The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  "the three lives flowed into one life, the three arts into beauty . . . and an invisible force was in their midst."82

  This sense of divine interdependence of all art media was of great importance for the creative artists of Nicholaevan Russia. Artists in one medium generally knew those working in others. It was customary for poets to draw pictures and for artists to write poems in the notebooks that they kept and exchanged. The Ukrainian poet Taras, Shevchenko began his career as a painter, and Lermontov left behind almost as many paintings and sketches as poems.83 His Demon later inspired Rubinstein's opera of the same name (one of the most popular of the many Russian operas that remain virtually unknown abroad), and many of the best canvases of Vrubel (one of the best of the many painters who also remain little known outside of Russia). Briullov's painting, "The Last Days of Pompeii," was inspired by an opera, and in turn inspired the novel of Bulwer-Lytton. Odoevsky as a music critic and Botkin as an art critic acquired positions of general influence almost as great as those of the literary critics (and were themselves creative writers).

  Poetry was viewed, at least until the late thirties, as the first and greatest of the art forms: "the first-born daughter of the deathless spirit, the holy hand-maiden of eternal elegance, nothing less than the most perfect harmony."84 Such flowery tributes seem not altogether inappropriate; for the 1,820's and 1830's were the golden age of Russian verse. In the quantity of good poetry and the quality of its best, Russia drew equal to any other nation of Europe and far ahead of anything in its own past. The greatest of all, Alexander Pushkin, represents in poetry what his ill-fated Decembrist friends represented in politics: the final flowering of eighteenth-century aristocratic aspiration. But, whereas the Decembrists came to an inglorious end and had little impact on subsequent political thought, Pushkin was lionized even in his lifetime, and sounded forth many of the themes that were to dominate a rich literary culture in the late imperial period. His extraordinary success helped attract gifted Russians to art as a kind of alternative to politics during the reactionary period that followed the crushing of the Decembrists.

  From a background of privilege and a largely French, neo-classical education at the newly founded imperial lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin grew continually in the range and depth of his interests. Within his relatively brief life of thirty-eight years, he wrote plays, stories, and poems with equal facility about a wide variety of times and places. His most influential work was the "novel in verse" Eugene Onegin. Its portrayal of provincial aristocratic life and its muted tale of unfulfillment made it "the real ancestor of the main line of Russian fiction," while "superfluous" Onegin and the

  lovely Tatiana became "the authentic Adam and Eve of the Mankind that inhabits Russian fiction."85 One of his last poems, The Bronze Horseman, is probably the greatest ever written in the Russian language. A much shorter and more intense work than Onegin, The Bronze Horseman struck a resonant chord in the Russian apocalyptical mentality with its central image of a flood descending on St. Petersburg without any ark of salvation. Drawing on his own memories of the flood in 1824, Pushkin transforms Falconet's bronze statue of Peter the Great into an ambiguous symbol of imperial majesty and inhuman power. The clerk Eugene, in whose final delirium the statue comes to life, became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction-pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone control.

  Pushkin remains the outstanding illustration of Russian aristocratic culture. In his hands, Russian poetry came close to Nadezhdin's ideal synthesis of classical and romantic elements; the Russian language attained an elegance and precision that was at last devoid of affectation; and the famous "broad Russian nature" was combined with the classical virtues of clarity and disciplined moderation. For all his breadth of interest and subject matter, Pushkin was a different temperament from the Shakespeare with whom Russians often compare him. His was not the "golden uncontrolled enfranchisement" of the Elizabethans but rather the fulfillment of the oft-maligned aristocratic ideal: disinterested curiosity freed from dilettantism; ranging sympathies freed from condescension; and honest self-awareness freed from morbid introspection.

