Vladimir Golstein
In the late XIX century, an American named George Kennan (distant relative of the famous George Kennan of the containment doctrine), traveled through Siberia.
The dude loved Russia and used every opportunity (work for telegraph company and journalism) to travel through Russia’s most exotic parts. He collected some of his observations into a two volume book, Siberia and the Exile System (1891), highly detailed, dispassionate, and observant description of the life of tsarist’ prisoners.
According to his statistics (and he is obsessed with it), life of Siberia prisoners were even more brutish and short than that of American ones in the most god-forsaken places in this country. In any case, below, is his very moving description of the beggar song, that the convicts sing as they are being transported from one dreary place to another.
Kennan might be critical, but one really hears in his words endless amount of sympathy and compassion. Where are such Americans now?
“As the party, wet, tired, and hungry, approaches one of the little log villages that lie along its route, the starosta, or chief of the artel, asks the convoy officer to allow them to sing the “begging song” as they pass through the settlement. The desired permission is granted…the convicts all remove their gray caps ; and entering the village with a slow, dragging step, as if they hardly had strength enough to crawl along, they begin their mournful appeal for pity. I shall never forget the emotions roused in me by this song when I heard it for the first time. We were sitting, one cold, raw, autumnal day, in a dirty post-station on the great Siberian road, waiting for horses. Suddenly my attention was attracted by a peculiar, low-pitched, quavering sound which came to us from a distance, and which, although made apparently by human voices, did not resemble anything that I had ever before heard. It was not singing, nor chanting, nor wailing for the dead, but a strange blending of all three. It suggested vaguely the confused and commingled sobs, moans, and entreaties of human beings who were being subjected to torture, but whose sufferings were not acute enough to seek expression in shrieks or high-pitched cries. As the sound came nearer we went out into the street in front of the station-house and saw approaching a chained party of about a hundred bare-headed convicts, who, surrounded by a cordon of soldiers, were marching slowly through the settlement, singing the “exiles’ begging song.”
No attempt was made by the singers to pitch their voices in harmony, or to pronounce the words in unison; there were no pauses or rests at the ends of the lines; and I could not make out any distinctly marked rhythm. The singers seemed to be constantly breaking in upon one another with slightly modulated variations of the same slow, melancholy air, and the effect produced was that of a rude fugue, or of a funeral chant, so arranged as to be sung like a round or catch by a hundred male voices, each independent of the others in time and melody, but all following a certain scheme of vocalization, and taking up by turns the same dreary, wailing theme.
The words were as follows: Have pity on us, O our fathers ! Don’t forget the unwilling travelers, Don’t forget the long-imprisoned. Feed us, O our fathers — help us ! Feed and help the poor and needy ! Have compassion, O our fathers ! Have compassion, O our mothers ! For the sake of Christ, have mercy On the prisoners — the shut-up ones ! Behind walls of stone and gratings, Behind oaken doors and padlocks, Behind bars and locks of iron, We are held in close confinement. We have parted from our fathers, From our mothers; We from all our kin have parted, We are prisoners; Pity us, O our fathers !”
If you can imagine these words, half sung, half chanted, slowly, in broken time and on a low key, by a hundred voices, to an accompaniment made by the jingling and clashing of chains, you will have a faint idea of the miloserdnaya, or exiles’ begging song. Rude, artless, and inharmonious as the appeal for pity was, I had never in my life heard anything so mournful and depressing. It seemed to be the half-articulate expression of all the grief, the misery, and the despair that had been felt by generations of human beings in the etapes, the forwarding prisons, and the mines.
As the party marched slowly along the muddy street between the lines of gray log houses, children and peasant women appeared at the doors with their hands full of bread, meat, eggs, or other articles of food, which they put into the caps or bags of the three or four shaven-headed convicts who acted as alms-collectors.
The jingling of chains and the wailing voices of the exiles grew gradually fainter and fainter as the party passed up the street, and when the sounds finally died away in the distance, and we turned to reenter the post-station, I felt a strange sense of dejection, as if the day had suddenly grown colder, darker, and more dreary, and the cares and sorrows of life more burdensome and oppressive.”
Alexander Palladin
