The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Earth is_the_jtussian "Eternal Womanhood,'^notthe…celestial image

  of it; mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian

  soil4.is„.black.12)

  Thejriver Volga also was referred to as "dear mother" in the first Russian folk.song ever recorded and "natal mother" in one of the most popular: the ballad of Stenka Razin.13

  ? The extension of Kievan civilization on to the_headwaters of thisthe.

  /-largest river in Eurasia proved the means of its salvation. The very in-hospitability of this northern region offered a measure of protection'Tforn both east and west. The Volga provided an inland waterway for'future expansion to the east and south; and its tributaries in northwestern Russia reached almost to the headwaters of other rivers leading into the Baltic,

  Black, and Arctic seas.??---

  But the movement out to the sea and onto the steppe came later in Russian history. This was essentially a period of retreat into a region where the dominant natural feature was the forest.

  i.. 1 ne ? uresi j-x.

  In speaking of the region, Russian chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depart from their usual tendency to use the name of a dominant city, referring instead to zaleskaia zemlia, "the wooded land": a pointed reminder that the virgin forest was the nursery of Great Russian ??????*?^??1????????1?????17^??1?? folklore taught "that the primeval forest had extended all the way up to heaven.15 In the formative early period, the forest represented a kind of evergreen curtain for the imagination, shielding it from the increasingly remote worlds of Byzantine and Western urbanity.

  It is probably not too much to say that the wooded plain shaped the life of Christian Muscovy as profoundly as the desert plain that of Moslem Arabia. In both areas food and friendship were often hard to find, and the Slavic like the Semitic peoples developed warm compensating traditions of hospitality. At the lowest level, peasants presented the ritual bread and salt to all arrivals; at the highest level, princes welcomed visitors with the elaborate banquets and toasts that have remained characteristic of official Russian hospitality.

  If life in the scorching desert was built around the dwelling in the oasis and its source of water, life in the frozen forest was built around the dwelling in the clearing and its source of heat. From the many words used for "dwelling place" in Kievan Russia, only izba, meaning "heated building," came into general use in Muscovy.10 Being permitted to sit on or over the -earthenware stove in a Russian dw^llmgjw^iJhe_uJtimate in peasant hos-pitaUty^heequi^aJratj^^iying a man somstinngjo drink in the desert. The hot communal bath had a semi-religious significance^ still evidenFIoday ia some RusslSn~pTiblic~,b^tn^^MnFuTm^h~^mTas and analogous in some ways to the ritual ablutions of desert religions.17

  Unlike the desert nomad, however, thejygical Muscovite was sedentary, for he was surrounded not by barren sand but ?????^??????????? forest he could extract notjmly logs for his^hut but wax for his candles, bark for his shoes and primitive records, fur for his clothing, moss for his floors, and pine boughs for his bed. For those who knew its secret hiding places, the forest could also provide meat, mushrooms, wild berries, and-as its greatest culinary prize--sweetjioney.

  Man's rival in the pursuit of honey through the forests was the mighty bear, who acquired a special place in the folklore, heraldic symbolism, and decorative wood carvings of Great Russia. Legend had it that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship, and had in revenge assumed an awesome new shape and retreated to the forest to guard it against the intrusions of his former species. The age-old northern Russian customs of training and wrestling

  with bears carried in the popular imagination certain overtones of a primeval struggle for the forest and its wealth, and of ultimately re-establishing a lost harmony among the creatures of the forest.18

  The fears and fascinations of Great Russia during these early years were Jo a large extent the universal ones of war and famine. The former was made vivid by the internecine warfare of Russian princes as well as periodic combat with Tatars and Teutons. Famine was also never far away in the north where the growing season was short and the soil thin; and where grain could not even be planted until trees were arduously uprooted and soil upturned with fragile wooden plows.

