The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Thus, the suspicions of rational enlightenment engendered during Alexander's lifetime had a debilitating effect on the subsequent development of Russian culture. It was particularly fateful that the high tide of anti-Enlightenment feeling should occur at the very time when Russia was becoming fully conscious of its national power and identity. Anti-rationalism was given special sanction within Russia because rationalism was identified with revolution, revolution with Napoleon, and Napoleon with the invasion of Russia and burning of Moscow.

  The new Moscow that arose on the ruins of the old soon began to eclipse St. Petersburg and to think of itself as distinct from European culture. Following the burning of Moscow, Michael Zagoskin, one of the most widely read writers of the era, began a lifetime of gathering material for sketches on "Moscow and Muscovites," which enjoyed great popularity when they finally appeared in the 1840's. As he said in his introduction:

  I have studied Moscow too much for thirty years and can say emphatically that it is not a city, not a capital, but an entire world that is profoundly Russian. . . . Just as thousands of rays of sunshine come to a focus at one point in passing through a magnifying glass, in precisely the same way in Moscow the different characteristics of our Russian popular physiognomy are unified in one national countenance . . . you will find in Moscow a treasure house of all the elements in the worldly and civil life of Russia, that great colossus for which Petersburg acts as the head, and Moscow the heart.136

  The "heart" was more important than the "head" for the mystical romantics of the new Muscovite culture. Their attempts to find truths hidden in the physiognomy of a city was an extension of the occult fascination with statuary and phrenology under Alexander. The very uniqueness and asymmetry of Moscow appealed to their imagination. Marvelous meaning was discovered in the strange shapes of the old capital, whereas fear and

  foreboding were found on the face of the new-in the contemporaneous Physiology of Petersburg and a number of literary works.187 This was no longer the Moscow which had appeared on Latin-inscribed medals struck in honor of the founding of Russia's first university, showing the Kremlin towers illumined by the rising sun,138 but a Moscow of mysterious moonlight:

  How clear and brilliant is the moon

  Contemplating sleeping Moscow. Can it have ever seen in all its journeys through the vault of heaven A city so magnificent? Can it have seen a second Kremlin?139

  The remarkable cultural activity of Moscow under Nicholas I was, however, no mere return to the Muscovy of old. Catherine and Alexander I had wrought an irrevocable change in Russian thought. The aristocracy had undergone a stimulating exposure to the West, and to books that were hitherto inaccessible in the vernacular-from the complete New Testament to Diderot's Encyclopedia. They had acquired a taste for the fraternal and intellectual activity of small circles. Secular journalism and art, organized education and philanthropy, had all become part of the life of many Russian aristocrats.

  The changes that had already taken place in the intellectual atmosphere are illustrated by the figure who finally set down the official state philosophy of Nicholas I, Sergius Uvarov. From the time he first propounded his sacred trilogy of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" as the newly installed minister of education in 1833 until he died just a few months after Nicholas in 1855, Uvarov was an urbane and effective apologist for the anti-Enlightenment. Just as Speransky's new law code of 1833 spelled an end to the hopes of the Russian Enlightenment for political-constitutional reform, so Uvarov's circular of the same year brought to a close hopes for educational reform. But in contrast to the law code, Uvarov's writings helped open up new avenues for Russian thought by keeping alive some of the ideological passion of the preceding era.

  Superficially, Uvarov appears as yet another epigon of occult Masonry -arguing that some supra-rational basis must be found for truth and authority and that one must look to the ancient East for surviving reflections of the "lost light of Adam." Russia should treasure its links with Asia and conduct extensive "metaphysical archeology" into its Eastern heritage, Uvarov argued, in his blueprint of 1810 for an Asian Academy.140 Two years later, his Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries idealized the authority of mystery in a primitive Greek civilization still thought to be linked to its Oriental heritage. The implication was that the democracy and critical

  philosophy for which Greece had generally been praised in the Age of the Enlightenment were, in fact, corrosive forces that had destroyed the "intellectual solidarity"141 of an earlier, proto-Oriental society.

