The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  The young idealists all viewed Russia's suffering and humiliation by Europe during the early modern period as a purifying process guaranteeing Russia a redemptive role in the new era that is coming into being. German pietist preachers and their philosophic heirs, Baader and Schelling, encouraged Russians to believe that the evangelical ideal of the Holy Alliance must be kept alive; that Russia must remain a new supra-political force dedicated to healing the spiritual wounds of Europe. An even more vivid conception of the nation as suffering messiah was developed by the leaders of suppressed nationalist movements within the Russian empire: Poles like Mickiewicz and the Ukrainians of the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.38

  The idealists generally agreed that (in the words of Pogodin's inaugural lecture as professor of history at Moscow in 1832) a "grandiose and almost infinite future"39 lies before Russia, and with the literary critic Shevyrev's declaration in the same year: "We all have one task: to set forth thought that is all-encompassing, universal, all-human, and Christian in the Russian vernacular of today."40

  Yet the idealists rejected the social and political conservatism of Pogodin and Shevyrev as well as the example of the bourgeois West. Their despair over all existing alternatives gave an increasingly prophetic and revolutionary cast to their writings. Much attention was paid to a pessimistic look into the future cast in 1840 by Philarete Chasles, a relatively obscure French journalist. Even more emphatically than Tocqueville, Chasles wrote that the future belonged to Russia and America, "two young actors seeking to be applauded, both ardently patriotic and expansive." He spoke of a coming time when men will "discover twelve thousand new acids . . . direct aerial machines by electricity . . . imagine ways of killing sixty thousand men in one second."41 He could well have been describing his admirer, Chaadaev, as he depicts the prophetic philosopher looking down at this picture of destruction,

  . . . from the heights of his solitary observatory, gliding over the obscure expanse and howling waves of the future and past . . . burdened down with sounding the hours of history . . . forced to repeat the lugubrious cry: Europe is dying.42

  The most remarkable and original historical prophecy of the age may well be that of Prince Odoevsky, the original "lover of wisdom" and one of the leading musical and literary critics of the period. In a series of dialogues written during the thirties and published together in 1844 as Russian Nights, Odoevsky wrote that "the West is perishing," that "the nineteenth century belongs to Russia," and that "the sixth part of the world designated by Providence for a great deed (podvig). . . will save not only the body but the soul of Europe as well."43 He was well aware of the West and its accomplishments, writing learnedly on Bach and Shakespeare as well as contemporary figures; but he felt that "in Russia many things are bad, but everything together is good; in Europe many things are good, but everything together is bad."44 He was particularly haunted by the writings of Malthus and wrote a sketch, "The Last Suicide," showing humanity lighting a fire to relieve overpopulation, then trying in vain to check it in order to save some vestige of life on earth.45

  Much of his thought was devoted in the thirties to an historical trilogy designed to set forth the nature and destiny of Russia. He thought of writing

  on the impact of Asia on Russia but soon decided on a more ambitious conception. He planned to write one volume on the past, one on the present, and one on the future of Russia; and his attention was soon focused on the tantalizing third volume.

  He published first in 1835 and then, more fully, in 1839 his picture of the future in a remarkable fantasy, The Year 4338. Appearing under the pseudonym "the voiceless one," the story purports to be a series of letters written from Russia by a visiting Chinese student from "the chief school in Peking" in "the year 4338." The world has been divided between Russia and China. The historical calendar is now divided into three parts: from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, from thence to the division of the world between these two powers, and from that time till the present. Little is even remembered of other countries or of history preceding the Russo-Chinese era. No one can read the few surviving lines of Goethe. The English long ago went bankrupt, and saw their island sold to Russia at a public auction.

  Russia is the cultural center of the world. Great new cities have been built, the weather transformed throughout the north, special aerial platforms, aerial hotels, and balloons fill the sky. The supreme sovereign of Russia is now a poet, who is aided by a "minister of reconciliation" and "philosophers of the first and second rank." Artificial lights are made from electricity; hostile impulses are deadened by "magnetic baths," in the course of which all secrets are revealed; communication is by magnetic telegraph; and marvelous, pliable synthetic products have been devised to provide every possible form of physical comfort. Love of humanity has become so great that all tragedy has been eliminated from literature. A month is set aside for rest and relaxation at the beginning and middle of each year. There is a "continuous congress of the learned" to aid artists and scientists, and the capital is full of museums and gardens containing extinct curiosities, such as paper and animals. China is not quite so advanced but is busy learning from Russia and has progressed rapidly in the five hundred years since "the great Khun-Gin awoke China at last from its long slumber, or rather, deathly stagnation." Without his leadership, China

  would have been made over by now in the likeness of those unsociable Americans, who for the lack of other speculative ventures, sell their cities on the public market, then come to us to expropriate. [They are] the only people in the whole world against whom we must maintain troops.46

  The only drawback to the picture as presented is that the subsidized scientists of this super-state have calculated that Halley's comet is about to hit the earth; and although people have already begun to move to the moon

  to help relieve overpopulation, no one seems able to devise a means of preventing this catastrophe.

