Other biblical and liturgical terms in the novel are used by Soviet people, who perhaps did not even know where they originated, since it was very difficult to find a copy of the New Testament in a modern Russian translation, and the Russian Orthodox Church often had to operate underground from the 1950s to the 1970s, after Khrushchev’s virulent anti-religious campaign (1958-1964). The dinner lady Auntie Galya and her kitchen helpers, for example, compare the child actors to ‘birds of the air’ — a veiled reference to the biblical verse:
Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
Matthew 6. 26–27 (New King James Bible
