Russia's Don Quixote

Extract

‘Who are you? Without waiting for a reply people answer for themselves. All Communists and atheists regard me as a militant reactionary. All reactionaries regard me as a Communist and almost an atheist. All churchmen think I am a sectarian; all sectarians regard me as a churchman. Every ignoramus thinks me an intellectual; every intellectual regards me as a social reject and member of the Proletariat. Every Russian thinks me a Jew; every Jew regards me as a Russian’ (1966).

‘One (fellow prison) inmate called me Don Quixote ... I am a Don Quixote because he is the prototype of all revolutionaries and friends of truth. Dostoievsky wrote: “If God in the Last Judgment calls on Humanity to render account of what good it has done, it could hand him with tears Cervantes’ Don Quixote”’ (1970).

‘Only people who do nothing make no mistakes’ (1966).

These are the words of Anatol Levitin, pen-name Krasnov, spoken with typical irony. He has been the Don Quixote of Russian church life, tilting at windmills, putting tactless pen to paper on every burning issue. Bom in Baku in 1915, his father a Jew baptised into Christianity, he became a school teacher. He was ordained deacon in the small ‘Living Church’ which co-operated with the regime, until in 1944 he joined the Patriarchal Church as a layman. Like thousands of others, he spent the years 1949-56 unjustly in a labour camp. After his release he wrote regularly for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and was co-author of a history of the Living Church, but because of his criticisms he lost his teaching job in 1966 and found work as a church caretaker.