When they leave the old man's room and go back into the open air, the boys are suddenly impelled to sound a final joyful chorus. There was a hint of it in the mysterious metamorphosis of Iliusha's dog "Beetle" (Zhuchka), whom Iliusha had tortured and driven away (in a way prescribed by Smerdiakov) into Kolya's dog, "Ringing of Bells" (Perezvori), who turned the last visit of the boys to Iliusha almost into a time of joy. The ringing of church bells provides the transition from Katya's scene with Dmitry to the funeral of Iliusha. But the sound of bells soon gives way to one last "Ode to Joy." It is almost as if the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which Bakunin had exempted from destruction by revolutionaries, were suddenly being acted out; as if each "beautiful daughter of the divine spark" (as Bakunin used to address his anarchistic followers) had suddenly reached the moment in the Schiller-Beethoven text when "all men shall be brothers" and the "aesthetic education of mankind" shall be completed by the realization that "above the vault of stars there must live a loving father."34
In this joyous final moment of The Brothers the image is again that of hands. They are not joined in prayer as Durer would have them or making the sign of the cross in the manner of either the Orthodox or the Old Believers. Least of all is the image one of hands raised to salute Caesar or register votes in some parliamentary body. Rather it is the picture of the hands of children joined near a grave in an unexpected moment of warmth which overcomes all sense of schism and separation, even between this world and the next. A shared newness of life has mysteriously come out of the death of their little comrade. "Let us be going," says Alyosha. "For now we go hand in hand." "Forever so, hand in hand through all of life!" echoes Kolya "rapturously."
The image of reconciliation is profoundly Christian. It is very different from the late Ibsen's pagan picture of hands joylessly joined by shadow people on an icy mountaintop over the dead body of John Gabriel Borkman. Yet Dostoevsky's novel ends not with the traditional heavenly hallelujah but with an earthly cry of joy. As they go off hand in hand to enjoy the funeral banquet and life thereafter, Kolya calls out, and the boys echo, one of the last and best hurrahs in modern literature: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"
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3- New Perspectives of the Waning Century
1 he early months of 1881 brought the death of Musorgsky and Dostoev-sky and the end of the populist period in the history of Russian culture. It seems strangely appropriate that Surikov's "Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy," one of the "wanderers'" most famous historical canvases, was first exhibited in St. Petersburg on March I, 1881, the very day of Alexander II's assassination.1 This murder precipitated a program of execution and purge that was as decisive, if not quite as bloody, as that to which Surikov's canvas alluded. The wave of reaction and repression that followed the death of the "tsar-liberator" did not recede significantly until the revolutionary crisis of 1905, nearly a quarter of a century later.
The artists of the populist age had combined remorseless realism with a compulsive conviction that "the people" contained in some way the hidden key to the regeneration of Russian society. Artists and agitators alike-many of whom had been educated in seminaries-frequently subscribed to the vague but passionate belief that some new, primarily ethical form of Christianity was about to be realized on Russian soil. It was not uncommon for "liberty, equality, and fraternity" to be written on crosses; or for radicals to affirm their belief in "Christ, St. Paul, and Chernyshevsky." The ideal of a new Christian form of society drew strength from the indigenous schismatic and sectarian traditions, from the Comtian idea of a religion of humanity, from the quasi-religious socialism of Proudhon, and even from official insistence that Christian Russia had a unique spiritual heritage to defend against the heathen Turks and the corrupt West.
It is hard to recapture the great sense of expectation that pervaded the atmosphere of Alexander's last years. There was a general feeling that dramatic changes were inevitable precisely because of Russia's increasing importance in the world and the need to be worthy of its calling. Dostoev-sky's famous speech in Moscow on June 8, 1880, extolling Pushkin as a
uniquely Russian prophet of universal reconciliation, was the scene of a public demonstration typical of the age. For half an hour he was cheered as scores of people wept, and he was publicly embraced by everyone from the old Slavophile Aksakov to the old Westernizer (and his long-time antagonist) Turgenev. Voices in the crowd called out "prophet" just as they had burst forth in the court scenes of the late seventies to call out their approval for the pleas of political prisoners to fight "in the name of Christ" for "the humiliated and the weak." The raised section in which the accused sat was referred to as Golgotha, and the revolutionaries frequently spoke of themselves as "true Christians" or a "Christian brotherhood." Even the most positivistic of populists, Mikhailovsky and Lavrov, claimed Christ on occasion as the source of their moral ideas; and most "men of the seventies" believed that moral ideals-not political or economic forces-would ultimately determine the course of history.
