Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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To God’s throne on high.

Two roads are there to take,

Beware which choice you make!

One leads to heaven fair,

One to old Satan’s lair!

“Ivan! come to supper!” they called from the other side of the raft. A fire was burning there on stones which had been put together in imitation of a stove, and over it hung on three sticks an iron kettle boiling fish-soup. Ivan did not heed, but went on singing. The group which sat talking round the fire comprised, beside the boatmen and bourlaks, the aged schismatic Cornelius, who preached of self-burning and was now on his way to the Kershen forests beyond the Volga; his disciple, a runaway Moscow scholar named Tichon Zapólsky; Alexis Furlong, a gunner, deserter from Astrachan; the caulker Ivan Boudlóff, a sailor under the Admiralty, also a deserter; the clerk Larion Dokoukin, an old woman Vitalia belonging to the “runners,” who to quote her own words “led the life of a bird,” always on the move, soaring everywhere, staying nowhere; her companion Kilikeya the Barefooted, an epileptic woman, who had a “satanic suggestion” in her abdomen; and many other “people in hiding” who had fled to save themselves from the heavy taxation, soldiering, the cat-o’-nine tails, forced labour, tearing of nostrils, beard shaving, crossing with two fingers, or some of the other terrors of Antichrist.