ramshackle ones, with barns at random so if anyone is in that much little houses, clinging each other.
Next there were a field and a forest...
If you turn away from the ring: no signs of the times, the smell of smoke and rotting leaves... But behind him, as far as the eye can see, there was a pile of concrete icebergs, and crosses of antennas instead of the church - a typical Russian landscape.
Old and new worlds, separated by a ring-crowned road.
Their dissimilarity was only apparent.
And the doomed village, and the big city, and an endless string of these smoky mercilessly thundering trucks - all united by something elusive, a kind of general instability, disorder, ghostly existence.
Even the concrete masses the impression of the scenery of its uniformity, the lack of distinctive details.
If they were hastily worked on a couple of years.
Jarring trucks on the ring; it seemed just about fall apart along with the broken-down road.
Everything was done somehow, compared to the abundant soundly-comfortable world that Ignatius left.
However, he fely that it is this disorder tha quenched now his nostalgic hunger. Again snipe and swamp came to his mind.
He remembers the early years spent 'there', after adaptation, when money and opportunity to travel appeared.
He remember strange mystical rejection of ill-abundance of all these showcases, luxurious hotels and car rentals, business, dressy crowd, frantically spinning in the realm of unlimited needs.
Between those offices, exchanges, supermarkets, banks, art exhibitions, premieres, business and non-business meetings, adulteries - with hilarious doom once launched by someone from the top of his macabre pointless-focused energy.
The meaning of which was, like, in the process of rotation.
He then curiously looked closely especially at the powers, at the minions of fortune.
Where was the borderline where benefits of civilization, unwinding turned man into a slave? Where was the 'eat to live' becomes 'live to eat'?
A few days later Ignatius irritated the lack of those same benefits. Lack enslaved no less than abundance, they can be overcome only individually, from the inside.
'Give us this day our daily bread'.
The most important thing today, because 'tomorrow had their cares'.
Free from vanity, not the one who has not but one he who does not want to have.
But then, looking at a squalid village on the background of dull concrete icebergs while listening to rumble of loosening trucks, drifting from the village drunk fingering accordion and a dog barking, sniffing a gasoline fumes, then the furnace smoke, he experienced an almost physical pleasure it is from this poor landscape of where the dreams in their nostalgic dreams.
As well as on the stately, snow-covered 'Wild North' from his childhood.
And about Peter, a fabulously beautiful fictional city, though forgotten on the shore of eternity that flew old Russia and quietly dying under the quilt ordinary-looking signs.
'Memento Mori', reads the ancient wisdom.
Is it not the mystery of Russia?
Not in death memory of its landscapes, whether Shishkin's forest, or Levitan's hill 'Above the Eternal Peace', or 'the Wilde North?
It was 'verbless rest'.
This was a country of passionate storms and quivering candle; it organically aliened Majeure feast of civilization.
There were no pyramids, no Coliseum and no lasting things.
Here even temples built on the centuries explode.
Even relics, Orthodox and Soviet ones, could not find a reliable shelter.
Here, the soul seemed to remember that 'blessed are those who mourn', that on the earth it is in exile.
And, even at times unconsciously, passionately it is waiting for the Messiah.
'But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have� be as though they had none.
And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away'.
(1 Corinthians 7:29)
'For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal'.
(2 Corinthians 4:18)
So thought Ignatius who returned to the peak of the stagnation to country where 'Everything is not what it's not that all is not firmly' and that 'cannot be understood by mind'.
Where when merchants and attained wealth, they ether ruin oneself by drink, brawl, hit the mirror, or distributed their estates to the poor.
Or they went into the rebels inducing people to revolt against their own wealth and his incited to dig their own, the bourgeois', grave.
Where cannot live by the rules of civilized society.
Hyped gyroscope on the earth immediately collapsing on its side.
Here it is good to fight to the death, to give for something or someone to life, to prepare for death and dying.
Anticipation and desire for the apocalypse reigns over this mysterious magical land 'from the southern mountains to the northern seas'.
Where 'a person goes as an owner, having nothing and not wanting to have.
Here they built only for posterity, shot themselves and killed early singers and poets.
Here, people are waking up only for wars and disasters.
Here on Sundays and holidays the whole family goes to the cemetery to relax with snacks at the mound, where they go on vacation for the fog and the smell of the taiga.
Where address is not home and not street. Where are the great goals involved in the death:
'We will all die in the fight for it!'
Rejecting the proposed earth's civilization paradise of consumption, as intended bride of Heaven rejects a rich husband, this country is subconsciously craves the apocalypse, and prepares for it. Forseeing in it ' new heaven and new earth'.
Not to prepare for death and eternal consuming mysterious power of attraction of this land, and in 'death to life'.
In the deep faith in the future resurrection.
In fact, that 'corn is not quickened, until it dies'.
Rejection of the earth written in memory of the people's. Subconscious disdain for empirical existence, enslaving the benefits and temporary purposes.
And the globe has become the core of me,
To which a convict chained...
I'm in the hallway of close days,
Where even the sky is a heavy yoke,
Look in the century, live in minutes
And wait for the Saturday of Saturdays...
Countries, from which Ignatius returned, lived.
Russia waited.
It always looked only into the distance.
It was mistaken, opened its doors and hearts to different impostors and robbers.
It was locked in a tower, raped, passed from hand to hand and sold into slavery - she raised, and again, abused and ravaged, directs the eye into the distance to horizon.
It was as s holy fool stepdaughter, hated, and hated that promise only misery and trouble living a normal life more fulfilling prosperous civilized world.
It was a bewitched maiden, waiting for the prince -deemer.
Then in the sleepy hopeless stupor of Oblomov's cobwebs. Then after awakaning crushing all around. Then wandering into the abyss of another false prince.
Then moving mountains and rising from ashes.
A country where people speak in Russian, and even in a hundred languages.
Where Joanna goes along streets.
Where millions heed miserable half-dead elders, broadcasting on grandiose plans, playing obscure nor themselves, nor those millions of fairy tale.
Where more and more frightening and interesting.
To ten years later, when uploaded, will collapse the old decorations and black becomes white and white - black, good bad and vice versa, has started a new game, much more terrible than the old ones.
So was a new bridegroom appear as a sort of a singer of freedom, love and human rights to the poor princess, who sits in a locked mansion.
And deceived and withdrew from the tower, by false words, magical potion and the lewd spectacles.
Fill up with bright cloths, destroy the tower, ruin, rapes, shame...
And will become he pimp, making for a song to sell her body and soul.
The driver hooted and howled that it was time to go.
Ignatius was still standing at the crossroads of the mysterious epoch of their country, as if belted asphalt ring running time.
And thinking that once rumbled along this road wagons and carts. Troika galloping brand cars changed, rushing to eternity...
Instead of asphalt there was once a loose clay, then a paving...
However, what would it have been, and everything resumed its normal course�
But Russia is not looking for this ever-changing stream rushing past, she waits. Silent and waits.
Mad is his country, waiting for the Bridegroom.
Impoverished, deceived, abused, but again and again looking at a gray, dank and sooty sky in anticipation of a miracle.
When those who endured until the end will see a blue star rising in the east through the bloody web of the apocalypse.
And magical charms will disappear in an unseen blueness of the sky...
And the fraudulently-real image of the Fallen 'this age' will collapse, the ring of time will be torn.
'And I saw a great white throne and him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was no place for them'.
'And God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no, no sickness will not be around things have passed away'.
(Revelation 21)