In poetry, the new symbolism soon gave way to futurism, acmeism, imaginism, and a host of unclassifiable styles. On the stage, the spirited ensemble work of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater, the fiery impressionism of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, the "conditionalism" and "bio-mechanical" expressionism of Meierhold's theater-all demonstrated an accelerating pace of life and exuberance of expression. In music, Stravinsky
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sounded the death knell of romantic melodic cliche with his cacophonous "Rite of Spring"; and Russia produced a host of new musical forms along with two of the relatively few figures whose pre-eminence in a given area of the musical stage has remained undisputed: the bass Chaliapin and the dancer Nizhinsky. In all phases of creativity there was an exhilarating new concern for form and a concurrent revulsion against the moralistic messages and prosaic styles that had dominated Russian culture for half a century. Of all the art media, music was perhaps the determining one. Alexander Blok, the greatest poet of the age, spoke of escaping from calendar time to "musical time."2 Vasily Kandinsky, its greatest painter, considered music the most comprehensive of the arts and a model for the others. Chiurlionis, another influential pioneer of abstract painting, called his works "sonatas" and his exhibitions "auditions."3 The "futurist" Khlebni-kov, the most revolutionary of poets and self-proclaimed "chairman of the world," broke up familiar words just as cubist painters broke up familiar shapes, seeking to create a new and essentially musical "language beyond the mind" (zaumny iazyk). Words, he contended, "are but ghosts hiding the alphabet's strings."4 The Moscow home of David Burliuk, where futurist poets and painters met, was referred to as "the Nest of Music."
In prose, a new musical style was evolved and a new form of lyrical tale, "the symphony," developed by the seminal figure of Andrew Bely.5 In the theater Meierhold's fresh emphasis on the use of gesture and the grotesque was born of his belief that "the body, its lines, its harmonic movements, sings as much as do sounds themselves."6
Even among the most puritanical and visionary of Marxist revolutionaries there was a curious fascination with music. Alexander Bogdanov, theoretician and leader of the remarkable effort to produce an integral "proletarian culture" during the Civil War, believed that oral singing was the first and model form of cultural expression, because it arose from man's three most basic social relationships: sexual love, physical labor, and tribal combat.7 Bogdanov's friend, Maxim Gorky-the proletarian realist among the aristocratic nightingales-dedicated his anti-religious Confession of 1908 to Chaliapin; and Lenin confided to Gorky that music provided a profoundly disturbing force even in his monolithic world of revolutionary calculation:
I know nothing more beautiful than the "Appassionata," I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every -time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the
time to stroke people's heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal-it is a hellishly hard task. . . .8
The revolutionary events of 1917-18 in which Lenin played such a crucial role have a kind of musical quality about them. Mercier's characterization of the French Revolution, "Tout est optique,"9 might be changed for the Russian Revolution into "Tout est musique." In France there was a certain "demonic picturesqueness" in the semi-theatrical public execution of the King (on which Mercier was commenting) and in the aristocratic, neo-classical poet, Andre Chenier, stoically writing his greatest poetry in prison while awaiting execution. In Russia, however, there was no "Latin perfection of form"10 to the Revolution. The Tsar was brutally shot with his entire family in a provincial basement and their bodies mutilated in a forest, while poets from the old order, like Blok and Bely, wrote half-mystical, half-musical hymns to the Revolution in the capital, seeing in it, to cite Blok, "the spirit of music."
Symbolic of these chaotic revolutionary years was the extraordinary institution of the Persimfans, an orchestra freed from the authoritarian presence of a conductor.11 In the emigration, there sprung up the so-called "Eurasian movement," which saw in the Bolshevik Revolution "the subconscious revolt of the Russian masses against the domination of an Euro-peanized and renegade upper class." Leading Eurasians hailed the new Soviet order for recognizing that the individual man fulfilled himself only as part of the "higher symphonic personality" of the group; and that "group personalities" could alone build a new "symphonic society."12 A kind of icon was provided for artists of this period by the pre-revolutionary painting of the "supremacist" Casimir Malevich, "The Cow and the Violin," which symbolized the vague hope that the agitated creativity of the violin might somehow replace the bovine contentment of bourgeois Russia.13 Even a future fighter for the old order like Nicholas Gumilev wrote a pre-Revolutionary poem bidding the artists of his age "look into the eyes of the monster and seize the magic violin."14
Stringed instruments provide, indeed, the background music for this period of violent change: the gypsy violins of Rasputin's sectarian orgies in imperial palaces, the massed guitars of fashionable aristocratic nightclubs, the unparalleled profusion of virtuoso violinists in Odessa, and the balalaikas which accompanied the popular melodies sung around campfires by both sides throughout the Civil War. The consolidation of Bolshevik power between the coup of November, 1917, and the peace of 1921 provides a kind of feverish crescendo to the music of runaway violins. The
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sound of "harps and violins" (the title of one of Blok's collections of poems) began to fade soon thereafter, so that the later, Stalinist, revolution brought silence to the cultural scene from exhaustion as well as repression. The silence was broken only by prescribed ritual, communal chants and the grotesque merriment of collective farmers dancing at pre-arranged state festivals. The role of music in the Stalin era is typified by Alexis Tolstoy's paean to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony as the "Symphony of Socialism."
