The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  in a boat with some people that she did not know. They were silent and sat quite still. No one was rowing the boat, which moved of its own accord. Elena was not feeling frightened, but she was bored; she wanted to know who these people were and why she was with them.

  Out of this boredbm and confusion comes a revolutionary upheaval:

  Shejopisd around and as she did so, the lake grew wider, the banks disappeared: andjjow it was""no~ longer ??????? but a heaving seafEIiSa1? unknown companions jumped up, "ffioTIting and waving their arms. . . . ElenaJeCOgiflZea meir races now: her falher_was among. Iheml Then-»--sort of white hurricane burst upon the waters.

  Thus, the aristocracy itself was beinp; consnmed| In an effort to chart the course mat lay beyond, Turgenev turns the water into "endless snow," moves Elena from a boat to a sleigh, and gives her a new companion: "Katya, the little beggar-girl she had known years ago." Katyais. of course^. a prototype of the new populist saint: a "humiliated and insulted" figure who retains nonetrIeTess*inherent noMty_and imparts to the aristocratic Elena ??^?????????)^^

  world"

  "Katya, where are we going?" Elena asks; but Katya, like Gogol's troika and Pushkin's bronze horseman, does not answer. Instead, traditional

  symbols of messianic deHyerjace.i^xJaefor«4je£.^^

  of tEe_dieam:

  She looked along the road and saw in the distance, through the blown snow, the outlines of a city with tall white towers and silver-gleaming cupolas. "Katya, Katya, is that Moscow? But no," she {yumgnt}, "that's not Moscow, that is the §olovetsk monastery"; and she knew that in thereTin one of its innumerable narrow cells, sturTy*"ancl crowded to-' gethellike toe cells of a beehive-in mere bmitry Was locked up. "1 must free him."

  Liberationcomes^however, only in death; and, atthjs very ???????-?»^

  "a yawnffl^Tgrey abyss suddenly opened up in front of her." The sleigh I

  plunged into it, and Katya's last distant cry 6f"'"Elena" proved in reality ?

  the voice of her Bulgarian lover,Insarov, the "true Tsar" of the new Russia, I

  its would-be revolutionary deliverer, saying "Elena, I am dying."""--J

  In the metaphysics of late romanticism, death offers a kind of liberation; and the sea appears more as a place for obliteration than purification. Suggestions of such thinking are present even in Christian thinking. The Spanish martyr and mystic Raymond Lully (one of the most popular of medieval Western writers among Russians) had proclaimed "I want to die in an ocean of love";27 and Dante's Paradise had likened the peace of God to "that sea toward which all things move."28

  In Chekhov's "Lights," the night lights of a half-finished railroad by the sea are likened to "the thoughts of man . . . scattered in disorder, stretching in a straight line toward some goal in the midst of darkness" leading the narrator to look down from a cliff at the "majestic, infinite, and forbidding" sea:

  Far below me, behind a veil of thick darkness, the sea kept up a low angry growl. . . . And it seemed to me that the whole world consisted only of the thoughts straying through my head . . . and of an unseen power murmuring monotonously somewhere below. Afterwards, as I sank into a doze, it began to seem that it was not the sea murmuring, but my thoughts, and that the whole world consisted in nothing but me. Concentrating the whole world in myself in this way, I . . . abandoned myself to the sensation I was so fond of: the sensation of fearful isolation, when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. It is a proud, demonic sensation, only possible to Russians, whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as their plains, their forests, and their snow.29

  An artist rather than a metaphysician, Chekhov looks_in_the end to

  "the expression ??^?"???;?~??11?~??£?? rather than to the logical con-

  clusion of his thoughtsT^neHfiiTOroT"^rather than__

  commits suicidef j^""ls^IlieTbby^^elf_^oves froJTl_tteJ?leJoiir?rlatic__, suicidelittne" end of his firsTgreat play, The Sea Gull, through an unsuccess-

  un to iew snores

  ful suicide in Uncle Vanya, to the elegiac beauty of his last play, The Cherry Orchard, in which there is no attempt at suicide-or any other form of escape from the lingering sadness of late Imperial Russia. Nonetheless, Chekhov's fascination with what he was the first to call "the Hamlet question" helped keep thoughts of suicide before his audiences.

