The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Father Ambrose explained to Tolstoy that the dream illustrates the plight of Christian Russia which "looks with lively feeling, sadness, and even fear on the sad state of our present faith and morality, but will not approach the queen of heaven and pray to her for intercession like those in the cave."

  When a trickle of inteUectuals began to return to the Church in the late imperial period, one of the converts likened the process to an exchange of the Sistine Madonna for the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.134 In both cases the missing God was feminine-linked not only to the Christian image of the Virgin but also perhaps to the "damp mother earth" of pre-Christian Russia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci of European romanticism.

  The "Hamlet Question"

  Although none of the "cursed questions" were fully answered in the "remarkable decade," the debate now tended to take place within the framework of certain basic assumptions. Truth was to be found within rather than beyond history. Russia had some special destiny to realize in the coming redemption of humanity. A new, prophetic art was to announce and guide men to this destiny. The golden age "lay not behind us but ahead": in a time when man's Promethean labors will end and he will come to rest both physically and spiritually in eternal and ecstatic union with the elusive feminine principles of truth and beauty.

  Within this vague romantic cosmology, however, the Russians pressed on relentlessly, seeking more complete answers. What was this truth, this destiny? Where was this feminine principle to be found? And, above all, what specific message does prophetic art bring to us?

  Thus, however impractical their ideas may seem to the Western mind, the driving force behind Russian thought during this period was an essentially practical impulse to find more specific answers to these psychologically compelling questions. They were not interested in form or logic, which were part of the artificial "pseudo-classicism" of the eighteenth century. They were not afraid to seek truth in fantasies and symbols, though they were no longer fascinated with the occult for its own sake as in the Alexandrian age. The men of the "marvelous decade" wanted answers to the questions that arose inescapably, existentially, along the new path they had chosen. Any kind of inconsistency or idiosyncrasy was permissible as long as a thinker remained dedicated to "intelligence" in the prophetic spiritual sense in which Saint-Martin and Schwarz had understood the word; as long as they remained what their Schellingian and Hegelian professors had commended them to be: "priests of truth."

  In their heated desire to find answers for the "cursed questions," the aristocratic intellectuals mixed fact, fantasy, and prophecy at every turn. They created a unique fusion of intense sincerity and ideological contradiction, which has been the fascination and despair of almost every serious chronicler of Russian thought. Though not an aristocrat, Belinsky, "the furious Vissarion," epitomized this combination. The special authority which he-and his chosen ideological medium of literary criticism-came to occupy in the culture of the late imperial period is not understandable without appreciating the sense of human urgency that lay behind the Russian quest for answers. In a famous scene that became part of the developing folklore of the Russian intelligentsia, Belinsky refused to interrupt one particularly heated all-night discussion, professing amazement that his friends could consider stopping for breakfast when they had not yet decided about the question of God's existence.

  Belinsky was not at all embarrassed by his own contradictions and convolutions. He was not trying to transplant the clean, but remote categories of classical thought to the Russian scene-let alone the tidy, confining categories of timid bourgeois thinkers. "For me," he wrote, "to think, feel, understand, and suffer are one and the same thing."135 Books casually received in the West drove him and his contemporaries into intense personal and spiritual crises. They were pored over by Belinsky and other literary and bibliographical critics for hints of the "new revelation" and prophecy that Schelling and Saint-Martin had taught them to look for in literature.

  Belinsky was particularly concerned with discovering among his Russian contemporaries examples of the new prophetic art his teacher Nadezh-din had insisted lay beyond both classicism and romanticism. The great Russian novels of the sixties and seventies can be considered examples of

  such art, and it is impossible fully to understand the genius of those works without considering how it was influenced by, and responsive to, the traditions of philosophic and critical intensity pioneered by Belinsky.

