Ivanov recognized that he was plunging on to something entirely new. He insisted that the murals did not belong in any existing church and disavowed all links with the pre-Raphaelites, with whom he is often erroneously compared. He was, he insisted in 1857, the year of his visit to Strauss in Tubingen, attempting to "unite the techniques of Raphael with the ideas of the new civilization."117 He wrote to Herzen (who like Gogol before him and Chernyshevsky after him was attempting to enlist support for his efforts) that he was "trying to create a new path for my art in the sketches," and later confessed that "I am, as it were, leaving the old mode of art without having any bedrock for the new."118 In 1858 he set off, after twenty-eight years of absence, for St. Petersburg to exhibit at last his "Appearance of Christ to the People" and to solicit the support of the new Tsar for his temple. Disappointed by public indifference upon arrival and exhausted
morally and physically by his strange quest, Ivanov died only a few days after the first showing of his work in St. Petersburg.
Ivanov's "Appearance of the Messiah" must be judged as a failure by almost any standard. The corrupt figures in the foreground dominate the picture and seem totally indifferent to the distant figure of Christ, who seems strangely insignificant and almost unrelated to the picture. The much-labored face of Christ lacks any clearly defined characteristics and conveys an expression of weakness and even embarrassment.
It is perhaps fitting that this final artistic legacy of a monumental and prophetic age should be dominated by the figure of John the Baptist, who stands at the center of the canvas as its most majestic personality. The day of John the Baptist had been the most elaborate official holiday of Russian higher masonry. Chaadaev had encouraged Russians to believe that "great things have come from the desert" and had written on the title page of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that "I am not the savior, but he who announces his coming."119 Ivanov had tried first to create and then to become Christ, but he had left behind only sketches of human suffering and a noble failure dominated by the ascetic prophet who can do no more than announce that someone mightier is coming.
John the Baptist was known in Russia as "the forerunner" {predtecha), a designation that seems particularly appropriate for Ivanov. His vision of universal Russian rule aided by "public artists" and adorned with "temples of humanity" seems at times like an anticipation of Soviet ideology. His initial stylistic experimentation anticipates the emancipated search for new art forms in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. His final realism and preoccupation with suffering helped usher in the bleak, semi-photographic style that was to dominate painting until the 1890's. Nonetheless, for all his qualities as a prophet and precursor, Ivanov stands at the end rather than the beginning of an age. His life and work represent a final heroic effort to attain a kind of moralistic self-transformation into the likeness of Christ.
Ivanov's failure to find a new religious philosophy-or a philosophical religion-represents the frustration of a pursuit that had begun in higher order Masonry. Higher order Masonry was known to its adepts as the "royal art";120 and the prophetic artists of the Nicholaevan era had sought to find the art forms for the new kingdom. But no one was yet sure what kind of a kingdom it would be, and artists tended to become either haunted by the God they had lost or driven to madness in pursuit of His inner secrets. Ivanov's failure only posed in more dramatic terms the nagging question that Herzen had asked as early as 1835:
Where is our Christ? Are we students without a teacher, apostles without a Messiah? 121
In their anguish, thinkers of the late Nicholaevan era looked for a messiah almost everywhere: in the person of Nicholas I (Ivanov), the holy wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, suffering Poland (Mickiewicz), the Ukrainian peasantry (Shevchenko), or among the ascetic elders of the Optyna Pustyn (Kireevsky). The religious works of Gogol and Ivanov made Christ no longer appear to be a source of deliverance or tenderness. Ivanov's picture of Christ as a lonely, suffering, and uncertain man was reflected and magnified in subsequent nineteenth century paintings: suffering predominating in the work of Ge, brooding loneliness in that of Kramskoy. The seductive thought that the aristocratic reformer himself might prove to be the messiah was suggested by Pleshcheev, the prophetic "first poet" of the Petrashevsky circle in the late forties, who exhorted that confused circle of reformers to "believe that thou shalt meet, like the Savior, disciples along the way."122
As if to clear the stage for new and less narrowly aristocratic movements, the brief period from 1852 to 1858 claimed the lives of a host of gifted figures of the Nicholaevan age: Nadezhdin, Chaadaev, Granovsky, Gogol, Ivanov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky. None of these were old men; but they had burnt themselves out like those who had died even earlier and at much younger ages: Venevitinov, Pushkin, Stankevich, Lermontov, and Belinsky. Out of their collective effort had come an art that was truly national and rich in prophetic overtones. Khomiakov, who was himself to die in i860, wrote the epitaph for this chapter of Russian culture in a letter of 1858 on the occasion of Ivanov's death:
He was in painting what Gogol was in writing and Kireevsky in philosophy. Such people do not live long, and that is not accidental. To explain their death it is not enough to say that the air of the Neva hangs heavy or that cholera enjoys honorary citizenship in Petersburg . . . another cause leads these laborers prematurely to the grave. Their work is not mere personal labor. . . . These are powerful and rich personalities who lie ill not just for themselves; but in whom we Russians, all of us, are compressed by the burden of our strange historical development.123
The Missing Madonna
The waning of classical form in art and life was one of the many fateful results of the reign of Nicholas I. His official ideologists-Uvarov and Pletnev-had found the literary heritage of classical antiquity largely
incompatible with the new doctrine of official nationality. The continued loyalty of the aristocratic intellectuals to the distant world of classical antiquity and the neo-classical Renaissance became a sign of their estrangement from official ideology.
