The later Romanov tsars revealed both uneasy consciences and bad
taste by filling the ancient monasteries with votive baroc[ue_bell towers. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the older bell towers had been largely displaced, restrictions placed onThe excessive ringing of bells, and theh^special positionTn worship services challenged_by_the intrusion of ans and other instruments into Russian liturgical music. Yet the echo of bells lingered on. They ring again majestically at the end of the coronation scene in Musorgsky's Boris Godunov; and the theological hint of redemption offered by their "ringing through" (perezvon) on the eve of festive days is recaptured by the little barking dog of that name that leads Alyosha's youthful comrades to reconciliation at the end of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
In the world of politics, too, the bell called up memories. Bells had been used in some ot the proud, Westward-looking cities of medieval Russia to summonthe popular assembly (veche). Ihe final silencing of the asselribTy"" bell of Novgorod ? 1478 ended the tradition of relative freedom from
imperial authority and partial popuTaT7u1e~wKIcTi~until then Novgorod had shared with many commercial cities of the West. The ideal of non-despotic, representative government impelled the early-hineteenth-century reformer to
take myself in imagination back to Novgorod. I hear the ringing bell of the popular assembly … I throw the chains off my feet, and to the "Who goes there?" of the guard, I proudly reply: "a free citizen of Nov-
s°rod!"9'4
and the romantic poet to
sound forth like the bell in the assembly tower in the days of the people's celebrations and misfortunes.94
When, a few years later, lyricism turned to anguish^_Gogol gave_a new, more mysterious quality to the image in one of the most famous passages in all Russian literature. Likening Russia to a speeding troika (carriage with three horses) near_fj}ejend of Dead Souls, he"asks its destination. But "there was no answer save the^eUpouring forth rnarvellous sound."
A prophetic answer came a few years later in the prefatory poem to the first issue of Russia's first illegal revolutionary journal-appropriately called Kolokol (The Bell). The long-silent social conscience of Russia will henceforth-promised the editor, Alexander Herzen-sound out like a bell
swinging back and forth with a tone which shall not cease to reverberate until … a joyful, orderly, and quietly heroic bell begins to ring in every man.1*5
but Herzen's summoning bell was soon drowned out by the shrill sounds of the Nabat: the special alarm bell traditionally used in times of fire or attack and the name of the first Russian periodical urging the formation of a Jacobin recolutionary elite.96 Tkachev, the editor of Nabat, was vindicated by the eventual victory of Lenin's professional revolutionaries. BujLunder {Bolshevismj_a.il} bells fell silent-their function to some extenttak^_up_by__ the hypnotic sounding of machine^1_whicluamiQuji«d_-^e_coming of an earthly rather than a heavenly paradise.
The enduring Russian fascination with cannon was evidenced in Ivan IV's storied stonrmT^~qf^Kazajg^ui"i552"; the""shooting ????????"?????? by a Moscow mob in 1606 of the remains of the False Dmitry, the only foreigner ever to reign in the Kremlin; the determination of Chaikovsky to score "real cannon fire into his "oVSrfure ???????????????? the defeat of NapgleojijirTffia; and in the iaterlsare' use~of a hundred cannon to announce their annointment during a coronation.97 Stalin was neurotically preoccupied with massed artilTeTyTormafiohs throughout the Second World War; and his military pronouncements conferred only on the artillery the adjective grozny ("terrible" or "dread") traditionally applied to Ivan IV,,?JL^ ~5ub sequent Soviet success with rockets can be seerTaTan extension of this long-time interest. Tshere seems a kind of historic justice to the~Interde-p"endence in the late 1950's between the dazzling effects of cosmic cannoneering and the renewed promises of a classless millennium.
The Communist world that had come into being by then corresponded less to the prophecies of Karl Marx than to those of an almost unknown Russian contemporary, Nicholas Il'in.99 While the former spent his life as an uprootedJnteDectual in Berlin, Paris, and London, the latter spSurhis~as'"a" patriotic artillery officer lffRussian central AsiaCWTiel:elisTn7former iookecT to the rational emergence of a new, basically Western European proletariat under German leadership, the latter looked to the messianic arrival of a new Eurasian religiou^__ciyjhrationunder Russian tutelage. At the very time Marx was writing his Communist Manifesto for German revolutionaries refuged in France and Belgium, Il'in was proclaiming his Tidings of Zion to Russian sectarians in Siberia. U'in's strange teachings reflect the childlike love of cannon, the primitive ethical dualism, and the suppressed fear of Europe, which were all present in Russian thinking. His followers marched to such hymns as "The Bomb of the Divine Artillery"; divided the world into men of Jehovah and of Satan (Iegovisty i Satanisty), those sitting at the right and left hand of God (desnye i oshuinye); and taught that a new empire of complete brotherhood and untold wealth would be formed by the followers of Jehovah along a vast railroad stretching from the Middle East through Russia to south China.