  The Russians looked to literature for prophecy rather than entertainment. There is almost no end to the number of Western literary influences on Russian thought. They range from inescapable ones like Schiller, Hoffmann and George Sand136 to all-but-forgotten second-rate figures like Victor-Joseph Jouy, whose depiction of Parisian life was transposed to St. Petersburg and given new intensity by Gogol.137 Perhaps the most important of all was Sir Walter Scott, whom Gogol called "the Scottish sorcerer," and whose works inspired the writing of history as well as of historical novels.138 Pseudo-medieval romances helped give an active, historical cast to the "spiritual knighthood" of higher order Masonry. Russians dreamed of being "a knight for an hour," to cite the title of a famous Nekrasov poem; or of recreating the masculine friendship and implausible heroism of Posa and Don Carlos in opposing the authoritarianism of the Grand Inquisitor and Philip II in Schiller's Don Carlos. They also identified themselves with the metaphysical quest of such favorite romantic heroes as Byron's Cain and Don Juan, Goethe's Faust and Wilhelm Meister.

  But there was one Uterary character who seemed particularly close to the soul of the aristocratic century. He was the favorite stage figure of the "marvelous decade," the subject of one of Belinsky's longest articles, and a source of unique fascination for modern Russian thought: Shakespeare's Hamlet.

  The romantic interest in the melancholy prince began in the eastern Baltic, on the gloomy marshes that divide the German and Slavic worlds. It was in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) that the "magus of the North," Johann Hamann, first taught the young Herder to regard the works of Shakespeare as a form of revelation equal to the Bible and to use Hamlet as his basic textbook for this new form of symbolic exegesis.139 Hamann was an influential pietist preacher, a student of the occult, and a bitter foe of what he felt to be the excessive rationalism of his neighbor and contemporary, Immanual Kant. If Kant's influence was great, indeed decisive, on the subsequent development of Western philosophy, the immediate influence on ordinary thinking of men like Hamann was far greater, particularly in Eastern Europe. For better or worse, Kant's critical philosophy never gained a serious hearing in Russia until the late nineteenth century, whereas Hamann's quasi-theosophic idea of finding symbolic philosophic messages in literary texts became a commonplace of Russian thought.

  By the time Herder moved east from Konigsberg to Riga, Russia had already welcomed Hamlet as one of the first plays to be regularly performed

  on the Russian stage. Sumarokov started the Russian critical discussion of the tragedy with his immodest claim to have improved on the original by his garbled translation of 1747.140 Whether or not Herder first imparted his fascination with the original version directly while in Russian-held Riga or only indirectly through his later impact on German romantic thought, Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.

  The extraordinary popularity of Hamlet in Russia may have come in part from certain similarities to the popular drama about the evil Tsar Maximilian confronted by his virtuous son. But the principal reason for the sustained interest of the aristocracy lay in the romantic fascination with the character of Hamlet himself. Russian aristocrats felt a strange kinship with this privileged court figure torn between the mission he was called on to perform and his own private world of indecision and poetic brooding. By the early nineteenth century there seemed nothing surprising in a Russian aristocrat's leaving his boat to make a special pilgrimage to "the Hamlet castle" at Elsinore. Standing on the Danish coast in the straits where the Baltic Sea moves out into the Altantic, this cas
tle loomed up before Russian ships en route to Western Europe like a darkened and deserted lighthouse. Lunin paid a nocturnal visit to it at the beginning of his trip to Western Europe in 1816 that led him onto the path of revolution.141

  Particular attention was always paid to the famous monologue "To be or not to be," which posed for Russia the one "cursed question" that was -quite literally-a matter of life or death. The famous opening phrase was translated in 1775 as "to live or not to live";142 and the question of whether or not to take one's own life subsequently became known in Russian thought as "the Hamlet question." It was the most deeply personal and metaphysical of all the "cursed questions"; and for many Russians it superseded all the others.