It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an accelerando corresponds to the subway system; the Allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the Union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and enthusiasm of the masses.15
The pendulum of history had swung back from the freedom and experimentalism of the electric age to the authoritarianism of the candle-lit past. Indeed, "the silence of Soviet culture"10 was all the more terrifying for its simulacra of sound.
The remarkable brief interlude of freedom that preceded a quarter century of Stalinist totalitarianism was dominated by three general attitudes: Prometheanism, sensualism, apocalypticism. These were preoccupations rather than fixed ideologies: recurring leitmotivs amidst the cacophony of the age, helping to distinguish it from the period immediately before or after. Each of these_ three concerns had been central to the thought of Solov'ev; each was developed to excess in the years following his death in 1900; each became suspect as Russia plunged back into a new "iron age" under Stalin.
Prometheanism
Particularly pervasive was Prometheanism: the belief that man- when fully aware of his true powers-is capable of totally transforming the world in which he lives. The figure of Prometheus, the Greek Titan chained to a mountain by Zeus for giving fire and the arts to mankind, had long held a certain fascination for radical romantics. Marx- had idealized this legendary figure; and Goethe, Byron, and Shelley had elaborated the legend in their writings. Now the Russians, as they plunged more deeply into the mythological world of antiquity, also turned a
dmiring eyes to Prometheus.
Merezhkovsky translated Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; others read Prometheus und Epimetheus of the Swiss Nietzschean, Carl Spitteler, or La scommessa di Prometeo of Leopardi. Ivanov wrote a Prometheus of his own in 1918, and objects as far afield as a leading publishing house and a key musical composition of Scriabin bore the name Prometheus. Revolutionary admirers of Beethoven in Russia as elsewhere saw themselves as "creatures of Prometheus" and hailed the Prometheus theme in the last movement of their hero's Eroica Symphony, in which Beethoven was thought to defy Christian doctrine about man by shouting "in a voice of thunder: 'No, thou art not dust, but indeed the Master of the Earth.' "17
Russians of this period sought like Prometheus to bring fire and the arts to humanity. Thus, their interest in questions of form and technique did not, for the most part, create indifference to social questions, but rather excitement over the possibility of solving them with the alchemy of art. Moreover, increased interest in contemporary European culture did not imply indifference to Russian tradition. On the contrary, the amassing in Russia of unparalleled collections of contemporary French art and the popularization of a wide variety of contemporary Western art on the shimmering pages of The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) coincided with the rediscovery, restoration, and reproduction of icons and the development of a new, more spiritualized form of religious art by figures like Michael Nestorov.
The diversity of Russian culture in the late imperial period is exemplified by the three most widely discussed events in Russian culture during the last year before the outbreak of World War I: the first performance of Stravinsky's ultra-modern, neo-pagan "Rite of Spring," the opening of the first large exhibit of fully restored ancient icons and the "futurist tour" of a group of avant-garde poets and painters. The first event took place in Paris, the second in Moscow, and the third in seventeen provincial cities. But there was little sense of conflict. As in the golden age of Pushkin, Russians of the silver age sought answers that would be equally applicable for all mankind. The preceding age of Alexander II and III and the succeeding age of Stalin were far more parochial. Populists and Pan-Slavs under the Alexanders were interested mainly in the peculiar possibilities of Russia: just as Stalinists concentrated on "socialism in one country." Populists, Pan-Slavs, and Stalinists all looked to the West primarily to learn from its natural scientists and social theorists. But Russian thinkers in this period looked at the full spectrum of Western artistic and spiritual experience.
With the enthusiasm of fresh converts, Russian artists saw in the newly discovered world of art something to be enjoyed for its own sake and exalted for the sake of all mankind. The term "Russian Renaissance,"
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which is sometimes used to describe the cultural activity of the early twentieth century, is appropriate in suggesting a similarity with the love of art and exaltation of human creative powers of the Italian Renaissance. Art offered Promethean possibilities for linking Russia with the West, man with man, and even this world with the next.
