SEVAST, NIKON

(17th century)--It is believed at one time Satan lived under this name in the Ovchar gorge on the Morava River, in the Balkans. He was unusually gentle, addressed all men by his own name: Sevast, and worked as the head calligrapher at the St. Nicholas Monastery. Where ever he sat, however, he left an imprint of two faces, and in the place of a tail he had a nose. He claimed that in his previous life he had been the devil in the Jewish hell and had served Belial and Gebhurah, had buried golems in the attics of synagogues, and one autumn, when the birds had poisonous droppings that seared the leaves and grass they soiled, had hired a man to kill him. This enabled him to cross over from the Jewish hell to the Christian hell, and now in this life he served Lucifer.

According to other stories, he never did die, but a dog lick a bit of his blood, then entered the grave of some Turk, grabbed him by the ears, tore off his skin, and put it on. That is why goat's eyes peered out from behind his handsome Turkish eyes. He ran from flint, ate his supper after everyone else, and stole a rock of salt every year. The story goes he would ride the monastery and village horses in the night; indeed, sunrise would find the animals coated with foam and dust, their manes braided. They say he did this to cool off his heart, because his heart had been cooked in boiling wine. Therefore, into the horses' manes they inserted the seal of Solomon, from which he fled, and this protected the horses from him and his boots, which always bore the tooth-marks of dogs.

He dressed lavishly and painted very good frescoes--a talent, it is said, that was given the archangel Gabriel. On his frescoes in the churches of the Ovchar gorge are inscriptions that, if read in a certain order from painting to painting and monastery to monastery, form a message. It can be assembled as long as the paintings themselves exist. Nikon left this message fro himself, for when, in three hundred years' time, he would return from the dead to be among the living; demons, he would say, recall nothing of their former lives, and this, therefore, was how they must get around it. When he first started painting he was not especially successful as an artist. He worked with his left hand; his paintings were fairly good, but they simply could not be remembered; it was as if they would vanish off the wall as soon as no one was looking at them. One morning a dejected Sevast sat in front of his paints and felt a different kind of stillness float into and shatter his own silence. Someone else was present, and keeping silent, but not in Nikon's language. Then Nikon began praying to the archangel Gabriel to grant him the grace of colors. Throughout the ravine at this time, in the monasteries of St. John, the Annunciation, St. Nicholas, and the Visitation of the Virgin, there were always plenty of young monks--icon and fresco painters--who decorated the walls and, in some silent, collective prayer, competed to see who would best paint the saint. Hence, it never occurred to anyone that Nikon Sevast's prayer might be answered. But that is precisely what happened.

In August 1670, just before the day of the seven saintly martyrs of Ephesus, when one starts eating venison, Nikon Sevast said: One of the sure paths to the real future (because there is also a false future) is to proceed in the direction of your fear."

And so he went hunting. He took with him the monk Theoctist Nikolsky, who assisted him in copying the books at the monastery. It is probably thanks to that monk's notes that this hunt made its way into the story. Sevast, the story goes, hoisted a greyhound behind him onto the saddle, and they set out to hunt deer. All of a sudden the greyhound leapt from the horse's croup to attack; though Theoctist saw no dear in front of them, the gray hound barked as if it were actually chasing the prey, and slowly something invisible but heavy moved towards the hunters. Twigs could be heard snapping in the underbrush. Sevast behaved like the dog. He stood poised as if there were a deer in front of him; a deer's bellow could, in fact, be heard from very nearby, and from this Theoctist concluded that the archangel Gabriel had finally appeared before Nikon in the form of a dear, a deer that was the soul of Nikon Sevast. In other words, the archangel brought Nikon a soul as a gift. And so, Nikon hunted and caught his own soul that morning, and with it struck up a conversation.

"Depths call unto depths in the expanse of you voice; help me with colors to offer your praise!" Sevast cried out to the archangel, or to the deer, or to his own soul, or whatever it was. "I want to paint the night between Saturday and Sunday, and on it so fine and icon of you that even in other places, without seeing it, people will pray to you!"

Finally, the archangel Gabriel spoke, and said, "Preobidev potasta se ozlobiti . . . . "

The monk realized that the angel was omitting the nouns from his speech, because nouns are for God and verbs are for man.

The icon painter then replied, "How will I work with my right hand when I am left-handed?"

But the deer had vanished, and the monk asked Nikon, "What was that?"

The latter answered perfectly calmly, "Nothing special, all this is but temporary; I am merely passing through here on my way to Constantinople . . . ." But then he added, "Move a man from his resting place, and in that resting place are worms, insects as translucent as precious stones and mildew. . . ."