  For a poet with natural musicality, it seems appropriate that Pushkin wrote about music and musicians and had so much of his own work adapted for the musical stage.86 There is a kind of compatibility between the grace of his verse and that of the imperial ballet, which by the 1820's had surpassed all others in Europe. During thirty of Pushkin's thirty-eight years thjs^aUet was directed by Charles Didelot, the first of the great Russian impresario-choreo^apHeTsTHe^mkeTplishkin's work, and Pushkin found fresh inspiration for his poetry in one of Didelot's greatest ballerinas, Istomina.87 The verses of Pushkin and the movements of Istomina gave Russians a new confidence that they were capable of surpassing the West not only in primitive combat but also in sophisticated cultural accomplishment.

  For all his genius and symbolic importance, however, Pushkin did not affect the path of Russian cultural development as much as many lesser writers.

  He exerted, it is true, a vast influence on Russian literature, but almost none on the history of Russian thought, of Russian spiritual cul-

  ture. In me mneteenm century ana generally ?? oui own umcs, rvussiau thought and spiritual culture has followed another, non-Pushkinian path.88

  Pushkin was a relatively unpolemical writer, a man of shifting interests, tantalizing fragments, and elusive opinions. Yet he gradually developed an outlook that can be characterized as conservative in social and political matters and liberal in the realm of spiritual and creative culture. After a youth of many love affairs and close contact with Decembrists and other romantic reformers, he became a supporter of autocracy in the 1820's and a half-domesticated paterfamilias in the 1830's. He had always shared the aristocratic distaste for the vulgarity and capriciousness of the common horde. He was skeptical about the possibilities of democracy in America, and tended to praise great men-Peter the Great, Lomonosov, and even at times Napoleon-who had disregarded majority opinion in order to lift standards and advance culture. Always a monarchist, he hailed Nicholas I in more cordial terms than he had Alexander I; praised Peter and derided his Ukrainian foe Mazeppa in his Poltava of 1829; and endorsed the crushing of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Increasingly, he felt reverence for continuity and tradition. Violent change of any sort, he came to feel, would bring forth an inescapable revenge of fate-just as uncontrolled excess in poetry produces an imbalance that destroys true art. Pushkin was horrified by the terror of the French Revolution, and inveighed against the unleashed fury of the mob in his own major historical work of the early 1830's, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.

  Yet insofar as revolutionary figures become distinct personalities rather than mere weapons of the impersonal war on tradition, Pushkin treats them with the same relative detachment that is accorded to princes, gypsies, and all humanity in his work. Pugachev as an individual is sympathetic and understandable in Pushkin's History and an idealized figure in his fictional Captain's Daughter. Poles are portrayed objectively in Boris Godunov, as are Crimean Tatars in "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai." The crushing of the Decembrists saddened him not because of his sympathy for their programs but because of the foreshortening of imaginative vistas implied in the loss to Russia of gifted poets like Ryleev and Kiichelbecker. In the very year of the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin identified himself with the neo-classical French poet Andre Chenier, who was guillotined dunh"g™the terror of the French Revolution. Pushkin's Chenier "sings to freedom at the habitual popular festival of execution, unchanging to the end," and exclaims just before his death:

  thou, sacred Freedom, Immaculate Goddess, thou art not guilty.*

  uiuKiuuai ucauvc nccuom must oe preserved it fiuman life is to have any dignity. "Pushkin defends the viewpoint of a true conservatism, based on the primacy of culture and the spiritual independence of the individual personality and society."90 Even in the relative security from mob rule
and commercial pressures provided by Nicholas I, Pushkin felt "the primacy of culture" challenged by petty bureaucrats and stifling censorship. The flood and madness which engulfs the poor clerk in "The Bronze Horseman" are the revenge of fate for the precipitous reforms of Peter, just as the calamities and death which overtake Boris Godunov are revenge for the presumed crimes of an otherwise sympathetic Boris. The optimism of Pushkin's early lyrics becomes more obscured in his later works by a deepening sense of human loneliness amidst an essentially unfeeling nature, and a growing consciousness of the irrational chaotic depths within man himself. His late years were characterized by attempts to deepen his hitherto perfunctory understanding of Christianity, a nostalgia for his youth, and a general movement away from poetry to prose. "I am," he said, "an atheist of happiness. I do not belive in it."91 He died early in 1837 as a result of wounds incurred in a senseless duel.