The exciting possibilities of creative art tended to lure many away from democratic socialism or liberalism which should perhaps have commanded the allegiance of the educated anti-authoritarian intellectuals. Nicholas Berdiaev, who had been interested in social democracy in the 1890's, reflected the new indifference to piecemeal reformism when he said almost derisively of the representative Duma of 1906: "These Russian Girondists will not save Russia, for something great and important is necessary to accomplish such a salvation."18 Creativity, he argued, was the only way in which the human spirit can free itself from "the prison" of ordinary life:
The idea behind every creative art is the creation of another way of life … the breaking through from "this world" … the chaos laden, distorted world to the free and beautiful cosmos.19
The "free and beautiful cosmos" of art seemed to offer new possibilities for harmonizing the discords of an increasingly disturbed world. The romantic idea so prevalent in the age of Pushkin that different art forms were all expressive of a common spiritual truth was revived and intensified.
The Ballet Russe represented a harmonious fusion of the scenic designs of Benois, Bakst, and Roerich, the music of Stravinsky, the dancing of Nizhinsky, the choreography of Fokin, and the guiding genius of Diaghilev. One artistic medium tended to flow into another. Futurism, the most bold and revolutionary of the new artistic schools, began in painting before moving into poetry.20 The painter Vrubel drew much of his inspiration from poets; and his florid colors, in turn, inspired other poets. Briusov praised the "peacock sheen of outstretched wings" that Vrubel raised over the "desert" of contemporary life;21 and Blok, at Vrubel's funeral, waxed lyrical over the color of his sunset:
As through a broken dam, the blue-lilac twilight of the world bursts in, to the lacerating accompaniment of violins and tunes reminiscent of gypsy songs.22
Poetry in turn burst into song, most notably in the work of Blok. Before the Revolution, he had written a cycle of poems to tell "What the Wind Sings About"; and just after the coup of November he suggested in his
famous "Twelve" that it was singing about the Revolution. Powerful, gustlike lines bring a Revolutionary band of twelve into wintry St. Petersburg. Then, the poet introduces the Revolutionary song traditionally played to the accompaniment of throbbing balalaikas:
No sound is heard from the city,
There is silence in the Nevsky tower, And on the bayonet of the sentry Glistens the midnight moon.23
In Blok's version, the last two lines are changed to suggest liberation rather than confinement:
And there are no more policemen-•
Rejoice, lads, without need of wine!24
Yet the unheard melody is still that of lamenting strings; and Blok came to look on his own poetic tribute to revolution with irony before his early death in 1921.
Blok loved painting and music, wrote plays, studied philology, discoursed with philosophers, and married the daughter of Russia's greatest scientist, Mendeleev. As the greatest poet of a poetic age, he is, ex officio, one of its key cultural figures. But because Blok himself felt that music was closer than poetry to the spirit of the age, it is perhaps appropriate to use Alexander Scriabin, one of the greatest pianists and the most original composer of the age, as the main illustration of Russian Prometheanism.
Scriabin's creative activity was inspired by Solov'ev's mystical faith in divine wisdom and also by the international theosophic movement which had been launched by Mme Blavatsky, the teacher of Solov'ev's elder brother and self-styled bearer of the hidden secrets of universal brotherhood and communion with the dead. The anniversary of her death, May 8, 1891, became known to her followers as White Lotus Day; and it was-among the intellectuals of the silver age-at least as well known as the socialist festival of May Day, which had been established by the Second International exactly a week before her passing.
Solov'ev and the symbolists saw in sophia a mystic union of the divine wisdom and the eternal feminine; and Scriabin sought to possess sophia in both senses through his art. "Would that I could possess the world as I possess a woman,"25 he wrote, reverting to the obscure, but seductive language of Boehme so familiar to Russian mystics:
The world is in impulse toward God. … I am the world, I am the search for God, because I am only that which I seek.2''
Christ Dethroned
PLATES XVI-XVII
The nineteenth century's increasing preoccupation with the purely human aspects of Christ's personality manifested itself in Russian art in a particularly dramatic fashion.
Traditional iconography had displayed a serene but powerful Christ enthroned in triumph-resolving, as it were, the trace of anguish still noticeable in the face of his "precursor," John the Baptist, who is reverently inclined toward him from the left-hand side of the central tryptich of the icon screen. In Ivanov's long-labored "Appearance of Christ to the People
" (Plate XVI), John the Baptist is the dominant, central figure; and the timid Christ is less noticeable than the worldly figures in the foreground.
By the end of the century, the somewhat artificial links that Ivanov and aristocratic Russia had sought to forge with the classical world of Rome (where he painted) and Raphael (whom he emulated) had given way to harsh, plebeian realism. Thus, the crucifixion of 1891 by Nicholas Ge (Plate XVII) is a bleak, purely human scene. This painting, which moved Ge's friend Leo Tolstoy to tears, shows a wretched, wasted Christ, no longer capable of resurrection, let alone enthronement. To the left is no longer the iconographic John the Baptist pointing to the coming glory of God's world, but only a thief whose frightened look suggests the self-centered pathos of a new, godless world.
The Icon and the Axe Page 71