  In the spring of 1789, when Europe was standing on the brink of the French Revolution, the restless young aristocrat Nicholas Karamzin was writing the Swiss phrenologist Lavater in search of an answer to the question of why one should go on living. There is, he complained, no real joy in living, no satisfaction in the knowledge of one's own being. "I am-even my / is for me a riddle which I cannot resolve."143 Three years later, after extended wandering through Europe (including visits to Lavater and to a performance of Hamlet in Drury Lane Theatre),144 he returned to write a story-not about the social and political turmoil that was convulsing the continent but about "Poor Liza," who solves the riddle of being by ending her own life. The suicide of sensitivity-in protest to an unfeeling world- became a favorite subject of conversation and contemplation. Visits were frequentiy made by young aristocrats to the pond where Liza's Ophelia-like

  drowning was alleged to have taken place. The lugubrious institution of Russian roulette was apparently created out of sheer boredom by aristocratic guards officers.

  Radishchev was perhaps the first to turn special attention to Hamlet's monologue in his own last work: On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, and resolved the question by taking his own life thereafter, in 1802. The last decade of the eighteenth century had already seen a marked rise in aristocratic suicides. Heroic suicide had been commended by the Roman Stoics, who were in many ways the heroes of classical antiquity for the eighteenth-century aristocrats. Although this "world weariness" was a Europe-wide phenomena and the Russian mirovaia skorb' is an exact translation of Weltschmerz, the term skorb' has a more final and unsentimental sound than the German word Schmerz. By the late years of the reign of Alexander I the high incidence of aristocratic suicide was causing the state grave concern and was used as an important argument for tightening censorship and increasing state discipline.145

  The rigid rule of Nicholas I did not, however, relieve Russian thinkers of their compulsive preoccupation with "the Hamlet question." Indeed, it was this search for the meaning of life-more than ethnographic curiosity or reformist conviction-that inspired the turn to "the people" by Belinsky (and the radical populists after him). Belinsky felt that preoccupation with the cursed questions set his own time apart from that of Lomonosov and the confident, cosmopolitan Enlightenment:

  In the time of Lomonosov we did not need people's poetry; then the great question-to be or not to be-was solved for us not in the spirit of the people (narodnost'), but in Europeanism.148

  To the men of the "remarkable decade"-many of whom courted or committed suicide-Hamlet stood as a kind of mirror of their generation As with so many attitudes of the period, Hegel was their indirect and unacknowledged guide. Hegel had associated the melancholy and indecision of Hamlet with his subjectivism and individualism-his "absence of any formed view of the world" or "vigorous feeling for life"147-problems be* setting any modern man who stands outside the rational flow of history as a proud and isolated individuum. This pejorative Hegelian term for "individual" was precisely the label that BeUnsky adopted in his famous letter to Botkin rejecting Hegel. It is in the context of this strange struggle that Belinsky waged with Hegel-always accepting Hegel's basic terminology, definitions, and agenda-that one must read Belinsky's extended portrayal of Hamlet in 1838 as a true idealist dragged down by the venal world about him.148

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  Belinsky was captivated not only by the quality of frustrated idealism in Hamlet but also by the intense way in which the part was played by Paul Mochalov. This extraordinary actor played the role of Hamlet repeatedly until his death in 1848, the last year of the "remarkable decade." So popular did the play become that simplified versions began to be given in the informal theatricals presented by serfs seeking to entertain their landowners; and the term "quaking Hamlet" became a synonym for coward in popular speech.149

  Mochalov was the first in a series of great stage personalities that was to make the Russian theater of the late imperial period unforgettable. The remarkable feature of Mochalov's acting-like that of Nizhinsky's dancing and Chaliapin's singing-was his ability to be the part. Just as later generations found it difficult to conceive of Boris Godunov without Chaliapin, or of The Specter of the Rose without Nizhinsky, so Russians of the forties could not think of Hamlet without Mochalov. The simple peasant, of course, always thought of Christ as he appeared on icons. Popular saints were "very like" the figures on icons, and the aristocratic hero felt impelled to become "very like" the figures on the stage. Stankevich confessed that he came to regard the theater as a "temple" and was deeply influenced in his personal patterns of behavior by watching Mochalov.150

