Four days at the Orthodox monastery in Jēkabpils

Like many others, Dostoevsky condemned me to the study of Russian. I am inclined to believe it is impossible to understand his genius without understanding his faith; none of his characters, neither the humbly loving Alyosha (The Brothers Karamazov), the tormented Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), the depraved and scheming Verkhovensky (Demons/The Possessed), the patient and suffering Myshkin (The Idiot), are devoid of some tendency or progression toward, or fluctuation around, the supremely good, or the supremely corrupt. What is the measure by which these movements occur? A good indication, outside of the books themselves, is found in a letter Dostoevsky sent to a close friend, Mme N.D. Fonvisin, in 1854;

“I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism… How dreadfully it has tormented me— this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet God gives me sometimes moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple; here it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more: if anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.”

26 years after he penned this letter, the first chapters of The Brothers Karamazov would appear in serial form in Russia, a book properly understood as a powerful defence of Orthodox Christianity against various ‘innovations’ in Western philosophy. The monk Zosima is, at least partly, an incarnation of the now canonised Saint Ambrose of Optina, who Dostoevsky lived with and sought consolation from following the death of his three year-old son Alexey.

Left: Fydor Dostoevsky on his bier (Ivan Kramskoi, 1881). Right: Optina Monastery (c 19th Century).

When Dostoevsky arrived to Optina, he was writing a book about childhood. That book would become The Brothers Karamazov, a portrait of the entirety of the human condition. What was it about Optina that prompted this metamorphosis? That question, among others, I carried to the monastery in Jēkabpils, a small city two hours from Riga, last week.

“Here was peace, here was holiness…”

I had first been in contact with the monks at Jēkabpils last year, but Riga’s bright nights had distracted me from making the trip. About a month ago, at a Muslim Wedding in Uzbekistan, I emailed them again (yes, their preferred method of contact), and received an invitation to stay.

Walking through Kena Park in Jēkabpils last Tuesday, I smelt myrrh. Myrrh, on that grey Tuesday morning, emanating from somewhere up the road. I followed the fragrance. I stopped twice; in Maxima to buy бублик, and then in some nondescript clothing store with too many undressed mannequins, to purchase some pants (I had somewhat overestimated spring temperatures in Latvia). When I entered the store three babushkas leapt up from what looked like a book club meeting, all of them staring perplexedly. I negotiated myself into some very pale and stiff jeans (to be later condemned by my fiancee), and continued on my way.

When I reached the monastery, I went through the open gate, and, passing under the golden dome of the minor chapel, I saw three monks gathered around a crane which was collecting buildings materials. They were scratching at their beards and not speaking to each other. One noticed me with my backpack and beckoned me over. He was a large man, unshaven конечно, dressed in a habit and Crocs. As we spoke about my staying at the monastery, it began to faintly rain. All of it- that abundant myrrh, the many domes of the Byzantine style Church and the low 17th century walls, the monks’ smiling eyes, the many flowers and even the groans of the mobile crane, converged on a single impression. A place not like the world. A holy place. 

I spent four days living and praying with the monks in the Orthodox monastery in Jēkabpils. I had a room looking over the Daugava, full of icons. I was fed various soups and homemade bread and cakes, and sometimes eggs or milk. I did odd jobs- moving bags of wheat to the bakery, and helping one old pilgrim, who had the habit of bursting into one’s room without warning and shouting ‘Христос Воскресе… Пора, работать !” (“Christ is risen, work!”) to move old bricks. I stood in the church for five hours each day as the monks read, very slowly, prayers in Slavonic. I was given a book and icon by a nun who has lived in the monastery for 17 years to deliver to one of her relatives in Sydney. I shared a silent coffee with a travelling priest, a young man. I was woken every morning at 5am for ‘morning toilet’. I was left alone in my room with nothing to read but the Russian translations of old Patristic texts, a tea pot, and some local candies. I did not speak much. Just before I left, an old nun took me to see the first church built on the land, the church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker (1774). Unbolting the original metal door, I wasn’t sure if it was the grey sky flooding in, or the golden icons, miraculously bright. 

I was looked after thoroughly, by those kind monks.

“The monastic way is very different…”

Saint Ambrose of Optina 

I must admit that something imperceptible, some aspect of the gentle and humorous peace which resides in the monastery, is necessarily lost in the written word. It is not without reason that in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, very little is said of the monastery itself as compared to the people living in it. Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, one suspects, understood without explicit detail the monastic vocation. For us, however, such an idea as living without possessions of any sort, without freedom of movement or worldly ‘ambition’, and with the sole object of living in ‘unceasing prayer’, is nearly inconceivable.

But it is inconceivable until one is allowed to exist within it, for a moment.

Each morning, after walking adjacent to the Daugava with the other pilgrims, watching an oblique ray across that magnificent body of water, or the gentle descent of snow (yes, still falling in May), I would be in the chapel before 6. At 6, exactly, the monks would begin to chant the prayers. Whereas in the city, the ‘lord have mercy’ (x40) is hurried through, to accomodate laypersons, there, in the monastery, it was;

“Господи, помилуй…” cough. Pause.
“Will he read forty like that?” one thinks.
“Госпо…” cough. Pause.
“Помилуй!,” one says, to oneself.

But it is the total unreasonableness of that posture— the furious thinking and the shifting on one’s feet— which eventually gives way to a hitherto unknown peace and focus, and, perhaps, a condition connected to some of the greatest literature ever penned. Dostoevsky would, after his time at Optina, say through his Zosima, “the monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom.”

I cannot claim to have arrived to that freedom, but I think, in those very slowly delivered prayers, punctuated by the odd squeak of old Crocs, and those eyes which followed flickering vigil lights, I saw people who had. We spoke to each other twice. Once when a monk caught me reading the wrong prayer, and he said ‘the service is happening, don’t read English!’ and then afterwards, when I told the monks I was leaving. Two smiled, one made the cross over me. They turned and set off towards the bakery, I towards worldly things.

For the curious, the brave, the wondering, the faithful… consider a weekend, or a day— I daren’t (yet) say a lifetime— at the Orthodox monastery in Jēkabpils

Увидимся скорo! 

Laef, currently studying Russian at Liden & Denz Riga