  This early statement of pro-Asian sentiment attracted increased attention as Napoleon's invasion of Russia fanned anti-European and anti-Enlightenment sentiment. Uvarov's reiteration of this position in the 1830's benefited from a second wave of anti-Western feeling that followed the Polish uprising of 1830. Pletnev, Uvarov's leading lieutenant and popularize^ insisted that Western classicism was incompatible with autocracy; Osip Senkovsky, professor of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg, became a propagandist for Uvarov's views; and Count Rostopchin, the reactionary pamphleteer who had defended Moscow from Napoleon, was posthumously assigned a genealogy from Genghis Khan.

  "We must Easternize ourselves [ovostochifsid]," proclaimed one leading critic,142 and, as if in response, Asians suddenly became heroes in a number of new and distinctly second-rate historical plays and novels-such as those of the prolific Raphael Zotov, which ranged from the embellished saga of his Tatar father's battles against Napoleon, The Last Descendant of Genghis Khan, to the picture of enlightened Chinese struggling with corrupt Western intruders in Tsin-Kin-Tong, or the Three Good Deeds of the Spirit of Darkness. A play of 1823, The Youth of Ivan III, or the Attack of Tamerlane on Russia, even goes so far as to have the Mongol invader tutor the Russian tsar. An almanac of 1828 completed the picture by offering an anthology of Mongolian proverbs to a people always responsive to this type of folk wisdom.148

  Pan-Asianism did not become part of Uvarov's doctrine of "official nationality"; but his fascination with the Orient illustrates his own remoteness from any simple doctrine of returning to primitive, purely Russian practices. Instead, he appears as an uncertain seeker for some new form of authoritarianism. He speaks of "complete societies . . . where the philosophic element triumphs,"144 and where shallow philosophes are confounded by "complete thought" which integrates intelligence, imagination, and sentiment.145

  Uvarov fully shared the general aristocratic contempt for the commercially oriented West and its periodical press which has "dethroned the word."146 But he places on his ideological throne not the Word that was in the beginning but slogans that never were before. Orthodoxy comprised only one third of his formula; and his critical writings reveal a general indifference to Christianity-if not actual atheism.147 He is the voice not of faith but of inner uncertainty and romantic longing. He seems to be looking not for a philosopher-king or Christian emperor, but for the grand master

  of some occult order. His image of the "complete society" is not one in which each individual has perfected his rational faculties and remade the social order in accordance with moral law. Rather it is a rigidly hierarchical society ruled by an "intelligence" that is unintelligible to all but the inner initiates.

  Uvarov fought Cartesianism and scepticism not with tradition but with a new ideology that often seems to anticipate modern totalitarianism. In the process, however, he helped create other problems. By introducing narod-nost' ("nationality") as one of the three pillars of official ideology, he gave increased authority to a vague term which radicals later interpreted to mean "spirit of the people." By founding in 1834 and presenting his views regularly in a monthly "thick journal," The Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Uvarov moved the government into the risky terrain of ideological journalism. By idealizing the "effervescence of ideas"148 in the ancient Orient, he helped encourage the new effervescence of exotic thought that became characteristic of the age of Nicholas. By setting forth an all-encompassing state ideology, Uvarov helped turn R
ussian thinkers to broad questions of personal and national belief, which increasingly interested Russians as the possibility of political and pedagogic reform faded.

  New vistas had been opened to the imagination in the Age of Alexander I. Despite Uvarov's efforts to hold them in check, the aristocrats were to enjoy a last period of creative exploration under Nicholas before the stage became filled with the new social classes and material concerns of a more open and industrialized society under Alexander II.