The assassins of Alexander II seemed to believe that this act was a kind of spiritual duty which would in itself bring about the new age of brotherhood. The moral fervor and selflessness of the conspirators appealed to the intellectuals, many of whom (in the manner of the Karamazov brothers) felt responsible in some way for the assassination and involved in the trial and punishment. Prominent intellectuals like Tolstoy and Solov'ev appealed to the new Tsar for clemency-often precipitating emotional demonstrations of student support. Though few outside of the leadership of the People's Will organization favored terroristic assassination, many believed that the Tsar now had a unique opportunity to perform an act of Christian forgiveness that could resolve the disharmonies in society. It seemed as if the thirty thousand who had flocked to Dostoevsky's grave in January of 1881 were looking to Alexander III to be the "true Tsar," the long-lost Ivan the Tsarevich who would realize the hopes of his suffering people.
Alexander, however, followed the path that Nicholas I had taken after the Decembrist uprising, hanging the killers and initiating a reign of reaction. In a series of manifestoes and decrees he attempted to suppress once and for all both the activity of the revolutionaries and the intellectual ferment that lay behind it. The steady expansion of the educational system (and the unusually liberal range of higher educational opportunities for women) under Alexander II was curtailed by a return to Uvarov's idea of education as a form of civic discipline. By the end of 1884 all ministers even faintly interested in constitutional or federal rights had been dismissed, all publications of the People's Will curtailed, and the leading journal of legal populism, The Annals of the Fatherland, outlawed forever. This determined dash of cold water produced a stunned silence among those who had shared in the great expectations of the populist period. From a cultural
point of view the reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was a period of profound depression. The populist mythos continued to dominate Russian social thought, but gone were the old Utopian expectations and excitement. The period was referred to as one of "small deeds" and "cultural populism" as distinct from the great deeds and socially revolutionary populism of the seventies.
Two long-labored masterpieces of populist art were completed during this period: Repin's painting "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan" and Borodin's opera Prince Igor. They stand as final monuments of the new national art promised by the "wanderers" and the "mighty handful" respectively. Repin's canvas, which occupied him from 1878 to 1891, depicts the idealized exuberance of the rough-hewn "people," spontaneously and communally defying a would-be alien oppressor. Borodin's opera, on which he worked from 1869 till his death in 1887, elaborates the epic tale of Igor's ill-fated battle with the Polovtsy into a colorful stage pageant that harmoniously combined equal measures of earthy comedy, exotic dancing, and vocal lyricism.
