The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  'LATE VII

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  placed icon-painting in the eighteenth century as the

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  most vital form of the visual arts is the picture

  (Plate Vlll) of the merchant-aristocrat F. Demidov. plate viii

  Completed in 1773 by the court painter of Catiierine the Great, D. Levitsky, this painting is done full figure in the manner of the so-called "parade portraits," amidst pseudo-classical surroundings. The old obraza, or "forms," through which God was thought to have intervened in history were replaced by persony, or "persons," of importance who were thought to be making history in their own right. Demidov is pointing, not like the central figure in the "Old Testament Trinity" to God's mysterious gifts to man, but to his own eminently tangible benefactions to humanity as an "enlightened" patron of agriculture in the countryside and of botanical beau-tification in the new cities. The virtue of the painting lies in the faint note of caricature which Levitsky has injected into his portrayal of this rather vain and venal scion of a famous aristocratic family.

  PLATE VIII

  ???? under Catherine it was unclear what the relationship of the true tsar was to be toward the woman on the throne. For many of his followers, Pugachev was simply the miraculously returned figure of Peter III, the slain husband and imperial predecessor of Catherine. A few thought he should replace Catherine, but many thought he should marry her, and he himself seems to have looked on Catherine as a mother being ravished by her courtiers.84

  The fundamentally conservative nature of the belief in a true tsar may be seen from the fact that each of the major pretenders gained national support not through any positive program but through his ability to serve as the focus for a variety of forces resisting change. In each case the tsar most immediately threatened was attempting to extend central authority and cultural Westernization: Boris Godunov (the False Dmitry), Shuisky (Bolotnikov), Alexis (Stenka Razin), Peter the Great (Bulavin), and Catherine (Pugachev). The effect of the heroic rebellions was to strengthen rather than weaken the bureaucratic centralization they were opposing. Peasant animosities were in effect directed into periodic bloodbaths of local officials, who were relatively expendable for the central government, while peasant loyalty to the autocrat, the pivot and heart of the system, was intensified. Even in rebellion the peasants could not conceive of an alternative political system. They refused to believe that the reigning tsar was responsible for the evils of the time and the bureaucrats and foreign elements around him.

  As in the case of the Old Believers, the conservative peasant insur-rectionaries bear certain resemblances to other European protest movements against modernization. In social composition and messianic utopian-ism the Russian peasant rebellions resemble those of sixteenth-century Germany. In their conservative longing for a more godly ruling line, they resemble the Jacobites of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Just as the Jacobite myth lived on in agrarian Scotland and northern England long after it had failed as an insurrectionary force, so the myth of peasant rebellion lived on in the mentality of southern Russia long after the last great insurrection under Pugachev.

  Thus, although the state bureaucracy and army grew steadily and the service aristocracy gained in wealth and local authority throughout the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, many Russians continued to believe in the superiority of the small schismatic communities or to dream of a new Stenka Razin who would lead them to a tsar-deliverer.

  Less dramatic than either the schismatics or the peasant insurrection-aries was a third form of religious protest against the new world of St. Petersburg: the monastic revival within the official Church. This movement was the slowest to develop and the most restricted in terms of popular

  participation. But it was perhaps the deepest of all and the one most faithful to the culture of Old Muscovy. The central institution of that culture had always been the monasteries; and their ability to recover even in part from the crippling blows of the early eighteenth century is perhaps the surest indication of the continued importance of this "old" culture in the "new" period of Russian history.

  The possibility of any such revival must have seemed extremely remote in the early eighteenth century. The efforts of Peter and Anna to bring the Russian Church closer organizationally to the Lutheran state churches of the Baltic regions had resulted in a great weakening of the monastic estate. Whereas there had been about twenty-five thousand in monastic orders at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were less than fifteen thousand by the end of Anna's reign; and the number was to decline still further after Catherine the Great formally confiscated monastic property in 1763. The listing of 1764 showed that only 318 monasteries remained out of more than two thousand in the late seventeenth century.85

  The initial reactions of many monasteries had been to lash out in defense of their former privileges, allying themselves at times with those who advanced the claims of another "true" line of tsars. Typical was a monk of Tambov who fled his cloister convinced that the Antichrist had taken the place of the real Peter and was responsible for the murder of Peter's son. Although his prediction proved ill-founded that the end of the world would come early in 1723, he continued to gain monastic followers in the excitable Tambov region and went to Moscow at the time of Peter's death with high hopes of turning Russia back to the true path. Instead, he was arrested and executed, his followers rounded up and mutilated, and his head exhibited in the streets of Tambov by troops from one of the new guards regiments.86

  Only after the impossibility of a full return to the old ways had been clearly realized, perhaps, was the way clear for fresh approaches in Russian monasticism. Once all hope was lost of recovering their lost wealth and independence, the Russian monasteries began to return to the long-submerged tradition of the original fourteenth-century monastic pioneers and evangelists. This spiritual revival began quietly in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth, producing a gradual increase in the size of the monastic establishment87 and a deepening of its spiritual life.