  But the forest also gave rise to special fears: of insects and rodents gnawing from below amToTfireHsweeping in from without. Though common to most societies, fear of these primitive forces was particularly intense in GreatRussia. In the iHiRfalyTanguage of "our own times, they could be said to represent the guerrilla warriors and thermonuclear weapons of an adversary bent on frustrating the peasants' efforts to combat the cold and dark with the "conventional" defenses of food, clothing, and shelter. Even when he had cleared and planted a field and built a hut, the muzhik of the north was plagued by an invisible army of insects and rodents burrowing up through the floorboards and gnawing at his crops. During the brief summer months of warmth and light, he was harassed by swarms of mosquitoes; and when he put on his crude furs and fabrics for the winter, he exposed his body to an even deadlier insect: the omnipresent typhus-bearing louse. The very process by which the body generated warmth within its clothing attracted the louse to venture forth from the clothing to feast upon its human prey; and the__yery_communal bathsjby which Russians sought to cleanse themselves provided a unique"opportunity for the louse to migrate from one garment to another.19 ????????? the ????????????? bring Russia epidemics of the black plague in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuxies_thii--were.,probably even worse thm_„tllQS£_jQlLffie_stern Europe.20 The ^e^sjinfj_wooded„hut, which provided^xudjmentary^rpJretioB against the, larger .beasts of the forest, served more as a lure to its insects and rodents. They hungrily sought entrance to his jdwdhngplace, his food supply, and-eventually-his still warmbody.

  Pagan magicianstaught that insects actually begin to eat away at men while they are still alive; and that death comes only when men cease to believe in the occult powers of the sorcerer.21 The word "underground" (podpol'e) literally means "under the floor," and suggests insects and rodents who "creep up" (podpolzaf) from beneath. The first official English ambassador in the mid-seventeenth century was advised by Russian officials

  to sleep together with his servants "lest the Rats run away with them being single."22

  "The most mischievous enemies of unprotected and primitive man are not the big carnivora," insisted a nineteenth-century student of the Russian peasantry, "but the lower forms ot Creation-the insects, the mice, rats . . . which oveFwHafnHEIm by their numbers and ^Omnipresence."23 No less than the revolutionary who wroFelhese words, conservative writers like Gogol equated the ever-increasing swarm of inspectors and officials sent out to the countryside with these ubiquitous insects and rodents. Dostoevsky was even more frightened and fascinated by man's links with the insect world from his early^Notes from the Underground to his apocalyptical images in The Possessed^ot a rat gnawing at an icon and the human community turning into an anthill. Dostoevsky fills his works with haunting references to spiders and flies,24 which are lifted to the level of the grotesque by his sole surviving imitator in the Stalin era: Leonid Leonov. From his Badgers to The Russian Forest, Leonov mixes realistic plots with such surrealist creatures as "a new sort of cockroach," a 270-year-old rat, and an unidentified "giant microbe" prowling construction sites.25

  Evenjstronger in the Jorest was^the fear of, and fascination with, fire. Ere was "the host" in the house-the source of jwarnith and light thaTfe-quired cleanliness in its presence and reverent silence when being lrj^or extinguished. In the monasteries, the lighting of fires..for cooking and baking was a religious rite that could be performe^jmly bythe sacristan brinjyfl£jaj|ame from the lamp_in the sanctuary.26 One of the words for warmth. ????'??, vyas^yriQnyjnous-githjwealth.

  Russians tended to see the heavenly ordeLjn_jwins^^if_the famous writings attributed~totrle" mysHcT5ic^sjmJfor_whom angels are "living creatures of fireTTnTrrftastt^'wit
h lightning, streams of flame . . . thrones are fire and the seraphims . . . blazing with fire."27 Russians often mention Christ's statement that "I have come to send fire on the earth" and the fact tiiat the Holy Spirit first came down TS~TnalTffifougir"'45n^uljs ^FSre."28 Wfre~nTfcTnTfch 6*Feve¥"a^Tcoln"waT^rneins"MuscovyTFwas said to have "gone on high."29 Red Square in Moscow, the site of ritual processions then as now, was popularly referred to as "the place of fire."30 The characteristic onion dome of Muscovite churches was likened to "a tongue of fire."31