  To some extent drowning was a romantic imitation of Ophelia in Hamlet or of the real-life Byron. But drowning had abo_teen_aii-ijBportaflt

  ?

  form of ritual execution in Old Russia. Pre^hristian beliefsJjadL survived about the need to propitiate jealous~*wite7"^^ritsr^A^s_J^_missing nf^madonna ^ amp;1???~?7?????^?'^those transformed figures of drowned ?| women who became^aTHnd of enchanted ???? maiden ffii the florid pagan mythology of "Russian romanticism. Perhaps also somewhere at the bottom -of iHaETiay a purer existence than existed on land-perhaps the "shining city of Kitezh" which was said to have descended uncorrupted to the bottom of a trans-Volga lake at the time of the first Mongol invasion.

  A final symbol increasingly connectedwith the sea in the late imperial period waTthat oflne'coming apocalypse. Belief in "a past "of "comffigTSSa is one of the oldest and most universal wajs in which man's poetic imagination has expressed his fear of divine judgment and retribution.30 There may be traces of the Eastern myth of "an insatiable sea" seeking to inundate all humanity in the belief among Old Believers in the Urals that a great flood was coming and that God's people must flee to the mountains, where alone they could be rescued by God.31

  Fear of the sea_was perhaps to be expected among an earthbound

  people whose discovejj^fjbeje^^discove|y__

  of the £utside worJ_dJ_Jbemfact that the we£^ard-looking__capital~Qf_St. Petersburg was built on land reel aimed from--and periodically threatened by-^the.sea.gaxe_sgecial vividnessJoJhe_BjbJicjJJmagw^_rf^e_fJ£od. The occurrence of the first important flood of the city in 1725, the very year of Peter's death, encouraged those who had resisted Peter's innovations to speak of a "second flood" and the coming end of the world. Belief that these calamities represented the wrathful judgment of God was encouraged by the curious fact that two of the greatest subsequent floods of the city occurred almost exactly one hundred and two hundred years later, at the very times when two other imperial innovators had just died: Alexander I and Lenin respectively. In both subsequent cases, the death and flood occurred at the end of periods of hopeful expectation and broughTmore prosaic, re-A preserve forces into power: Nicholas I and StalmTTEusTIKi" ncrThistoricai 2* imagination!^

  colnHdencis."™"""" *-«---"^-

  Particularly after Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman," the image of a flood

  consuming St. Petersburg recurs frequently in the literature of the late imperial period. Whereas fire was the enduring fear and symbol of judgment -j in the wooden_w£dd_r^_Moscoffi,. the sea prWMea]^chasymbbriOTTne~i2^ cityj3nthe_NgX£.

  The man_wdioperhaps__didjsast to bring Russia both visually and imaginatively in_xontact with_the_ sea in the late nineteenth century was the gifted and prolific painter lyan^Airazoysky. Born by the sea in the Crimea in 1817, Aivazovsky was fascinated by the sea and ships throughout the eighty-three years of his life. As a favored painter for the St. Petersburg academy, he traveled widely during the Nicholaevan era, and became a personal friend of its most gifted creative figures: Glinka and Briullov, Ivanov and Gogol. While visiting the latter two in Rome during the early 1840's, he sold one of his early canvases to the Vatican-on the appropriately romantic subject "Primitive Chaos." He followed one of Ivanov's early leads by painting numerous scenes of the idealized Italian sea coast and has been credited with introducing sea painting to Italy and influencing the work of Joseph Turner.

  Almost all of his more than five thousand paintings were scenes of the sea, and,pafficuTarly after his return to Russia, the majontyshowed either violenT^tormsor~rTattles. Following the tradition~f~Brrullov ????^????? Aivazovsky painted his major works on a gigantic scale,
many of them well over fifty feet in width. The sheer size of the sea in his canvases creates a sense of human insignificance both for the figures tossed upon it in the picture and for those looking at it in the gallery. His most influential paintings were his largest and most dramatic: "The Storm," which shows a ship sinking and a lifeboat bobbing in the midst of a vast panorama of contrasting light and darkness; and "The Ninth Wave," which lends a kind of incandescent glory to the last wave of the final flood predicted in the Book of Revelation.