In a similar, but even more visionary vein, Nicholas Fedorov, an. ascetic "and self-effacing librarian in late nineteenth-century Moscow, propKesiedlHat a new fusion of science and faith would lead even to the physical resuscitation of dead ancestors. Russia was to give birth in concert with China to a new Eurasian civilization, which was to use artillery to regulate totally the climate and surrounding atmosphere of this world, and-thrust its citizens, into the stratosphere to colonize others. His vision of cosmic revolution fascinated both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and influenced a number of Promethean dreamers in the earliest Soviet planning agencies.100 His most inspired followers fled, however, from Bolshevik Russia to Harbin, Manchuria, to form a quasi-religious commune, which was in turn engulfed when the wave of Leninist, political revolution spread from their native to their adopted land.
Russian historyJsfulIof_sjachprophetic anticipations, just as it is of
reappearingsyjiMsangMixa^axe~oT
cannon has often buried itself into the consciousness, ifnot the conscience, of the executioaex. That which is purged from the memory lives on in the subconscious; that which is expunged from written records survives in oral folkJore,Jrideed, one finds in modern Russian jhistory much j)f__the_ same__ recu^ejic^ofjjasic themes that one finds in the unrefined early traditions of bell ringing and popular singing.
It may be, of course, that these echoes from childhood no longer reverberate in the adult Russia of today. Even if real, these sounds may be as enigmatic as the ringing of Gogol's troika; or ^erhapsonly a dying echo: the perezvon thatjpmains misleadingly audible after the bell has already fallen silent. To determine how much of Old Russian culture may have survived, one must leave aside these recurring symbols from the remote past and turn to the historical recol:d7wrntch-begTnriirth€"fourteenth IJentury to provide a rich if bewildering flow of accomplishment that extends without interruption to the, present Having looked at the heritage, environment, and early artifacts of Russian culture, one must now turn to the rise of Muscovy and its dramatic confrontation with a Western world in the throes of the Renaissance and Reformation.
The Early Fourteenth to the Early Seventeenth Century
The rise of a distinctive civilization under the leadership of Moscow from the establishment of its metropolitan seat in 1326 to the achievement of military hegemony and the first assumption of imperial titles during the reign of Ivan III, "the Great" (1462-1505). Monastic leadership in the colonization of the Russian north (particularly in the century between the founding by St. Sergius of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in 1337 and the founding of the Solovetsk Monastery on the White Sea in 1436), and in the creation of a sense of national unity and destiny. Increased militance and xenophobia in the face of attacks by knightly orders from the West, continuing conflict with the Mongols, and the Byzantine collapse of 1453. The growth of prophetic passion as an intensification of the historical bias of Russian theolo
gy: the fools in Christ, Moscow as the "third Rome."
The complex, traumatic confrontation of a powerful but primitive Muscovy with a Western Europe in the throes of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The destruction of the rationalistic and republican traditions of cosmopolitan Novgorod; the victory of the Moscow-oriented hierarchy over the Westward-looking heretics. The importance of Catholic ideas in the formation of the authoritarian "Josephite" ideology of the sixteenth century adopted by the Muscovite Tsars even while denouncing "the Latins." The growing military and technological dependence-under Ivan IV, "the Terrible" (1533-84), Boris Godunov (1598-1605), and Michael Romanov (1613-45)-on the North European "Germans" despite ideological opposition to Protestantism.
The reign of Ivan IV as both the culmination and the first breaking point in the Muscovite ideal of building a prophetic, religious civilization. On the one hand, his fixation with genealogical sanctification, his attempt to monasticize all of Russian life, and the similarities of his rule with that of the kings of ancient Israel and of contemporary Spain. On the other, Ivan's breaking of the sacred ruling line (dating back to the legendary summons of Riurik to Novgorod in 862) and preparing the way for the tradition of "false pretenders," and his involvement of Russia in Western politics through his attempt to move west into the Baltic during the costly Livonian Wars of 1558-83. The coming of the Western European religious wars to Russian soil, as Lutheran Sweden and Catholic Poland begin a long, losing struggle with Muscovy for control of northeastern Europe during the Russian interregnum, or "Time of Troubles" (1604-13).
i. The Muscovite Ideology
1 he uniqueness of the new Great Russian culture that gradually emerged after the eclipse of Kiev is exemplified by the tent roof and the onion dome: two striking new shapes, which by the early sixteenth century dominated the skyline of the Russian north.
The lifting up of soaring wooden pyramids from raised octagonal churches throughout this period probably represents the adoption of wooden construction methods which pre-existed Christianity in the Great Russian north. Whatever obscure relationship the Russian tent roof may bear to Scandinavian, Caucasian, or Mongol forms, its development from primitive, horizontal log construction and its translation from wood into stone and brick in the sixteenth century was a development unique to northern Russia. The new onion dome and the pointed onion-shaped gables and arches also have anticipations if not roots in other cultures (particularly those of Islam); but the wholesale replacement of the spherical Byzantine and early Russian dome with this new elongated shape and its florid decorative use-not least atop tent roofs-is also peculiar to Muscovy.1 The supreme surviving example of the Muscovite style, the wooden Church of the Transfiguration at Kizhi, on Lake Onega, has been likened to a giant fir tree because of the massive, jagged shape produced by superimposing twenty-two onion domes on its sharp, pyramidal roof. The new vertical thrust of the tent and onion shapes is related both to the material need for snow-shedding roofs and to the spiritual intensification of the new Muscovite civilization. These gilded new shapes rising out of the woods and snow of the north seemed to represent something distinct from either Byzantium or the West.