  A basic metaphor for explaining the perfect combination of God and man in Christ had long been that of fire infusing itself into iron. Though essentially unchanged, this human "iron" acquires the fiery nature of the Godhead: the ability to enflame everything that touches it. A Byzantine

  X. I rw ruicsi

  definition of Christian commitment that became popular in Russia explained that "having become all fire in the soul, he transmits the inner radiance gained by him also to the body, just as physical fire transmits its effect to iron."32 Or again from Dionysius:

  Fire is in all things . . . manifesting its presence only when it can find material on which to work . . . renewing all things with its lifegiving heat . . . changeless always as it lifts that which it gathers to the skies, never held back by servile baseness. . . ,33

  Heat not light, warmth rather than enlightenment, was the way to God. At the same time, fire was a fearful force in this highly inflammable civilization: an uninvited guest whose sudden appearance came as a reminder of its fragile impermanence. The popular expression for committing arson even today is "let loose the red rooster," and the figure of a red rooster was often painted on wooden buildings to propitiate him and prevent a dreaded visitation. Leonov likens a spreading forest fire to a horde of red spiders consuming everything in its way.34

  Moscow alone was visited with some seventeen major_fires in the period from 1330 to 1453, and was"~to?? gutted by flames many mofe times between-thcn__ and the great ???"1???8?2???? recorded histories of Novgorod mention more T3ian a hundred serious fires.35 A sey^nteenth-century^yisitor^remarked that "to make a conflagration remarkable in this country there must be at least seven or eight thousand houses consumed."36 Small wonder that fire was the dominant symbol of the Last Judgment in Russian iconography7"Tfs red glow at the bottom ^f church frescoes and icons~was recognizable even from afar whenever, in their turn, the flames of the church candles were lit by the faithful.

  Perun, the god of thunder and_creator of fire, held a pre-eminent_p_lace

  in thepn^QijisJian^j^i^^bright-plumed firebird ?

  specialplace in Russian myJtok2gyJb;^i_of_Mj^m,j^

  lar Eerouoi3^r4stiawzeiL^the

  Slavic name^oflthe prophet Eli|a^whQ__sent down fire on the enemies of Isra^aniascjejoo^djpjirawn jn_a fier^-chariot. The first form oTthe drama in Russia was the "furnace show," on the Sunday before Christmas, in which the three faithful Israelites-Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego- were rescued by God from Nebuchadnezzar's fire. Although taken over from Byzantium, this drama received a new richness of staging and musical setting in Russia. Real fire was introduced in the Russian version; and, after their rescue, the three Israelites circulated through church and town to proclaim that Christ was coming to save men, just as the angel of the Lord had rescued them from the furnace.37 In the first of the critical religious

  controversies of the seventeenth century, the fundamentalists passionately and successfully defended the rite whereby flaming candles were immersed into the waters that were blessed on Epiphany to remind men that Christ came to "baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire."38 In 1618 the head of Russia's largest monastery was beaten by a mob and forced to perform a penance of a thousand prostrations a day for trying to do away with this uncanonical rite. One of the tracts written to denounce him, On the Enlightening Fire, accused him of trying to deny Russia "the tongue of fire that had descended upon the apostles."39 Fire was the weapon of the fundamentalists in the 1640's as they burned musical instruments, foreign-style paintings, and the buildings of the foreign community itself in Moscow. After the fundamentalists had been anathemized in 1667, many of these "Old Believers" sought self-immolation-often with all their family and friends in an oil-soaked wooden church-as a means of anticipating the purgative fires of the imminent Last Judgment.40