  Despite continuing success an^pc^u|arity_JAiyjzovs^yremained consumed by romantic wanderl?£?h??ghj?tJlisJife¦ In his last mgnthsji£yaji_ contemplating another sea journey in search of new inspiration; but he died in _i2£0_wnile working on Irislastj^ajwjis^^

  Warship." Just as poets had often sought to express themselves in painting durrngTKe age of Lermontov, so did this last leaf on the tree of Russian romanticism sometimes turn to poetry to express his feelings:

  The great ocean heaves beneath me.

  I see the distant shore,

  The magic regions of a sunlit land:

  With agitation and longing, thither do I strive.32

  ij nnw anuKts

  In his latej jeajs.j^vamvsk^^became in-

  tensely_nationalistic. He dreamei_Qf_a_gloriousjgiie^^£^^5nliav^l'ic-

  tories, which he hoped to record on canvas-just as Briullov had once en

  visaged!" designing murals of Russian m^TtanTvictories. ^,u,ssian~vigto"figs

  in me~"new^15ror^directions;

  jrorrxsE^^^gJU^^^Ldjf^tJSS^i^ Soviet strategisTswe7e~tolransform the Russian navyfrom^ojr?what_futile surface fleet to a somber submarine flotilla within half a j^ejoturyjgf_???? sky^sjdteath. Yet in the folklore of the new regime, two surface ships lived on as symbols of the revolutionary hopes of the new order: the battleship Potemkin, which mutinied briefly against tsarist authority during the Revolution of 1905, and the Cruiser Aurora, which provided perfunctory support fire for the Bolshevik insurrection of 1917. Thus, two ships became j»WBibols,oMeUverance in the new Soviet ideology.38 TTiiesynibol oicreative ^^curnfiejn.iJie_2owet periodwas, howeverTproyjded by a persecuted~poet, Osip Mandel'shtam, wEoTIEened his~verse to a message cast out in a bottle on melrighse^s^yTningmia£.nTan inT5i^5ope*oTreachjfl£jcS£ISFnB^ distS^rgader.34 Beforesejthigout-OTjhjase watejj_a^dscannirig the new horizons of Soviet Russia, one must chart the course which Russian creativity followed across the troubled seas of the late imperial period.

  i. The Turn to Social Thought

  A distinctive FEATURjLJ±JBassijEm-a^^t0 the ???1?

  fiUpatiflB with, what the Russians "??

  iSeo^s was its_extrag^__r ?

  "social thought" (obshchestvennaia mysl'). There is no exact equiyalentjor

  ^s £g^gEorX.of thougIrirTn~"^yeliterr^^and

  literary to be discussed fairly in the language of traditional moral philosophy or of modern sociology. Its concerns were not primarily political, and may be best understood in terms o£jisychoiogy or religion.

  In any event, Russian social thought is a phenomenon of the late

  imperial*'peTioa". It represents in many~ways an artificially delayedTlmcC-..,''

  chflSefTsWally"pas^ionate, Russian response to the rich ferment ofre^ ^

  fornusTiaE^in"TTiaTggrtat^^of 1830 and 1848. Social^

  thought provided a kinxL^rf intdls^tualbridge between aristocr proletarian Kussia^lf reflects the impracticaTfiy^m^Itopianism^rj amp;ig. ari^'^!^3^!^i^ys a "™'"awMeness *hat ?£ time had conie~tomove from philosophical to social questions-or, in Belinsky's words, "from the blueTskies info theliItctoen."^5oniorally pure was this tradition that almost all subsequent radical reformers felt constrained to represent themselves as heirs to its aspirations. Soviet ideologists have constructed for their citizens a kind of hagiographical guide that places Herzen and Belinsky, Chernyshev-sky and Dobroliubov, Pisarev, and (with some reservations) Lavrov and Plekhanov in the prophetic line that allegedly reached its fulfillment in

  Lenin.