The most gifted creative figures of the late Nicholaevan period- Gogol, Ivanov, and Tiutchev-had gone to Rome in hopes of forging some kind of link between the awakening culture of Russia and classical antiquity. Slavophiles sought these links no less than Westernizers; Shevyrev's lectures did much to introduce Russia to the wonders of classical literature. Herzen called his oath to avenge the Decembrists "Hanniballic." Catherine was the "Semiramis" and St. Petersburg the "Palmyra of the North." Most masonic lodges bore names from classical mythology, and there was an abundance of classical statuary, Latin and Greek anthologies, and classical captions and titles. A century of aristocratic poetry was in a sense framed by the figure of Homer. The first poem to enjoy real popularity was Fenelon's continuation of the Odyssey, TeMmaque, and the first important Russian epic poet, Kheraskov, was known as "the Russian Homer." The most eagerly awaited poetic accomplishment in the late years of Nicholas* reign (after the death of Pushkin and Lermontov) was Zhukovsky's translation of the Odyssey. Both Skovoroda and Kireevsky were called "the Russian Socrates" by their followers.
Closely identified with classical antiquity in Russian eyes was the neoclassical Renaissance, which Russians also idealized. BeUnsky's sobriquet "furious Vissarion" was a conscious adoption of Ariosto's Orlando Fu-rioso. Batiushkov built up a cult of the Italian Renaissance. Many lyric poets compared themselves to Petrarch, and "universal men" like Venevitinov likened themselves to Pico della Mirandola. The literary circles of the age looked for inspiration to the Neoplatonic mysticism of Ficino's Academy.
The nostalgia which Russians began to feel even during this period for the measured form of Pushkin's poetry and the broader vistas of Russian life under Catherine and Alexander bears tribute to the sense of lost opportunity which Russians were later to feel about this age. This was to remain the golden age of Russian letters, in which classical forms and Renaissance exuberance first struck real roots in Russian soil.
Perhaps
the finest legacy of this vanishing neo-classicism was the rich supply of palaces, parks, and public buildings that had been built in most of the cities and many of the estates of Russia. There was a last flurry of building in this grand ensemble manner during the early years of Nicholas' reign: the triumphal gate over the Tver entrance to Moscow from the St. Petersburg road; the Bolshoi Theater and Square in Moscow; the imposing
complex around the Synod and senate building in one part of St. Petersburg (and around the library, theater, and university buildings in another); and the stately ring of library, cathedral, and government buildings around the great square in Helsinki, the new capital of Russian-occupied Finland. The building of St. Isaac's Cathedral and the refashioning of the surrounding square in St. Petersburg were the last of these monumental efforts. Henceforth the style was to be more eclectic and utilitarian, the architectural development of the great cities more piecemeal and haphazard.
The forty years of work on St. Isaac's finally came to an end in 1858, the year in which Ivanov returned to die in St. Petersburg with his long-labored canvas. Ivanov's painting and sketches failed to inspire painters to remain faithful to the "technique of Raphael" just as decisively as St. Isaac's failed to encourage continued architectural allegiance to the neo-classical style of the past.124
The highest symbol of the classical culture that the Russians longed to share and the quintessence of ideal beauty to their romantic imagination was Raphael's Sistine Madonna. On exhibit in Dresden-an accustomed stopover point for Russians traveling by land to Western Europe-the painting inspired Russians to sigh for a world of "beauty and freedom! . . . the madonna of Raphael and the primitive chaos of mountain heights."125 Zhukovsky made frequent pilgrimages to the painting and wrote of it in the true romantic spirit:
Ah, not in our world dwells
The genius of pure beauty: Only for a time it visits us
From the heights of heaven.126
The painting became a kind of icon of Russian romanticism. A Russian visitor of the fifties wrote that after looking at the painting he was "deprived of all capability for thinking or talking about anything else."127 By that time, the painting had become an object of heated controversy as well as extreme veneration. Lunin cited it as a principal factor in his conversion to Catholicism;128 Belinsky, moving in the opposite direction, felt obliged to condemn it as a mere aristocratic portrait:
She looks at us, the distant plebeians, with cold benevolence, fearful at one and the same time either of being dirtied by our looks or of bringing grief to us.129
Herzen contended that the face of Mary revealed an inner realization that the child she held was not her own. Uvarov spoke of "the Virgin of Dresden" as if Dresden itself had been the site of new miracles.180 Dostoev-
sky kept a large print of the painting over his writing desk as a symbol of the combination of faith and beauty which he hoped would save the world.