Igor was Borodin's only mature opera, and came close to being a collective enterprise of the Russian national school even before Rimsky-Kors
akov and Glazunov were called on to finish the work after his death. Borodin often composed in the company of his friends. He used his knowledge as one of the outstanding chemists of his age to devise a special gelatin for preserving his crudely penciled scores and also to help develop Russian medical education. Despite his cosmopolitan education and mastery of many languages and disciplines, Borodin looked to Russian popular culture for his dramatic subject matter. He died in Russian national costume at a benefit ball, and was laid to rest near Musorgsky and Dostoevsky in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery. If subsequent generations were to remember Borodin's opera primarily for the famed dances in the camp of the Polovtsy, those who first saw the opera in the melancholy Russia of the early 1890's must have felt a special sense of identification with an earlier scene in the same act. The lonely figure of Igor, defeated in his great campaign and frustrated by his captivity, seeks private consolation by summoning up-in some of the most ecstatic music ever written for the bass voice-the image of his faithful wife; and by stepping forward to sing a line that is echoed by the surging orchestra and might well stand as the unanswered lyric prayer of the populist age: "O, give, give me freedom."2 Left with "small deeds" and unfulfilled hopes, idealists in the age of Alexander III fled from the broad arena of history to private worlds of lyric lament. The failure of the populist age and its prophetic artists to find any new redemptive message for Russia was accepted as final. The only
consolation was to find beauty in the very sadness of life. The fairy-tale beauty of Chaikovsky's ballets, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty, began during this period their long service to Russia of providing childlike interludes of graceful fancy for a harassed people. The talent that was to produce in 1890 the powerful, at times hallucinatory operatic masterpiece, The Queen of Spades, had already fashioned from another famous text of Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, the most popular opera of the 1880's (thanks partly to Alexander Ill's special passion for it). The preoccupation of this opera with unideological problems of personal relations and its mood of lush musical melancholy corresponded in many ways to the spirit of the times. Lensky's tenor lament for his wasted youth and Onegin's own farewell to his lost love amidst falling leaves in the last act seemed to drown sadness in a gush of melody. The composer who had entered the Russian musical scene with a buoyant cantata of 1865 based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy" died in 1893, just nine days after conducting the first performance of his grief-laden Sixth Symphony, appropriately known as the "Pathetique."
The leading painter of this period, Isaac Levitan, retreated altogether from the world of people to become perhaps the greatest of all Russian landscape painters. Not a single human figure appears in the paintings of the last twenty-one years of his life.3 Yet Levitan, like Chaikovsky, projects a deeply human sense of sadness into the beauty of his work. Many of his best compositions-"Evening on the Volga," "Evening Bells," and "The Golden Autumn"-depict the afterglow of nature rather than daylight or the promise of springtime.
An even sadder mood is set in the work of Levitan's lifelong friend, Anton Chekhov. Nowhere more than in Chekhov's plays does one find the pathos-in-comedy of human futility portrayed with more beauty and feeling. Although his greatest plays were written early in the reign of Nicholas II, they reflect the mood that had developed under Alexander III, the period of Chekhov's development as a writer. "I am in mourning for my life," explains the leading character at the beginning of Chekhov's first great play, The Sea Gull. The idea of a dead sea gull as a symbol of pathos had been suggested to him by Levitan; but through Chekhov's plays the symbol became equated with the slow and graceful gliding out to sea of old aristocratic Russia.
Characters wander across the stage unable to communicate with one another, let alone with the world about them. "There is nothing for it," says Sonya at the end of Uncle Vanya. "We shall live through a long chain of days and weary evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials which fate sends us . . . and when our time comes we shall die without a murmur." Consis-
tently, Chekhov glorifies those who suffer and succumb, still believing in the ideals of populism, but no longer expecting to see them realized on earth. Sonya suggests that "beyond the grave we shall see all our sufferings drowned in mercy that will fill the world." But this is only a lovely lyric moment like the melody from the "Pathetique Symphony." Progressively in his dramas, Chekhov moves away from all hope and consolation-even those found in the familiar conventions of melodrama, such as the escape-through-suicide which he invoked in The Sea Gull and Three Sisters. Seeking perhaps the tranquil twilight of Levitan's landscapes, Chekhov fled to a cherry orchard for his last play and went to the Black Forest to die. But he knew that the forces of material change were prevailing, and the offstage sound of the axe in the orchard brings down the final curtain in his last play.