  ButjjO£iaJjbougMin the middle and late nineteenth century was f ar_ more thanamere anticipa5i^^f^oIsEvismor ajneis critique of tsarism. It involxeda freejakyof tiie mind and heart: an uncompromisingearne^F"-ness that reflects the projection- ouTTrTto" the^broader arena of society of many of the deeper questions that had long been disturbing the aristocracy. The longing for a better world so evident in Russian social thought became_ subversive TfficTTnTmrln the STalin era; ".??????^the profound^ searchmgsense ceased to be tolerated in the_public culture of the USSR; and

  1. The Turn to social inuugm

  T

  b.

  even canonized prophets like Herzen and Chernyshevsky were expurgated or reinterpreted.

  In a general sense the distinctively Russian tradition of social thought began with the economic and political discussions of Catherine's time, with Radishchev's anguished critique of serfdom, with the various proposals of Bentham, Owen, and Saint-Simbh for including social reform in the program of Alexander's ????"???????, with PestePs™pfoposals _for__agrarianucPr distribution in the 1820's, and with the Russian interesHn_Sajnt-Simojiin,,the thirties^ But these were all subordinate or episodic concerns of an aristocracy still dominated by religious and aesthetic questions. Indeed, the only important socialist-style experiments on Russian soil during this period were the non-aristocratic communities of foreign sectarians, such as the Hutter-ites of southern Russia, who practiced a form of egalitarian communal living that has yet to be approached in the USSR.

  A trend toward communalism among native sectarians was evidenced, however, in thei!|3oTw1tfrtheTppTaTa^

  "?????????????

  'seKIcTobshchykh). This sectadarjted_Jhe_ old

  – ?~-,^v-.. ???? ??? jjiyunciii activities, inier-

  preting St. Paul literally, this sect insisted that eachjnember was* actually" and literaljybutjpnejwtof a common body. All things were sHared iff common by the nine menanHthreewomen" in each commune; public confessions were conducted in order to excoriate infection from any part of the body; and each person in the community was given a function corresponding to some bodily organ. Abstract thought was the exclusive province of the thinker (myslennik); physical work, of "the hands"; and so on. In this way, no one was complete in and of himself; each onederiejodfid^gn thejamb,. munity. The "tidings of Zion" sect of the TKjiys reveals the same pre-????????? with a new ideal conception of society, insisting that the coming millennial kingdom should be divided into twelve inseparable parts and that each member of each kingdom should live in total equality. This form of social organization was to be accompanied by the divinization of nterr,"ffte rearrangement where necessary of his physical organs, and thephgic,aj enlargeraenipf the earth in order to accommodate his expandingphysical needs.

  In this sameperiod one finds the first serious interest in social analysis

  ? and socialism among the "aristocratic intdl amp;cTu^sTTTieyTurHed" to social

  T^migHrT^^"peaceful

  vj political change. Russian thinkersot tnThfe'Weliolae'v^

  develop a program of reform for the real world, gradually concluded that

  the Decembrists had chosen the wrong field of battle. Political programs.

  constitutions, projects, and so on, were merely an elegant form of deception that the bourgeoisie of England and France had devised for deceiving and enslaving their people. The most magnetic figures of the decadejall tended to reject j›olilisjal_reform as a subject worthy of consideration. Herzen,J3ehnsky, and Bakjinin all thought in terms of a socjaLrather than

  a political transformation. All had briefperiods ofjdealizmg_theniUn^JsS as a possible instrument for-erecting socjaJTptrirm; but none of them ever idealized the forms of political.organization to be found in the liberal democracies of Western Europe. Whether one's vision of social transformation begaTn^Pliberating Slavs abroad or serfs at home, the ultimate objective remained that which a Serb explained to a radical itinerant Russian in the 1840's: the creation of a new type of human
society in which men can live simply aijJgcjnmunicate WmTone SloThgJj^taneouslv "without anypolitlci^bez vsiakoi politiki).s

  To be sure, there were some voices rai^ to behjilfortheoM Deceng^ brist ide^-oTTpoTuIcar?^^