Worse was yet to come in the twentieth century. Repin, in exile from Bolshevism in 1922, painted a crucifixion which showed only the two thieves, with Christ's cross lowered and a wolf-like dog licking the blood of an altogether vanished saviour.
PLATE XVII
LATE XVIII
The influence of Michael Vrubel (1856-1910) in late imperial Russia was almost as great on poets and composers as on experimental painters, for whom he had an impact that Naum Gabo likens to that of Cezanne on modern Western artists. Apprenticed in the restoration of church frescoes and mosaics, he soon turned from traditional religious subjects to the mystery of earthly beauty. From his early painting of "Hamlet and Ophelia" to his powerful illustration of Pushkin's "Prophet," Vrubel displayed his greatest power in portraying those figures from the pantheon of romanticism who in some way incarnated the proud beauty of his ultimate hero: the devil.
Beginning with a first sketch in 1885 and stimulated by a commission to illustrate a commemorative edition of Lermontov's "The Demon" in 1890-1, Vrubel painted the devil in a variety of forms, and increasingly referred to "seances" with Satan himself. The two illustrations on the left show his first and last major efforts to depict Satan through a monumental oil canvas. "The Demon Seated" (1890; Plate XVlll) broke sharply with the prevailing artistic realism and provided the Silver Age with a brooding hero: the newly seated prince of this world replacing, as it were, the traditional "Christ enthroned" of the next. "The Demon Prostrate" (1902; Plate XIX, central part only) was completed in the year of Vrubel's mental breakdown. The artist succeeds in suggesting the devil's own mental anguish by distending the figure in a manner somewhat reminiscent of some Russian variants of icons of "Our Lady of Tenderness." The swirling background reveals the influence of art nouveau and expressionism, and contrasts with the more controlled, semi-cubist backgrounds of the earlier "Demon."
Vrubel and the Devil
PLATES XVIII-XK
LATE XIX
Scriabin appears as the consummate romantic, a kind of cosmic Novalis, conceiving of his art as "the last great act of fulfillment, the act of union between the male creator-spirit and the woman-world."27 His mysticism of endless desire flows, thus, with a certain logic out of the lush Chopin- and Liszt-like melodies of his early piano works. Yet the complex orchestral works to which he soon turned show both technical inventiveness and a unique ability to express the inner aspirations of the age. There were essentially four musical stages in his late artistic-spiritual development: "The Divine Poem" of 1903, his third and last symphony; "The Poem of Ecstasy" of 1908; "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire" of 1909-10; and his "Mystery," which he had only begun at the time of his sudden death in 1915.
The "Divine Poem" depicted the ascent of humanity to divinity: the first movement represented the struggles, the second the sensual delights, and the last the "divine play" of the spirit liberating itself from matter. While composing the "Poem of Ecstasy" abroad, he met many socialists and proposed at one point to use the famous line from The International ("Arise ye wretched of the earth") as the epigraph to his work.28 Deliverance was to come, however, not from a revolutionary leader, but from a messiah who would unify the arts and provide mankind with a "new gospel" to replace the outmoded New Testament. Scriabin apparently viewed himself as a new Christ preaching from a boat in Lake Geneva and establishing close links with a radical Swiss fisherman named Otto: his St. Peter.29
The language of his new gospel was to be even more unconventional than the iridescent "Poem of Ecstasy," which still bore some musical resemblance to the tonal sheen of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner's "music of the future" was enjoying great popularity in Russia at the turn of the century; and the new musical world of Scriabin's "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire" has been described by one leading Russian critic as
a continuation and development of the grandiose, inspiring finale of Wagner's Gotterdammerung. . . . But . . . Wagner's fire brings destruction. Scriabin's, rebirth . . . the creation of that new world which opens up in the presence of man's spiritual ecstasy. . . . His fundamental condition is ecstasy, flight. His element is fire. . . . Fire, fire, fire; everywhere fire. And accompanying it, the sounding of alarm bells and the ringing of invisible chimes. Awesome expectation grows. Before the eyes rises up a mountain breathing fire. "The Magic Fire" of the Wagnerian Valkyries is childish amusement, a cluster of glow-worms in comparison with the "consecrating flame" of Scriabin. . . .30
