My Life and Thoughts

Caroline Kennedy tried her hardest, but she was not able to suppress the story of the Russian bells, which appears in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, on newsstands today.   There is also a podcast on the New Yorker website where you can listen not only to the bells themselves, but also to me trying to remember some facts about bells, which you could probably find faster using Google.  Actually the nice thing about a phone interview, I learned, is that you can pause mid-answer to look things up on Wikipedia, and later the pause/ typing sounds will be edited out.

For some reason, they didn’t link to any images of the destruction of bells in Soviet times, so I will do it here instead.  There are some great images here, and especially here. 

The article also mentions pictures of the mallet-wielding proletariat; and Soviet youth sitting in bells with cigarettes dangling from their mouths (this photograph was taken outside the Cathedral of the Assumption in Yaroslavl (1929), and reproduced in a terrific article by Richard Hernandez):

In further supplementary material, I will also share with you one editorial outtake, from the very beginning of the article, where Father Roman is first introduced:

“This is Father Roman,” Eck announced, and, turning, I beheld a towering figure, well over six feet tall, with enormous hands and a long beard, wearing a floor-length black habit and a skufya, the black pointed cap of a Russian Orthodox monk. “And this,” she continued, gesturing toward an easel, “is a picture of Father Roman.” A large photograph showed the gray-eyed monk in a belfry, beard blowing in the wind, against a leaden sky crossed by the ropes of Russian church bells.

It was startling to come so suddenly upon an Orthodox monk of such imposing and romantic appearance, accompanied by such a dramatic photographic representation, and somehow the first words that escaped me in Russian were: “Kakoi krasavets!” (“What a good-looking guy!”). Father Roman turned pink, but managed a small, constrained smile.

My editor thought I shouldn’t be seen "losing control" at such an early point in the piece, so he cut those last two sentences.  Nonetheless, here is a picture of Father Roman.

I would like to specially thank Father Roman for all his help with the research and fact-checking—he was really incredibly kind.  I would also like to specially thank my former classmate Luis Campos, who knows everything there is to know about those bells, and who was incredibly generous with his time and research.  Thanks also to Diana Eck, Benjamin Rapoport, Peter Riley, Marina Anisimova, Konstantin Mishurovsky, and all the Harvard students and alumni who were nice enough to talk to me last June. 

I leave you with a link to the Lowell House virtual bell tower, where you can ring the bells for yourself and entertain your neighbors. 

Tags: beards, music, publications, Russia

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.