  This blend of science fiction with Utopian prophecies of future comfort and Russian pre-eminence went largely unnoticed in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Far more attention was paid to the famous historical debate of the 1840's between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Each of these grew out of the romantic idealism of the day; each was opposed to both Nicholaevan bureaucrats and Western entrepreneurs; each sought to borrow Western ideas without Western practices, so that Russia could assume leadership in the revival of European civilization.

  The Slavophile view of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism. All of history was a contest between spiritual and carnal forces. The poet Tiutchev saw it as a struggle between cosmos, the organic unity of all nature, and chaos, the basic principle of the material world. Russia was, of course, on the side of cosmos; and in his famous verse he warned that

  With the mind alone Russia cannot be understood,

  No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness: She stands alone, unique-

  In Russia one can only believe.47

  Tiutchev's fellow poet and Schellingian, Alexis Khomiakov, set forth an even more ingenious dualism in his ambitious but never-finished Sketches of Universal History.4S The opposing forces throughout all history became for Khomiakov the spirit of Kush and of Iran. The former comes from the oppressive Ethiopians in the Old Testament who believed in material force and worshipped either stone (physical construction) or the serpent (sensual desire). The Iranian spirit was one of belief in God, inner freedom, and love of music and speech. The victory of the Roman legions over Greek philosophy had been a triumph of Kush, as was the more recent imposition of Byzantine formalism on happy Slavic spontaneity. The Jews had been the original bearers of the Iranian spirit, which had now passed on to the unspoiled Slavs. The spirit of Iran had penetrated particularly deeply into the life and art of the Russian people, whose strong family sense, communal institutions, and oral folklore had kept alive the principle of harmony and unity. Khomiakov assumes that the Iranian spirit will triumph, thus assuring a glorious future to Russia once it throws off th
e Kushite shackles of Byzantine formalism and Prussian militarism.

  Khomiakov is best understood as a perpetuator of the pietistic ideal of a universal, inner church. He was widely traveled in the West and viewed his Lutheran, Anglican, and Bavarian Catholic friends as allies in the

  "Iranian" camp. His two contending principles are reminiscent of Schlegel's "spirit of Seth" and "spirit of Cain."49 But Khomiakov is less romantic in his attitude toward the East than Schlegel and many other Western romantics. He decisively rejects the glorification of Asian ways which Magnitsky had made fashionable. The major Kushite worshippers of "the stone" were those who built pyramids in Egypt and temples in Asia; the worst followers of "the serpent" are the Indian disciples of Shiva.

  Khomiakov illustrates his theory in two plays of the 1830's, Dmitry the Self-Proclaimed and Ermak. The first play pictures the False Dmitry being first welcomed by the Russian people, then rejected when he is converted to the Latin ideal of earthly power. The later work shows the Cossack conqueror of Siberia struggling with the power-worshiping philosophies of his pagan domain. Ermak refuses to accept the Kushite beliefs of the Siberians and, indeed, renounces power altogether to seek forgiveness for earlier misdeeds from his father and his original home community.50

  Quite different from the Slavophile view, with its pietistic glorification of inner regeneration, family harmony, and a new universal church, was the view of the radical Westernizers. They looked to French more than German thought, Catholic more than Protestant sources for ideas.

  De Maistre was generally the starting point for Russians who took a more jaded view of the Russian past and Russian institutions. But he was soon supplanted by Lamennais, the real point of transition in French thought between Catholicism and socialism. Beginning as a standard counter-revolutionary Catholic with his famous call for a revival of faith in his Essay on Indifference in 1817, Lamennais had dreamt of a new "congregation of St. Peter" to replace the Jesuit Order and lead Europe into a glorious new era. Shortly after founding a journal, The Future, in 1830, Lamennais despaired of the Catholic Church and turned to Christian socialism and a passionate belief in the spirituality of the downtrodden masses. His writings, like those of De Maistre, were permeated with a kind of prophetic pessimism. As he wrote to the Savoyard:

  . . . Everything in the world is being readied for the great and final catastrophe … all now is extreme, there is no longer any middle position.51

  Russian converts to Catholicism during the Nicholaevan era were generally converted a la Lamennais, to a life of mendicant communion with the suffering masses. Pecherin, who served as Catholic chaplain in a Dublin hospital, saw in Lamennais "the new faith" for our times and felt convinced that the oppressed outer regions of Europe were the only hope for the decaying center. "Russia together with the United States is beginning a new cycle

  in history."62 Chaadaev was also influenced by Lamennais; and he generally served Russians as a guide in moving from an early infatuation with Catholicism to a later interest in socialism. From a Russian point of view, Catholicism and socialism did not seem as incompatible as they did in the West. Both forces seemed to offer the possibility of introducing social discipline and sense of purpose into a passive and unorganized Russia.