  3. The " Cursed Questions"

  nder Nicholas I, the imperial pendulum swung back from French Enlightenment to German discipline far more decisively than it had done during the brief reigns of Peter III and Paul. The various contacts and associations with the German-speaking world that had been growing fitfully but steadily in importance were climaxed during the long and superficially glittering reign of Nicholas by new bonds of princely and aristocratic brotherhood. Russian and German rulers stood together as guardians of the conservative restoration sealed at the Congress of Vienna. Far closer to his Germanophile mother than to his much older and more cosmopolitan brothers, Constantine and Alexander I, Nicholas married a Prussian princess and leaned constantly throughout his own thirty-year reign on his father-in-law and brother-in-law, who successively ruled Prussia as Frederick William III and IV. The addition to the Russian Empire of the Baltic provinces with their German baronial overseers further flooded the Russian aristocracy with Germans, and led to the famous incident whereby an aristocrat given his choice of new rank by the Tsar asked to be redesignated "a German."1 Survivors of the Alexandrian era complained in exile that Russia's movement into Central Europe had been its undoing:

  The Germans have conquered Russia in the very process of letting themselves be conquered. This is what happened in China with the Mongols, in Italy with the Barbarians, in Greece with the Romans.2

  Extending the Prussian ideal of military discipline to all corners of society, Nicholas became the bete noire of liberals and nationalists throughout Europe. Leaning for civil order on the investigative activities of his newly created "Third Section," Nicholas was said to have meant by the phrase le bien-etre general en Russie, "it is well to be a general in Russia."3

  Nicholas' reign occupies in some respects a place in Russian history similar to that of Peter the Great, of whom Nicholas' official apologists were

  such great admirers.4 Like Peter, Nicholas came to power at the end of a period of religious and political ferment in which allegiances and institutions all seemed subject to change. Like Peter, Nicholas was primarily a soldier, fascinated from boyhood with military weapons and technology; and sought to re-establish order on military lines with the aid of a Lutheran-style church clearly subordinate to the state. Just as Peter came into power by curbing rebellion within the palace guard in Moscow, so Nicholas ascended to the throne while crushing the Decembrist uprising within the new elite regiments in St. Petersburg.

  Peter, of course, was opening, while Nicholas was shutting, windows to the West. But the century between the end of Peter's reign and the beginning of Nicholas' had brought too much cultural exposure to the West ever to be blocked off; ideas from the West could not be stopped as Mag-nitsky would have wished. Like a swollen river suddenly confronted with a major obstacle, the flow was merely diverted into channels that had hitherto carried only a small trickle of ideas. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism replaced politics and religion in the mainstreams of Russian culture. For awhile it seemed that Russian intellectual life was to be diverted from practical concerns altogether. Many leading figures went abroad for visits that slowly lengthened into semi-exile. Many of Russia's finest minds moved into the realm of the distant or theoretical. In Kazan in the aftermath of the Magnitsky era, a young mathematician, Nicholas Lobachevsky, sought to supplant Euclid with a new "pan-geometry." His modern geometry, perhaps the greatest Russian contribution to scientific thought during the reign of Nicholas, earned him an unprecedented six terms as rector of Russia's easternmost university.5 Another area of scientific accomplishment lay in astronomy, which had been since the days of Kepler an area of active inquiry in the navigation-minded Baltic world. The long nights and northern lights stimulated interest, and as early as 1725 there was an observatory in St. Petersburg. Russia later fell heir to a larger observatory at Tartu, and in the i83o's Russia turned to the building of an observatory at Pulkovo, outside St. Petersburg, which became the largest in the world upon its completion in 1839. J-ts director, F. G. W. Struve, had turned from literary to astronomical studies during the late years of Alexander's reign, and his life's work at Pulkovo was a long study of a relatively nebulous astronomical subject: the Milky Way. Another fascination of the age was comets, which were a lively topic of speculative discussion, particularly before and after the rare appearance of Halley's comet in 1835.0 The most important philosophic journal of the Nicholaevan period called itself The Telescope.

  There was also a romantic interest in exotic portions of the Russian Empire itself. One scientific explorer, who was forced to make a long dis-

  claimer of any association with Masonic or secret societies upon returning from abroad in 1830, even idealized the frozen northern region of Novaia Zemlia (New Land).