  Apocalyptical fascination with the cleansing power of flames lived on in the traditions of primitive peasant rebellion-and indeed in the subsequent tradition of ideological aristocratic revolution. The atheistic anarchist Michael Bakunin? fascinated Europe during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-9 with his prophetic insistence that "tongues of flame" would shortly appear all over Europe to bring down the old gods. After hearing Wagner conduct a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig in 1849, Bakunin rushed forward to assure him that this work deserved to be spared the imminent world conflagration. Fascinated by this man (whom he called the "chief stoker" of revolution), Wagner was haunted by the fact that the opera house did perish in flames shortly thereafter, and may well have been influenced by Bakunin in his characterization of Siegfried, his own fire music, and his over-all conception of "The Downfall of the Gods."41 When Russia produced its own musical revolution in the early twentieth century, the symbol of fire was equally central: in Scriabin's "Poem of Fire" and the spectacular fusion of music with the dance in Stravinsky and Diaghilev's "Firebird."

  Their firebird, like the two-headed imperial eagle, perished in the flames of the 1917 revolution, which the winds of war had fanned out of Lenin's seemingly insignificant Spark. Some poets of the old regime feTT whaFone oFTIierrrcalled "the attraction of the moth-soul to fiery death,"42 while one of the first and greatest to be killed by the new regime left behind a posthumous anthology called Pillar of Fire.4* During the terrorized silence that followed under Stalin, the stage production which evoked the greatest emotional response from its audience was probably Musorgsky's "popular music drama" Khovanshchina, which ends with the self-destruction of an

  Old Believers' community-using real flame on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. The image recurs in the work of Pasternak; but the guestjon_of what arose from the cultural ashes of the Stalin era belongs to the epilogue rather than the prologue of our story. Suffice ???????? stress that the sense of spiritual intimacy with natural forces already present in earlier times was intensified in the inflammable forest world of Great Russia, where fire contended with fertility; the masculine force of Peran withjhe damp mother earth for control of a world in which human beings seemed strangely insignificant.

  WBy Russians did not sink into complete fatalism and resignation during {he dark days of the thirteemlrtndTouf teehth centuries can perhaps be explained in terms of two key pairs of artifacts that stayed with them through all the fires and fighting of the period???????? and icon in the countryside, and the bell and cannon in the monastery and city. Each element in these pairings bore an intimate relationship to the other-demonstrating the close connection between worship and war, beauty and brutality, in the militant world of Muscovy. These objects were also~"important in other societies, but they acquired and retained in Russia a special symbolic S'gRlfiSSSSfi-fiyJESJS1" 1^? complex culture of modefrTlimelF. ~

  Axe and Icon

  Nothing better illustrates the combination of material struggle and spiritual exultation in Old Russia than the two objects that were traditionally hung together in a place of honor on the wafr7›Te^ry"pTjTs1frit hut?" the axe and the icon. IBe'???? ffle basic inipiemeatoi;ureat Kus,sia: the_ indispensable meaFs~ot"T^

  The icon, or religious picture, was the omnipresent reminder of 1?? religious faith which gave the beleaguered frontiersman a sense of ultimate security and highex.pmposejf the axe was_used with delicacy to plane and smooth

  the wooden surface on which these holy pictures were painted, the icon, in_

  turn, was borne~TJfflitantIy beTSre*^^

  forth into the foTSsTI-wTtn" axes for the more harsh bulmesT"6r Telling-trees

&nb
sp; or warding off assailants.

  '~Th"e~axe was as important to the muzhik of the north as a machete to

  the jungle dweller of the tropics. It was the "universal tool" with which a

  Russian could, according to Tolstoy, "both build a house and shape a

  spoon."44 "You can get through all the world with an axe" and "The axe is

  the head of all business"43 were only two of many sayings. As one of the first and best students of daily life in early Russia has explained:

  In the bleak wild forests and in the fields wherever the axe went, the scythe, plow, and whirl-bat of the bee-keeper followed; wherever axes cut into them, forests were destroyed and thinned, houses were built and repaired, and villages created within the forests. . . .4e