  The posthumous veneration for Pushkin was, and has remained, extraordinary. His papers were immediately impounded as state property; and Lermontov wrote a poem which vigorously attacked Pushkin's censors and critics, signalizing the transfer of the mantle of poetic pre-eminence to another who was to die unnecessarily and prematurely just four years later. Lermontov was a more brooding and introspective figure than Pushkin. With him, the floodgates of emotionalism were opened and the heroes of European romanticism-Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goethe-came to dominate a poetic culture they had previously only influenced. Goethe's Faust was particularly influential. It was translated by Venevitinov, the original poetic Wunderkind of the twenties, and again in the thirties by Eugene Guber, a Saratov pietist who was a friend both of Pushkin and of Fesler, the occultist of the Alexandrian era.92 Odoevsky calls the hero of his highly romantic and widely read Russian Nights "the Russian Faust." The romantic longings and metaphysical preoccupations that were already marked in Lermontov are even further developed in the work of Fedor Tiutchev, who outlived Lermontov by many years, to-become-the-last-great sunfiybr.i3f_the__goJdfiILage of Russian poetry. Beginning with translations from Goethe's Faust in a dehbefately archaic Russian, Tiutchev turned to a world of private fantasy and nocturnal themes that is reminiscent of early, world-weary romantics like Novalis and Tieck.93

  This drift toward emotionalism, metaphysics, and obscurity signified the waning of the Pushkinian tradition and a general decline in the popu-

  larity of poetry. Growing impatience with the more disciplined and classical art forms of poetry and architecture did not diminish the enthusiasm for art itself, which was still believed to contain the answers to the great questions . of life.fThe idea of art as prophecy can again be traced to Pushkin, whose magnificent poem of 1826, "The Prophet," describes how the angel of the; Lord came to him when he was weary and lost in the wilderness "and my prophetic eyes were awakened like those of a startled eagle." The angel took away his idle inclinations, placed a living coal of fire where once his "trembling heart" had been, and bade him arise and speak the word of God to burn "the hearts of people."94

  The generation of artists that succeeded Pushkin tried to do just that. The way in which philosophic concerns created a new prophetic art is illustrated in the interlocked careers of two towering personalities of the "marvelous decade": the writer Nicholas Gogol and the painter Alexander Ivanov. The former dramatizes the transition from poetry to prose in rRussian letters; the latter the change from architecture to painting in the visual arts. Though they labored in different art forms and Gogol was far. moresuccesjful, they shared deep common concerns, and forged the first of the many close links that were to develop between prose writers and painters: Tolstoy and Ge, Garshin and Vereshchagin, Chekhov and Levitan.95

  The active lives of Gogol and Ivanov cover almost exactly the same space of time-roughly the reign of Nicholas I-and illustrate in many ways the inner discontent of that age. Both left St. Petersburg dissatisfied in the 1830's to seek a new source of inspiration for their art and to spend most of their remaining years abroad.

  Pilgrimages to foreign shrines were typical of the Nicholaevan era. A steady stream of Russians was visiting the residences of Schiller and Goethe. Zhukovsky, the father of Russian romantic poetry, spent many of his last years in Germany; the Munich of Schelling attracted Kireevsky, Shevyrev, and Tiutchev; the Berlin of the Hegelians drew Bakunin and Stankevich. Glinka and Botkin went to Spain, Khomiakov to Oxford, Herzen to Paris. The exotic regions of the Caucasus beckoned to Russians through the poetry of Baratynsky, Pushkin, and above all Lermontov. Romantic Auswanderung was so characteristic of the day that Stankevich suggested- in a caricature of Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus-that the Russian intellectual secretly wished to become "a prisoner of the Kalmyks."96

  Behind some of this travel lay the homesickness of the romantic imagination for the lost beauty of classical antiquity: "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." The search for links with this world was particularly anguished in Russia, which had no roots in classical tradition and little familiarity with the forms of art and life that had grown

  * out of it in the Mediterranean world. The best that Russia could do was to

  i

  : "discover" the Crimea: the exotically beautiful peninsula in the Black Sea, : which had been the site of a former Greek colony where Iphigenia had : found asylum, and Mithradates, exile and death.