  Turgenev used Hamlet as a symbol of the late-Nicholaevan generation of intellectuals in his famous essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote." Having just created one of the most famous Hamlet figures in Russian literature in his first novel, Rudin, Turgenev now spoke of the contrasting but also typical Quixotic type: the uncomplicated enthusiast who loses himself in the service of an ideal, unafraid of the laughter of his contemporaries. Such figures were to become prominent in the Quixotic social movement of subsequent decades, but "Hamletism" remained typical of much of Russian thought. Indeed, many of Turgenev's subsequent literary creations were to end in suicide.

  The conflict of these two types is mirrored in the career of one of the most interesting thinkers of late Nicholaevan Russia: V. S. Pecherin. There seems a kind of poetic justice in the similarity of his name to that of Pechorin, Lermontov's wandering and brooding "hero of our time." For this real-life Pecherin was an even more peripatetic and romantic figure. He moved from philology to poetry, from socialism to Catholicism, to an English monastery, and finally to an Irish hospital, where he died in 1885 as a chaplain to the sick-a distant admirer and faint echo of the populist movement in Russia. Yet he was tortured throughout-not so much by the fear that his ideas were Utopian as by gnawing uncertainty whether life itself was worth living. He had in his student days been driven to "the Hamlet

  question" by Max Stirner, whose lectures at Berlin inspired him to embark on one of the many unfinished trilogies of the Russian nineteenth century. The first part of this untitled drama is a weird apotheosis of Stirner's idea that man can achieve divinity through his own uncaused act of self-assertion: suicide. The leading character (with the heroic Germanic name of Woldemar) not only kills himself but convinces his lover (with the spiritualized name of Sophia) to do likewise. "Sophia," he tells her, "thy name means Wisdom, Divine Wisdom. . . . There is but one question: To be or not to be."161

  The second part of the trilogy, entitled The Triumph of Death, elaborates this theme with ghoulish delight, as King Nemesis watches the destruction of the entire world-announced by a storm, a musical chorus, and five falling stars representing the slain Decembrist leaders. The chorus in praise of death echoes some of the dark thoughts of Pushkin's "Hymn in Praise of the Plague" and draws freely from both apocalyptical and romantic symbolism. Death appears as a youth on a white horse and is hailed as "the God of freedom, the God of striving." Then the stage is cleared for one last monologue, which ends this second (and last) part of the trilogy. It is a song of the dying poet. "The poet," says Pecherin, "is Don Quixote . . . (who) will save the fatherland . . . find the new world for us." Then, in an en
ding that runs off into dots to indicate its incompleteness, the "dying poet" speaks of Russia as the land of "the brightening dawn" and says: "I shall pour forth abundant strength on Russia, and the steeled Russian knife . . ."162

  If "the Hamlet question" was never resolved by the aristocratic intellectuals, preoccupation with it nonetheless served to clear away secondary concerns. Indeed, the oft-ridiculed generation of "the fathers," the romantic, "superfluous" aristocrats of the forties, in some ways did even more to tear Russian thought away from past Russian practices and traditions than the iconoclastic "sons," the self-proclaimed "new men" of die sixties. The fantasy-laden romanticism of the Nicholaevan age swept away petty thoughts with the same decisiveness with which actors were swept off the stage in the last act of Hamlet or the final scene of The Triumph of Death. The passion for destruction which burst onto Europe in the late forties in the person of Bakunin was only the most extreme illustration of the philosophic desperation produced by the interaction of German ideas, Slavic enthusiasm, and the personal frustrations and boredom of a provincial aristocracy. Bakunin illustrates as well the transfer of the vision of a "brightening dawn," of "abundant strength," and "steeled knives" from the lips of a "dying poet" to the life of a living revolutionary. His volcanic career anticipated, and in some degree influenced, the proliferation of quixotic