He was the most good-natured creature in all the sub-lunar world, a world of which, incidentally, he knew nothing; yet it seems to me that in this old man’s very ignorance lay the foundation of his boundless love of humanity.

But in addition to these, as it were, aristocratic friendships with the leaders of the hermitages, I also had democratic relations with the monastic plebeians. I was very attached to the novices, that strange class of men in which, as a rule, two passions – laziness and vanity – predominate. In them, however, one sometimes encounters a store of cheerful unconcern and an authentically Russian indifference to the vicissitudes of their own fortunes.

‘So did you feel a calling to enter a monastery?’ you might ask one of them.

‘No,’ he would reply. ‘There was no calling, I just went.’

‘And will you take holy orders?’

‘Certainly.’

Leaving the monastery is always something that seems to the novice quite impossible, even though he knows that no one will prevent him from doing so. As a child I was very fond of these men – they were cheerful, waggish, courageous and good-naturedly hypocritical. As long as a novice is merely a novice – or ‘sluggard’ – no one pays any attention to him, and consequently no one knows what sort of a person he is. But from the time that the novice dons his surplice and hood, there is a sudden alteration in both his character and his relation to those who are close to him. While he is a novice, he is an uncommonly sociable creature. What Homeric fistfights I remember in the monastery bakehouses! What daring songs were sung in an undertone on the hermitage walls, when five or six handsome novices were slowly walking along them and looking intently down across the river, on whose opposite bank the resonant, enticing voices of women were singing another song – one in which there sounded the winged calls of ‘hurl yourselves, throw yourselves, into the green oak groves’. And I remember how the sluggards would hesitate when they heard these songs, and then, unable to restrain themselves, would rush off into the green oak groves. Oh, I remember all that so well! I have not forgotten one single lesson I learned: neither the singing of the cantatas which were composed on the most unusual of subjects, nor the gymnastics we did, not entirely facilitated by the high monastery walls, nor the acquisition of the ability to keep silent and to laugh while maintaining a serious expression on one’s face. But most of all I loved the fishing in the monastery lake. My friends the novices also regarded an outing on the lake as something of a holiday. Within the framework of their monotonous lives, fishing was the sole occupation in the exercise of which they could let go for a while and try out the strength of their youthful muscles. And indeed, there was much in these fishing trips that was poetic. From the monastery to the lake it was a distance of some eight or ten versts, which had to be traversed on foot through a very dense deciduous forest. We generally used to set off on these fishing excursions before vespers. In the cart, which was drawn by a very fat old monastery horse, lay a sweep-net, several buckets, a barrel for the fish, and some hooks; no one sat in the cart, however. The reins would be tied to the cart’s front edge, and if the horse wandered off the straight the novice who acted as driver would simply step up and give them a tug. But, in practice, the horse scarcely ever wandered off the road, and it would indeed have been impossible for him to do so, since there was only one road leading from the monastery through the woods to the lake, and it was such a winding one that the horse would never have felt like dragging the wheels out of the deep ruts. Sent along to keep an eye on us was the Elder Ignatius, a deaf and weak-sighted old monk who had once received the Emperor Alexander I in his cell and who could never remember that Alexander I was no longer on the throne. Father Ignatius travelled in a tiny cart of his own, which was drawn by another fat horse that he drove himself. As for myself, I always had the privilege of being allowed to ride in Father Ignatius’s cart, since my grandmother had given special instructions that this should be so, and Father Ignatius even let me drive the fat horse which was harnessed between the abbreviated shafts of his cart; but I generally preferred to walk with the novices, who never kept to the road. Very gradually, we would enter the woods, and would start by singing: ‘As a young monk was walking along, he met Jesus Christ a-coming his way,’ and then someone would break into another song, and so we would sing them, one after the other. Dear, careless time! A blessing on you, and a blessing on you who gave me these memories. Only towards nightfall did we approach the lake. There on the shore stood a small cabin in which two old men who were cassocked novices lived: Father Sergius and Father Vavila. They were both ‘bookless’, that is to say, they could neither read nor write, and were executing a vow of ‘tutelary obedience’ with regard to the wardenship of the monastery lake. Father Sergius was an uncommonly skilful handicraftsman. I still have in my possession a beautiful spoon and an ornamental crucifix, both of his manufacture.