  Saint-Simon, whose theory of history eventually became the credo of the young Westernizers, had himself been influenced by De Maistre's deep fear of anarchy and revolution and admired the ordering function which the Catholic Church had fulfilled in medieval society. In his call for a "new Christianity" that was to be purely ethical and a new hierarchy that was to be purely managerial, Saint-Simon and his disciple Auguste Comte were proponents of what has been called "Catholicism without Christianity." Whereas Saint-Simon's theories of industrial organization and class tensions interested his Western followers, it was "the breadth and grandioseness of his historical-philosophical views" which excited the Russians.53

  Saint-Simon's first Russian disciple was the Decembrist Lunin, who actively propagated Saint-Simon's ideas from exile after 1825 and was silenced only by imprisonment in 1841. Paralleling his career as a prophet of socialism was a religious life that brought him eventually into the Roman Catholic fold. A romantic student-soldier during the Napoleonic wars, Lunin felt alienated from his native land after becoming acquainted with Paris and Saint-Simon in 1814-16. Like Saint-Simon, Lunin was neither an advocate of revolution nor an admirer of the West as it actually was. "In your superficiality," he told a French friend, "you need only the light and playful. But we, inhabitants of the north, love all that which moves the soul and forces us to plunge into thought."54

  Saint-Simon made one of his infrequent visits to a fashionable Parisian soiree expressly for the purpose of bidding Lunin farewell in 1816.

  Through you, I would like to establish links with a young people not yet withered up with scepticism. The soil is fertile there for the reception of the new teaching. . . .

  Superstition considers that the golden age was some time in the distant past, whereas it is still to come. Then again giants will be born; but they will be great not in body but in spirit. Machines will work then in place of people . . . another Napoleon will stand at the head of an army of workers. . . .

  If you forget me, do not at least forget the proverb: "by running for two hares, one catches neither." From the time of Peter the Great you have been ever widening your borders; do not become lost in endless space. Rome was destroyed by its victories; the teaching of Christ entered

  into a soil fertilized with blood. War supports slavery; peaceful work prepares the basis for freedom which is the inalienable right of each.55

  Saint-Simon did not see his ideas take hold during his lifetime. His pleas to Alexander I for the adoption of his new Christianity by the Holy Alliance were no more heeded than his disciple Comte's later appeal to Nicholas I to adopt his new "system of positive politics."56 But these theologians of progress were perceptive in addressing their grandiose theories to a nation "not yet withered up with scepticism" or (in Comte's words) "retrograde empiricism." Neglected by the tsars, their new theories of history were taken up by the Westernizing aristocracy. "Spiritually we lived in France," explained one of the Westernizers of Nicholas' reign. "We in studying turned to France. Not, of course, to the France of Louis Philippe and Guizot, but to the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, Louis Blanc, and particularly George Sand. From there, came to us a belief in humanity; from there, certainty burst upon us that 'the golden age' lay not behind, but before us."57 Pecherin heard in Saint-Simon "the giant steps of the approaching future."58 Most important of all, the young figure of Alexander Herzen, who had sworn to avenge the Decembrists and continue their Westernizing traditions, carried around Saint-Simon's works "like the Koran." His Moscow circle of the 1830's began to lead the opposition to Schellingian philosophy and the turn to social problems which became characteristic of the new radical Westernizers.

  After Saint-Simon's death in 1825, Prospere Enfantin, one of his French followers who had begun his study of philosophy and economics in Russia, established a new Saint-Simonian religion. One of its adepts linked himself with Moses, Zoroaster, and Mohammed and darkly hinted that he might even be a reincarnation of Christ in modern dress. The Russians were fascinated by this strange, semi-sectarian movement and read its journal, The Globe, with great interest. Herzen's early followers can be considered a kind of splinter group within this "new Christianity"; for, although they were neither industrialists nor cultists in the manner of Enfantin's group, they were inspired by the Saint-Simonian view of history. By 1833 Herzen subscribed to the view that history moves in a three-stage progression from medieval Catholicism to philosophic Protestantism to the "new Christianity." This last phase was the "truly human" phase, a "renovation" rather than a revolution of society, designed to abolish poverty and war by the systematic application of scientific method to social and economic problems.59 A new elite of social managers and organizers must give man a modern, practical form of Christi
anity. The three-stage theory of history of Saint-Simon's

  protege Auguste Comte enjoyed even greater popularity among the radical Westernizers in Russia after being mtroduced by Valerian Maikov in the forties. Comte's idea that everything must progress from a theological through a metaphysical into a "positive" or scientific stage became the reigning theory of history among populist intellectuals.60

  At first the difference between Westernizers and Slavophiles was not great. Both believed in some new form of Christianized society and were opposed to revolution and egalitarian excess. The tendency to idealize the peasant commune and narodnosf, or "spirit of the people," as a regenerative life force in history was particularly characteristic of Slavophilism but also to be found among Polish revolutionaries and radical Westernizers. Narodnosf for all of these visionary reformers meant neither nationality as it did for Uvarov nor popularity in the Western electoral sense. It meant the unspoiled wisdom of the noble savage as revealed in the newly collected popular proverbs of Vladimir Dal or the folk songs and poems of Alexis Kol'tsov. Almost all the great social theorists had philological or ethnographic interests and rejoiced that a writer of their generation had written a History of the Russian People in answer to Karamzin's History of the Russian State.91