  The heart of the revival was, once again, the "holy mountain" of Athos and the rediscovery of its still-vigorous traditions of patristic theology and inner spirituality. The man who brought the spirit of Mt. Athos a second time to Russia was Paissius Velichkovsky, the son of a Poltavan

  priest and a converted Jewess. Although descended from one of the greatest Ukrainian baroque poets, Paissius was repelled by the "pagan mythology" that he found in this Westernized heritage. Like Maxim the Greek in the sixteenth and Ivan Vyshensky in the seventeenth century, Paissius came to Russia from Athos in the eighteenth century with a simple message: turn back from secularism to the simple ways of the early desert fathers. Like these earlier elders, Paissius was deeply opposed to worldly learning, yet was himself a learned and articulate figure. He began a series of Russian translations of the works of the early fathers-the best and longest collection of patristic writings yet to appear in Russia-and translated the popular Greek collection of ascetic spirituality, the Philokalia.*8

  Unlike Maxim or Vyshensky, however, Paissius was the initiator of a movement within the church rather than a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. He founded a number of new cloisters in Moldavia and southern Russia, and provided them with a series of "Letters of Spiritual Direction" as guides for the purification of the monastic estate. The key to monastic life for Paissius was common obedience to the spiritual elder within a community of ascetic hermits dedicated to the practice of unceasing prayer. The spiritual life was thus seen in hesychastic terms as one of internal prayer and self-discipline; and the "rule" adopted was modeled on that of the early desert fathers. The term pustyn', or desert, increasingly replaced other designations for a monastery as the austere rule of Paissius became more widely accepted.

  Even more influential and original was Tikhon Zadonsky, an anguished seeker for a new religious calling in a new kind of world. Born and b
rought up near St. Petersburg and educated in Novgorod, Tikhon was fully exposed to the new secularizing influences of the capital and also to the new wave of German pietistic thought. Influenced perhaps by the pietistic idea of inward renewal and rededication. Tikhon moved from his high post as suffragan bishop of Novgorod, by way of the bishopric of Voronezh, to a new monastery in a frontier region of the Don. The title of Arndt's influential pietistic tract On True Christianity became the title of Tikhon's own magnum opus on the holy life. In it and in his other writings and sermons Tikhon emphasizes the joys of Christ-like living. At Zadonsk, Tikhon took the role of the spiritual elder out of the narrow confines of the monastery into the world of affairs, becoming the friend and counselor of lay people as well as monastic apprentices.89

  The man who carried this revival into the nineteenth century, Seraphim of Sarov, combined Paissius' ascetic and patristic emphases with Tikhon's insistence on self-renunciation and ministering to the people. Seraphim gave up all his worldly goods and even his monastic habit to don a white peasant

  costume and spend fifteen years as a hermit in the woods near his new monastery at Sarov. A devoted Hesychast, he believed that "silence is the sacrament of the world to come, words are the weapons of this world."90 After returning from his forest retreat, Seraphim traveled widely in and out of cloisters, urging men to rededicate themselves to Christ. "Boredom," he taught, "is cured by prayer, by abstaining from vain speech, by working with the hands. .. ."91 Virginity he regarded as particularly desirable, and he was a frequent visitor to women's convents, the rapid growth of which was an important sign of the revived interest in religious callings.

  The spiritual intensity generated by the new monastic communities which Seraphim set up began to attract a new kind of pilgrim-secularized intellectuals-back for visits if not pilgrimages. The famous Optyna Pustyn, to the south of Moscow, became a center of counseling and of spiritual retreats for many of Russia's most famous nineteenth-century thinkers: beginning with the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who spent much of his later life there, and extending on through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov'ev. The figure of Father Zossima in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov presents a fairly accurate composite picture of Father Ambrose, the monastic elder at Optyna Pustyn, whom Dostoevsky frequently visited, and of Tikhon Zadonsky, whose writings Dostoevsky reverently studied.92

  The problems of the new monasticism were those of any religious calling in a primarily secular society. The new monks were bothered by self-doubt, harassed by demands that they prove themselves useful to the state like everyone else. Shorn of their role as court ideologists and great landlords, they were not yet sure what the role of the monastery could be in the new society. The monastic revival tended to be strongest outside the traditional monasteries.

  On the one hand, there was a tendency to withdraw to ever more remote hermitages, where the saintly ideal was removed from ordinary social life and related to individual ascetic exercises. In this strange, semi-Oriental world the attainment of physical incorruptibility after death was thought to be the ultimate fruit of ascetic self-mastery; and proof of some degree of this incorruptibility became a pre-requisite for canonization in the eighteenth-century Russian Church.93 The ascetic emphases of the new monasticism took it outside of the history and politics in which Muscovite monasticism had been continually involved. In its emphasis on repentance and reversion to the silent asceticism of the early Church, the new Russian monasticism was similar to the Trappist movement in post-Reformation Catholicism. Tikhon was typical not only in fleeing from ecclesiastical authority and civilization in general but also in his attempt to compile a "spiritual thesaurus gathered from the world." Only scattered fragments of

  insight and experience were worth finding and preserving in the contemporary world.