The Byzantine cupola over a church describes the dome of heaven covering earth; the Gothic spire describes the uncontainable striving upward, thi lifting up from earth to heaven of the weight of stone. Finally, our fatherland's "onion dome" incarnates the idea of deep prayerful fervor rising towards the heavens. . . . This summit of the Russian church is like a tongue of fire crowned by a cross and reaching up to the cross. When
looking from afar in the clear sunlight at an old Russian monastery or town, it seems to be burning with a many-colored flame; and when these flames glimmer from afar amid endless snow-covered fields, they attract us to them like a distant, ethereal vision of the City of God.2
Of all the gilded spires and domes that drew Russians in from the countryside to new urban centers of civilization none were more imposing than those of Moscow and its ecclesiastic citadel, the Kremlin. Seated on the high ground at the center of Moscow, the Kremlin had, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, gathered behind its moats and walls a host of objects which seemed to offer the Orthodox some "distant, ethereal vision of the City of God." Here were the largest bells, the most splendid icons (including the Vladimir Mother of God and Rublev's greatest iconostasis), and a cluster of magnificent new churches rising over the graves of princes and saints. Highest of all stood the domes of the bell tower of Ivan the Great. Its more than fifty bells represented the most ambitious single effort to simulate "the angelic trumpets" of the world to come; and the proliferation of lesser bell towers throughout the sprawling city of ioo,ooo3 attracted to the new capital the enduring designation of "Moscow of the forty forties," or sixteen hundred belfries.
Moscow, the second great city of Russian culture, has remained the largest city of Russia and an enduring symbol for the Russian imagination. The new empire of the Eastern Slavs that slowly emerged out of the divisions and humiliations of the appanage period was known as Muscovy long before it was called Russia. Moscow was the site of the "third Rome" for apocalyptical monks in the sixteenth century, and of the "third international" for apocalyptical revolutionaries in the twentieth. The exotic beauty of the Kremlin-even though partly the work of Italians-came to symbolize the prophetic pretensions of modern Russia and its thirst for some earthly taste of the heavenly kingdom.
Of all the northern Orthodox cities to survive the initial Mongol assault, Moscow must have seemed one of the least likely candidates for future greatness. It was a relatively new wooden settlement built along a tributary of the Volga, with shabby walls not even made of oak. It lacked the cathedrals and historic links with Kiev and Byzantium, of Vladimir and Suzdal; the economic strength and Western contacts of Novgorod and Tver; and the fortified position of Smolensk. It is not even mentioned in the chronicles until the mid-twelfth century, it did not have its own permanent resident prince until the early fourteenth, and none of its original buildings are known to have survived even into the seventeenth.
The rise of the "third Rome," like that of the first, has long tantalized historians. There are almost no surviving records for the critical 140 years
between the fall of Kiev and the turning of the Tatar tide under the leadership of Moscow at Kulikovo field in 1380. Perhaps for this very reason, there is a certain fascination in weighing and balancing the factors usually cited to explain the rapid emergence of Muscovy: its favorable central location, the skill of its grand dukes, its special position as collecting agent of the Mongol tribute, and the disunity of its rivals. Yet these explanations-like those of Soviet economic determinists in more recent years-seem insufficient to account fully for the new impetus and sense of purpose that Muscovy suddenly demonstrated-in the icon workshop as well as on the battlefield.
To understand the rise of Muscovy, one must consider the religious stirrings which pre-existed and underlay its political accomplishments. Long before there was any political or economic homogeneity among the Eastern Slavs, there was a religious bond, which was tightened during the Mongol period.
The Orthodox Church brought Russia out of its dark ages, providing a sense of unity for its scattered people, higher purpose for its princes, and inspiration for its creative artists. In the course of the fourteenth century, the prevailing term for a simple Russian peasant became krest'ianin, which was apparently synonymous with "Christian" (khristianin).* The phrase "of all Rus'," which later became a key part of the tsar's title, was first invoked at the very nadir of Russian unity and power at the turn of the thirteenth century, not by any prince, but by the ranking prelate of the Russian Church, the Metropolitan of Vladimir.5 The transfer of the Metropolitan's seat from Vladimir to Moscow in 1326 was probably an even more important milestone in the emergence of Moscow to national leadership than the celebrated bestowal by the Tatars in the following year of the title "Great Prince" on Ivan Kalita, Prince of Moscow. Probably more important th
an Kalita or any of the early Muscovite Princes in establishing this leadership was Alexis, the fourteenth-century Metropolitan of Moscow, and the first Muscovite ever to occupy such a high ecclesiastical position.
Within the church the monasteries played the key role in the revival of Russian civilization, just as they had somewhat earlier in the West. Monastic revival helped to consolidate the special position of Moscow within Russia, and inspired Russians everywhere with the sense of destiny, militance, and colonizing zeal on which subsequent successes depended.
The Icon and the Axe Page 8