Lyric lament was replacing the harsh but inclusive realism of the populist age. Short stories and sketches replaced the great works of the populist age. There is nothing in the late nineteenth century to compare in scope and realistic intensity with Nekrasov's poem "Who Then Is Happy in Russia?" (1863-76) or Saltykov's Golovlev Family (1872-6), let alone with Khovanshchina or The Brothers Karamazov. The golden age of the realistic novel came to an end in the eighties just as the golden age of Russian poetry had ended in the forties. Turgenev wrote his last novel (and Tolstoy his last great one) in the late seventies. Pisemsky, another pioneer of the realistic novel, died within a few weeks of Dostoevsky and Musorgsky in 1881. By the end of the decade Saltykov, Shelgunov, Eliseev, and Cherny-shevsky had died, thus severing the last living links with the critical journalistic traditions of the sixties. Of the leading populist writers, only Uspensky and Mikhailovsky remained active in Russia and uncompromised in their fidelity to populist ideals throughout the eighties. But the former was going slowly insane after completing his bleak masterpiece The Power of the Land (1882) and such prophetic fragments as Man and the Machine (1884). Mikhailovsky had developed a marked nervous tic and was increasingly preoccupied with publishing the memoirs of himself and his friends.
It was, in general, a time for memoir writing and commemorative meetings in imitation of the Pushkin fete of 1880. Some former revolutionaries like Tikhomirov publicly renounced their previous beliefs and achieved notoriety inside Russia; others like Kravchinsky (Stepniak) and Kropotkin fled abroad and earned reputations in Western radical circles as martyred heroes and revolutionary theorists. The pathetic conspiratorial effort to kill Alexander III in 1887 (in which such unlikely bedfellows as Pilsudski and Lenin's older brother were involved) reflected the futility and
addiction to old patterns that prevailed among the few who continued as active revolutionaries inside Russia.
More typical of the age than this isolated act of terroristic heroism was the emotional but essentially apolitical student demonstration of 1886 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobroliubov's death. With the death of Ostrov-sky in the same year and of Garshin and Saltykov in 1888 and 1889 respectively, the age of realism in Russian literature can be said to have ended.
In its place a new popular culture appeared that sought neither to depict reality nor to answer vexing questions but to distract the masses with sex, sensationalism, and crude chauvinism. Illustrated weeklies captured the attention of those who might previously have turned to the thick monthly journals for ideas and inspiration. One of these journals, Niva, grew rapidly from its relatively obscure origins in 1869 to gain, by the end of the reign of Alexander III, the totally unprecedented circulation of 200,000. It and other journals offered a new literature of faded romantic escapism. Exotic travel literature, sentimentalized love stories, and stereotyped historical novels rushed in to fill a void created both by the tightened censorship and by general exhaustion at the no-exit realism of the previous era.
Amidst the lassitude and bezideinosf ("lack of ideology") of the era, two powerful figures struggled, as it were, for the soul of Russia: Constantine Pobedonostsev and Leo Tolstoy. They had both opposed a
nd outlived the revolutionaries of the sixties and were already relatively old men by the eighties, yet both were destined to live on into the twentieth century. Neither of them founded a movement, yet each contributed to the climate of fanaticism that made revolution rather than reform the path through which modernization was accomplished in twentieth-century Russia.
These two figures helped define the unresolved and often unacknowledged conflict of political ideas within the thought of the populist age: between irrational adherence to authoritarian tradition and rationalistic insistence on a direct transformation of society. Pobedonostsev, the lawyer and lay head of the Church Synod, was the symbol and author of Alexander Ill's program of reaction. Tolstoy, the novelist turned barefoot religious teacher, was the enduring symbol and example of anarchistic populist protest. However bitterly they were opposed to one another, each was in a sense true to the populist age in which he was nurtured. For each of them was uniquely willing in the succeeding age of small deeds and great compromises to sacrifice his personal happiness and well-being to the ideal in which he believed. The ideal of each was, moreover, that of a totally renovated Christian society rather than of partial improvement through practical economic or political reforms.
Their paths first crossed in 1881, when Pobedonostsev withheld from Alexander III Tolstoy's letter urging clemency for the assassins of the Tsar's father. "As wax before the fire, every revolutionary struggle will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ," Tolstoy wrote; but Pobedonostsev correctly retorted that "our Christ is not your Christ."4 They met again in 1899, when Tolstoy included in his last novel Resurrection a thinly veiled caricature of Pobedonostsev. The latter responded in 1902 by excommunicating Tolstoy, whose followers countered with the defiant statement that "your anathemas will far more surely open to us the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven than could your prayers."
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