Andrey Merzlikin:

I take the chance to step inside the bell… and take in every moment to gladden my heart.

Andrey Merzlikin:

 I take the chance to step inside the bell… and take in every moment to gladden my heart.

— I am one of those lucky people. Enthusiasts know the tradition that during Easter week anyone who wishes has a unique chance to climb the bell tower and ring the bells. Someone corrected me recently: I always used to say “beat the bells”, but it turns out the right word is “ring the bells”.

— And you have rung the bells…

— I had the chance both to learn and, let’s say, to play pranks during Easter week — you just start “belling away” as your heart desires. Once I happened to be in the Holy Land during Easter week, and the monks let me climb up.  It turns out they have this tradition too, which really surprised me; I had thought it was something of our own Russian Orthodox culture. It was such a strange, poignant and joyful, childlike, emotional state: you climb up the bell tower, and all around you is the Mediterranean Sea, and there in the abode of the Most Holy Mother of God you can ring the bells and recreate  joy. Because joy is the sign of a healthy person, and bells illustrate and even create exactly that childlike, heartfelt state of joy. That joy is what we all lack.
— You rejoice…
— It’s not for nothing they say that when bells ring there are vibrations at an ultrasonic level; a cleansing happens, a separation, like filtering. That’s why there is even a human tradition of standing inside a bell, especially a big one. And  when the clapper strikes the heavy bronze,  you hear the peal pierce your whole body,  you feel the sound running through you. You don’t sing at that moment, you say nothing, you simply  tune in to the vibration of this huge, great mass of bronze. It passes right through you and is said to have healing properties.
— Do you believe in healing by bell ringing?
— I trust it, but I’m not one of those who try to preach it to other people. Whenever there is a chance to stand inside a bell, I take that chance and stand there like a child, simply taking in every sound, every vibration and every moment to gladden my heart.
I grew up on Soviet-era films, and one of them is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, which certainly shaped my worldview. When we all watched the novella in which the young Nikolai Burlyaev casts the bell, I remember that first emotion when it turns out he didn’t know the recipe for casting it. And it formed my worldview for life: that daring creative impulse of ours, when you by and large don’t know how poems are written, how films are shot, how plays are staged, how life itself is created — but you take that first daring step with the air of someone who knows, with that confidence; the main thing is that no one realizes you’re bluffing…
But how important it is to take that step. You could confess and say you don’t remember, that your father has gone and taken with him, as in that ballad, the famous secret of the heather ale. But this boy boldly decided to say that he knows. A little boy, and behind him follow grown men, a whole host of them, who trust this lad.
— What tune did you want to play when you rang the bells?
— To play Kamarinskaya — that’s what always comes to mind first. During Easter week, when you’re playing pranks,  you just try to create a kind of cacophony, to convey an emotional, heartfelt, joyful state.
But you also realize the whole neighborhood is listening and will ask what all that racket is about. So you always want to ask the bell ringer to teach you real chords, and you try to repeat as closely as you can what the bell ringer teaches you.
Interview by Kira Magid