But the feeling was growing in the fifties that beauty in truth "dwells not in our world." If men of Gogol's and Ivanov's talent could succeed only in depicting earthly suffering, perhaps there were no other worlds-or at least no .other worlds that could be reached through art. Chernyshevsky, whose admiration for Gogol and Ivanov had helped lead him out of the seminary, began to cast doubt on the intrinsic merit of art in his Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality in 1855. It was only a short stride to Pisarev's declaration that a cook in St. Petersburg had done more for humanity than Raphael; to the slogan "boots rather than Raphael" (or in some versions, Shakespeare); and to the popular revolutionary legend that Bakunin had urged that the Sistine Madonna be pitched onto the barricades to keep the slavish soldiers of the old order from firing on his revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849.
The passion for ideas and the development of psychological complexes about certain names and concepts, though generally characteristic of European romanticism, was carried to extremes in Russia. Bakunin's alleged fury at Raphael-like Belinsky's earlier rage at Hegel-is more understandable in terms of passion than of intellect. There was an unhealthy compulsion about some of the Russian attachment to classical antiquity and an element of sublimated sexuality in the creative activity of the period. The prodigious and original careers of Bakunin and Gogol both seem to have been developed partially as a compensation for sexual impotence. There is, in general, little room for women in the egocentric world of Russian romanticism. Lonely brooding was relieved primarily by exclusively masculine companionship in the lodge or circle. From Skovoroda to Bakunin there are strong hints of homosexuality, though apparently of the sublimated, Platonic variety. This passion appears closer to the surface in Ivanov's predilection for painting naked boys, and finds philosophic expression in the fashionable belief that spiritual perfection required androgyny, or a return to the original union of male and female characteristics. Ivanov in his preliminary sketches of the all-important head of Christ in his "Appearance" used as many feminine as masculine models. Gogol in his strange essay Woman compared the artist's effort to "transform his immortal idea into crude matter" with the effort to "embody woman in man."131
Women in romantic literature were often distant, idealized creatures, such as Schiller's Maid of Orleans or his Queen in Don Carlos. In the relatively rare cases in Russian literature of this period where a woman was simple and believable-like Tatiana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin-she
tended to be venerated almost as a saint. Zinaida Volkonsky was a kind of mother figure to Gogol and Ivanov in Rome; and the suffering, faithful wives of the exiled Decembrists became a favorite subject for fanciful and idealized poems.
The aristocratic intellectual whose outlook was still primarily heterosexual was often just as deeply unhappy in his personal life. Just as he tended to be experimental and inconstant in his attachment to ideas, so he was in his relations with the opposite sex. Indeed, frustration in love was at times relieved by infatuation with an idea (and vice versa). Always the egocentric lover, he embraced both women and ideas with a mixture of passion and fantasy that made a sustained relationship almost impossible. Whether the object was a woman or an idea, the embrace tended to be total and intercourse almost immediate. Then came a fleeting period of euphoria after which the aristocratic intellectual resumed his restless search to find somewhere else the ecstasy that eluded him. His dreamy idealism was transferred en bloc to some new object of ravishment; and all that was venal or ungratifying was associated with the former partner. Thus, ideological attachments were often an extension of personal ones, and neither area of life can be fully understood without some understanding of the other.
But it would be irreverent and inaccurate to concentrate too narrowly on physiological factors. The Russian romantics of the period liked to express their plight in terms of Schiller's Resignation. There were, according to the story, two flowers in the garden of life, the flower of hope and that of pleasure; and one cannot hope to pluck them both.132 The Russian aristocrats had no hesitation in choosing hope. Inconstant in faith and love-the other qualities that St. Paul had commended to the young church of Corinth -the anguished Russians held fast to hope. An implausible, impassioned sense of expectation was the most important single legacy of the aristocratic century to the century that lay ahead. Frustrated both personally and ideologically, the thinking elite of Russia sought with increasing intensity to find a prophetic message in history and art.
At the base of their plight lay not just a world-weary desire to "return to the womb" but also perhaps a subconscious nostalgia for the "other Russia" on which the aristocracy as a class had turned its back. They seemed almost to be feeling their way back to the dimly perceived, half-remembered world of Muscovy where belief was unquestioning and where truth was pronounced by the original prophetic historian and artist: the monastic chronicler and iconographer.
The missing Madonna was perhaps not that of Raphael, which they had never really known, but rather the Orthodox icon of the Mother of God. This icon stands at the center of a prophetic dream for w
hich Tolstoy
later sought an explanation from the elders of Optyna Pustyn. In the dream a single candle is burning in a dark cave before a solitary icon of the Mother of God. The cave is full of faceless people praying with lamentation that the time of the Antichrist has come; while Metropolitan Philaret and Gogol's fanatical spiritual guide, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, stand trembling outside, unable to enter. The "fear and trembling" which Kierkegaard found missing from the complacent Christendom of nineteenth-century Europe is literally present in this dream-as it is in the ugly, shivering, naked old men that John the Baptist is trying to lead into the river Jordan in one of Ivanov's best sketches,133 and in the trembling, skeletal figure of Gogol being forcibly bled by leeches as he lay uncovered and trembling on his deathbed underneath an icon of the Virgin.
The Icon and the Axe Page 52