Joy seized him like an illness; he transferred his brush from his left hand to his right and began to paint. Colors flowed from him like milk, and he barely had time to spread them on. Suddenly he knew everything: how to mix India ink with musk, that yellow is the fastest color and black is the slowest, taking the longest to dry and show its true face. His best colors were "St. John's white" and "dragon's blood", and he coated his pictures not with lacquer but a small brush dipped in vinegar to give them the color of radiant air. He painted by feeding and healing everything around him with colors--door-posts and mirrors, beehives and pumpkins, gold coins and peasant shoes. On his horse's hoofs he painted the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and on his own fingernails God's Ten Commandments; on the well bucket he painted Mary of Egypt; on the shutters he painted both Eves, the first Eve (Lilith) and the second Eve (Adam's). He painted on gnawed bones, on his own teeth and other's, on pockets turned inside out, on caps and on ceilings. He painted the twelve apostles on live turtles and let them crawl off into the woods. The nights were as quiet as rooms; he would chose the one he wanted, enter, place a lamp behind the board, and paint a diptych. On it he portrayed the archangels Gabriel and Michael passing the soul of a sinner woman to each other through the night from one day to the next, with Michael standing on Tuesday and Gabriel on Wednesday They walked on the written names of the days, and the pointed letters made blood gush from the archangels' feet. Nikon Sevast's paintings were nicer in winter in the reflected brightness of the white snow, than in the summer under the sun. They had then a kind of bitterness about them, as if they had been painted during an eclipse, and the smiles on the faces were extinguished in April and lost until the first snow. Then he would sit down to paint again, and only occasionally, with his elbow, would shove his enormous penis between his legs so it would not bother him while he worked.

People remembered his new paintings all their lives; monks from the ravine and icon painters from its monasteries flocked to the St. Nicholas Monastery, as if called by a whistle, to see Nikon's colors. Monasteries began to vie with one another for him, each of his icons brought in as much money as a vineyard, and he painted faster than the gorse could run. A record of how Nikon the Icon painter worked has been preserved in a book of eight-voice canticles, and this record from 1674 reads:

"Two years ago, on the Day of St. Andre Statilat, when we begin to eat partridge, I was sitting in my cell at the St. Nicholas monastery," notes the unknown monk in the record, "reading the book of the new-Jerusalem poems from Kiev, and in the adjacent room three monks and a dog were eating: the two idior-rhythmic monks had already finished their dinner, and the painter Sevast Nikon was eating, as was his custom, later. Throughout he silence of the poems I was reading, I could tell that Nikon was chewing beef tongue that had been beaten against the plum tree outside to make it tender. When Nikon finished his meal, he sat down to paint, and, watching him prepare his colors, I asked him what he was doing.

" 'It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.'

"He took blue and red and placed them next to each other, painting the eyes of an angel. And I saw the angel's eyes turn violet.

" I work with something like a dictionary of colors,' Nikon added, 'and from it the observer composes sentences and books, in other words, images. You could do the same with writing. Why shouldn't someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole?'

"Nikon Sevast the turned to the window, pointed with his brush to the field outside, and said:

" 'Do you see that furrow? It is not a plow that made it. That furrow was made by the barking of a dog . . . .'

"Then he thought for a moment and said to himself, 'If I paint this way with my right hand when I am left handed, just imagine how I would paint with my left hand!' And he transferred the brush from his right hand to his left . . . .

'Word of this immediately speared through all the monasteries, and everyone was horrified, convinced that Nikon Sevast had gone back to Satan and would be punished. Indeed, his ears again became as pointed as knives, and it was said he could slice a piece of bread with his ear. But his talent remained the same; he painted just as well with his left hand as his right, and nothing changed; the archangel's anathema had not been carried out. One morning Nikon Sevast awaited the prior from the Monastery of the Annunciation, who was coming to arrange for Nikon to paint some altar doors. But non one arrived from the Monastery of the Annunciation that day or the following day. Then Sevast seemed to remember something, read his fifth 'Our Father', which is recited to put the souls of suicides at peace, and set out for the monastery himself. There he found the prior in front of the church, and in keeping with his custom of calling others by his own name, inquired:

" 'Sevast, Sevast, what is it?' Without a word the old man led him into the cell and showed him an icon painter, as young as hunger can be, who was already painting the door. Nikon stared at the paintings, shocked. The young man flapped his eyebrows like wings and painted just as well as Nikon. He was no better and no worse than he. And then Nikon understood the kind of punishment being meted out to him. It was also rumored that another young man as good as Nikon was working in the church at Prnjavor, and this proved to be true. Soon, other mural and icon painters, some not so young, began to paint better and better; it was as if they had untied themselves from a pier and were setting for the wide-open seas, and they began to catch up with Nikon Sevast, whom, until then, they had regarded as an unattainable ideal. And so the walls of all the monasteries in the ravine were illuminated and restored, and Nikon went back to the beginning, from his left to his right. Unable to bear it he said:

" 'What is the point of my being an icon painter like the rest? Now everyone can paint like me. . . .'

"He discarded his brushes forever and never painted another picture. Not even on an egg. He wept all the colors from his eyes into the monastery mortar and departed from St. Nicholas Monastery with his assistant, Theoctist, leaving behind him the print of a fifth hoof.

"Upon leaving, he said 'I know a great lord in Constantinople whose pigtail is as thick as a horse's tail and will employ us as scribes.'

"And he mentioned his name. The name was Kyr Avram Brankovich."