  Novaia Zemlia is a real land of freedom, where each man may act and live as he wishes. It is the only land where there is no police force or other ruling force besides hospitality. … In Novaia Zemlia each man who arrives is greeted as an honest man.7

  The most important flight from harsh realities was, however, the flight to German romantic philosophy. On soil that was thoroughly prepared by the occult theosophic pursuits of higher order Masonry, the seeds of Schell-ing's and Hegel's great philosophic systems were now sown. The harvest was to be rich indeed, for these cosmic systems provided the thinking aristocracy not only with consolation from the frustrations of the Nicholaevan age but also with a vocabulary to discuss certain deep philosophical questions that troubled them.

  Thus, far from turning to new problems, the aristocratic intellectuals resolved to make one last heroic effort to answer the old ones. The material world, which was increasingly preoccupying a Western world in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, was simply not yet on the agenda of Russian thought. Occult spiritual forces were still thought to rale the world; and small circles of dedicated truth seekers were believed capable of understanding and serving these forces. As the optimism and reformist enthusiasm of the Alexandrian era waned, Russian thinkers turned from the outer to the inner world: from practical affairs to problematic philosophy. Beneath the tranquil surface of Nicholaevan Russia, disturbing questions were asked as never before about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. In their increasingly desperate effort to answer these so-called "cursed questions," they turned to Germany no less enthusiastically than Nicholas himself-but to its universities rather than its drill fields. The answers they found in the philosophy taught at these outwardly conservative institutions were new, and in many cases potentially revolutionary.

  The Flight to Philosophy

  Old Russia had repeatedly and consistently rejected the need for any systematic secular philosophy. "The Russians are philosophers not in words, but in deeds,"8 Krizhanich wrote sadly after his unsuccessful efforts to introduce Western philosophic ideas into seventeenth-century Russia. Philos-

  ophy was rejected not only because it was irrelevant to salvation but because it can lead men-in the words of an early nineteenth-century Old Believer- "to contemplate the overthrow of kingdoms."8

  Thus, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, philosophy held for the Russian mind some of the exotic fascination of soaring comets and distant lands. Almost from the first introduction of philosophy into the curriculum of Moscow University, it acquired the subversive reputation of being a rival and potential substitute for revealed religion. Even during the early years of Catherine's reign, a follower of Hume was forced to resign from the university and a dissertation on natural religion publicly
burned. With the founding of new universities early in Alexander's reign and the influx of German-trained professors, German philosophic idealism gained such a foothold that Magnitsky could with some justice speak of "substituting Kant for John the Baptist and Schelling for Christ." So heavily censored were lectures on philosophy by the end of Alexander's reign that the most serious discussion of broad philosophic issues often took place in faculties like medicine and jurisprudence. In the wake of the revolution of 1848, Nicholas I abolished philosophy altogether as a legitimate subject of study. This extraordinary ban was lifted in 1863, but other crippling restrictions on academic philosophy remained in effect until 1889.10

  The effect of such harassment was not to prevent the study of philosophy but rather to force it out of the classroom into the secret society: away from an atmosphere of critical discipline into one of uncritical enthusiasm. The philosophy that was popularized by Schwarz was similar to that with which the ancient Gnostics had opposed the worldliness of late Hellenistic culture. Schwarz believed in a supra-rational knowledge (gnosis or mudrost', premudrost') which could harmonize reason with revelation. To the clinical study of the natural world, they opposed the mystical "light of Adam," which man could recapture only through inner purification and illumination. The most important single influence on the formation of a Russian philosophical tradition was Jacob Boehme, of whom Schwarz, Saint-Martin, and the other heroes of higher order masonry were little more than popularizes. In Boehme's richly metaphorical writings, all of the universe-even evil-became expressions of the wisdom of God. It was this "wisdom of God" (theosophy) rather than any "love of wisdom" (philosophy) that Boehme held out to his followers as an attainable ideal. Boehme's God was not the finite clockmaker and repairman of the deists, but an infinitely transcendent and, at the same time, omnipresent force. God created the world not out of nothing but out of his own essence. All of man's intellectual pursuits, sexual longings, and social impulses were expressions of what Jung-Stilling called "homesickness" (Heimweh) for the lost unity between