  As a merchant gathers varied wares from different countries, brings them into his house and hides them, so the Christian can gather from this world thoughts that are useful for the soul, lock them in the prison of his heart, and build up his soul with them.94

  At the same time, there was a new desire within the monasteries to communicate more directly with people in all walks of life. The emphasis on ascetic piety tended to break down the older ritual and formality of the communal monasteries, just as the confiscation of monastic lands had taken away the former preoccupation with economic affairs. The influence of Protestant pietism tended to turn monastic elders like Tikhon into part-time popular evangelists. Elements of self-doubt may lie behind the almost masochistic desire of the new monks to humble themselves. Tikhon requested that he be buried under the entrance stone of a simple church so that he could be literally trampled underfoot by the humblest believer. When hit by a freethinker in the course of an argument, Tikhon replied by throwing himself at the feet of his astonished assailant to ask forgiveness for driving him to such a loss of self-control.95 It is perhaps fitting that Tikhon was canonized and his works studied anew in the 1860's, when Russian thinkers were turning again to the problem of moral purification and humbling themselves before the simple people. The principal ideological movement of that age, the famous "movement (literally 'procession' or 'pilgrimage': khozhdenie) to the people," was in many ways only an extension and secularization of the effort to take the monastic ideal out to a bonded but still believing peasantry. Indeed, the complex populist movement-the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history-appears in many ways as a continuation of all three post-Petrine forms of conservative protest to the Westernization and secularization of the Russian empire. Like all of them, populism was a loose tradition rather than an organized movement. Like most Old Believers, the populists believed in preserving the old communal forms of economic life and in the imminent possibility of sudden historical change. Like the peasant insurrectionaries, the populists believed in violent action against police and bureaucrats and in the ultimate benevolence of the "true tsar." Even after killing Alexander II in 1881, the populists could conceive of no other program than to address Utopian appeals to his successor.96 Like the monastic revivalists, the populists believed in ascetic self-denial and in humbling oneself before the innocently suffering Russian people.

  But before considering this and other movements of the late imperial period one must turn to the new and distinctive culture that took shape under Elizabeth and Catherine and lasted for a century. During this period the schisms and tensions that had been opened in Russian society by the reforms of Alexis and Peter were plastered over with the decorative effects of aristocratic culture. It is to the brilliant and self-confident culture of the aristocratic century-and to its lingering inner concerns-that attention must now be turned.

  The Mid-Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

  The unchallenged reign of a distinctive, if disturbed aristocratic culture during the century from 1755-6 (the date of the Russian alliance with the France of Louis XIV and the founding of the first Russian university and permanent theater) to 1855-6 (the year of decisive military defeat in the Crimea and the advent of the reforming tsar, Alexander II). The constant struggle between French and German influences, between rationalistic and romantic impulses; the adoption of the French language and the importation of French ideas as an aristocratic badge of class beginning in the reign of Elizabeth (1741-62); the emphasis on Prussian discipline under Peter III (1762) and Paul I (1796-1801) immediately before and after the long Francophile reign of Catherine the Great. The Russian Enlightenment: the breadth and scientific achievement of Michael Lomonosov (1711-65), the neo-classical art forms and the new cities that accompanied Catherine's age of conquest.

  The recurrent dilemma, first met by Catherine, between the desire for rational rule based on natural laws and the concurrent determination to maintain an unlimited autocracy based on rigid class distinctions. The crucial change in the character of opposition to tsarist rule under Catherine, from the last of the great peasant revolts under Pugachev (1773-5) to the first manifesto of the "Pugachevs from the un
iversities": The Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790) by the alienated aristocratic intellectual Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802). The struggle against frivolous "Voltairianism," the journalistic activities of Nicholas Novikov (1744-1818), and the seminal importance of Russian Freemasonry in the deepening communal life of the reforming aristocracy.

  The great expectations during the reign of Alexander I (1801-25); the national revival in resisting the Napoleonic invasion (1812-14); the frustration of political reform and the suppression of the aristocratic Decembrist uprising of 1825. Russia as the focal point of the European-wide reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Catholic, pietistic, Orthodox, and occult, Eastward-looking elements in the wave of reactionary thinking that culminated in the pronouncement in 1833 of "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality" as the official ideology of the Russian Empire.

  The immersion of aristocratic thinkers in German romantic philosophy during the authoritarian, Prussophile rule of Nicholas I (1825-55). The intense desire to discover within the fraternity of small discussion groups and to set forth on the pages of "thick journals" the answers to certain "cursed questions" about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. The transition from the aristocratic poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) to the anguished prose of Nicholas Gogol (1809-52); from neo-classical architecture to the ideological paintings of Alexander Ivanov (1806-58); from the visionary romanticism of Schelling and the Slavophiles of the 1830's to the revolutionary rationalism of the young Hegelians and "West-ernizers" of the 1840's. The legacy of metaphysical anguish left by the aristocratic search for Truth; the symbolic importance of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" in the unresolved search for cultural identity.