  The Crimea had increasingly attracted aristocratic visitors in the years since Catherine incorporated it into the empire in 1783 and compared the region to "a fairy tale from the 1001 nights" after a visit four years later.97 The embellished account of a journey through the Crimea in 1820 by the tutor in classical languages to the future Tsar Nicholas I and the Grand Duke Constantine lent a glow of classical and pseudo-classical glory to what Pushkin was moved to call the "enchanted periphery" of the Russian empire.98 Though known in this period by the classical name of Taurida (Tauris), the more familiar, Tatar-derived name of Crimea also came into use-a reminder that this was the land of a recently vanquished Moslem people. Legends of Moslem magnificence began to mingle with memories of classical antiquity in the Russian romantic imagination. Pushkin's glittering pseudo-historical poem "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" became one of his most popular works and immortalized the Tatar capital.

  Pushkin's "Fountain," as distinct from Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets (or Lermontov's Hero of Our Time), has a balanced structure and a plot free from morbidity or melodrama. His picture of the captive Polish maiden at the court of the Tatar khan in Bakhchisarai inspired one of the most popular ballets of the Stalin era, and became, through the magic of Galina Ulanova's characterization, a suggestive symbol of a European heritage in bondage to despotic, quasi-Oriental rule.

  Pushkin remained essentially a classical European even while staying inside Russia and visiting no more than the periphery of the classical world. Gogol and Ivanov, on the other hand, became profoundly and selfconsciously Russian even while leaving their native land and journeying to the very heart of classical culture: to Rome, the artistic and religious capital of the Western world. A Russian colony had assembled there around Zinaida Volkonsky. She had brought with her a rich art collection and memories of her intimate friendship with Alexander I and the poet Venevitinov. She seems to have viewed herself as a kind of Russian Joan of Arc-having written, and sung the title role in, an opera of that name.99 It was in Rome, in the shadow of the Volkonsky villa, that Gogol and Ivanov were to create their greatest masterpieces.

  The two artists brought to their new home a profound conviction that their work must in some way exemplify Russia's redemptive spiritual mission in the world. They sought, as it were, to provide the artistic guides and weapons for the "spiritual conquest of Europe" that the prophets of the

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  thirties were predicting for Russia. Gogol had a special sense of responsibility born of the feeling that he had succeeded Pushkin as the first man of Russian letters. Ivanov felt a similar sense of special responsibility as the son of the director of the St
. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

  Each man devoted his life to one great work which was never really completed. Each became more politically conservative toward the end of his life (as did many of the Slavophiles), believing that Nicholas I and the existing powers could alone bring about a new order. Most important-and fateful for the subsequent history of Russian creative art-each came to believe that aesthetic problems should be subordinated to moral and religious ones. Each remained unmarried and apparently unmoved by women. Each life ended in strange wanderings, partial mental derangement, and a death that was unnecessary and-like that of Venevitinov, Pushkin, and Lermontov before them-brought on by their own actions. Unlike these earlier poets, however, the new prophetic artists included in their wanderings the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and ascetic self-mortification.

  Their work was-as they had wished it to be-uniquely Russian and quite unlike anything else in the world of art. By commanding the fascinated attention of Russia in their last years, they helped excite others with their blend of stark realism and aesthetic moralism. They swept aside not only the conventions of classicism but the sentimentality of romanticism as well. Despite their final conservatism, these two figures were idolized by radical and disaffected intellectuals who helped invest their anguish with an aura of holiness that had previously been confined to saints and princes.