The "consecrating flame" of Prometheus is provided by a totally new harmonic system. Among other features, Scriabin introduced the mystic
chords of the flagellants into his music, just as Blok had ended his "Twelve" with the flagellant image of a returning "Christ" at the head of a "boat" of twelve apostolic followers. He also devised a correlation between the musical scale and the color spectrum, writing into the score chords of color to be projected through the symphony hall by a "keyboard of light," a giant reflecting machine to be played like a toneless piano. Fascination with color was a particular feature of an age anxious to compensate for the grayness of early industrialization. Rimsky-Korsakov had independently conceived of correlating sound and color; and the rediscovery of the pure colors of the newly restored icons encouraged a new generation of painters to see in color itself many of the miraculous powers originally attributed to the icons. Vasily Kandinsky, who exhibited the first of his pioneering, non-representational paintings in 1910, the year of Scriabin's "Prometheus," insisted that "color is in a painting what enthusiasm is in life,"81 and that each color should start a "corresponding vibration of the human soul,"32 ranging from the total restfulness of heavenly blue to the "harsh trumpet blast" of earthly yellow.33
In the last year of his life, Scriabin turned to the great work he hoped would unify the arts and lift man to the level of the gods. In the score for "Prometheus," he had already insisted that the chorus wear white robes to emphasize the sacramental nature of the occasion. Now he began sketching out plans for a "Mystery" that was to involve two thousand performers in a fantastic fusion of mystery play, music, dance, and oratory. It was to be a "ritual" rather than music, with no spectators, only performers; the emission of perfumes was written into the score, along with sounds and colors, to provide a kind of multi-sensory polyphony; and the action was to begin in Tibet and end in England.34 The fact that this "Mystery" could not be staged-or even clearly written out by Scriabin-was not held against him by artists of the silver age, most of whom agreed with Kandinsky that art is "the expression of mystery in terms of mystery."35 Humanity was not yet spiritually prepared for anything but mystery. A great cataclysm was needed to prepare humanity for the sublime ritual that would unify the good, true, and beautiful. The cataclysm came with the beginning of World War I, shortly after Scriabin had set forth the first plan ("initial act" he called it) for his "Mystery." Scriabin died just a few months later.
The purpose of art was not to depict but to transform the real world for most artists of the age. In their desire to bring the most advanced art directly into life, they staged innumerable exhibits, concerts, and cultural tours throughout provincial Russia. A highlight perhaps occurred in the summer of 1910, when Scriabin's complex tonal patterns were played on a boat floating down the Volga under the direction of young Serge Kousse-
vitzky, wafting music out across the unresponsive and uncomprehending countryside.
This Promethean aristocratic art helped spur on a simultaneous revival of popular art, which in turn provided fresh stimulus for the restless avant-garde. The aristocracy developed fresh interest in ceramics, woodcarving, weaving, and embroidery as industrialization began to threaten them. Cottage industries and peasant crafts were given new encouragement by the provincial zemstvos; and a totally new form of musical folk poem, the harmonically complex chastushka, arose as a kind of grass roots equivalent to the new and more musical poetry of the symbolists.36
Thus, it seems appropriate that much of the initial impulse toward creating a new experimental Russian
art in Russia should come from the collective attempt of a small circle of artists to rediscover and recreate the artistic forms and craft techniques of Old Russia near Moscow on the estate of a wealthy railroad baron, Sawa Mamontov.37 In 1882 they began by designing, building, and decorating a small church in the early Novgorod style, and then turned to fashioning stagings for the first private opera company in Russian history, which Mamontov established in Moscow the following year.
Mamontov's activities helped move the center of artistic gravity from St. Petersburg back to Moscow in the 1890's. Even painters like Surikov and Repin, who had been trained in the dominant St. Petersburg traditions of realism and social significance drifted to Moscow and the Mamontov estate, portraying in their masterpieces of the late eighties and nineties early Russian historical subjects on a vast fresco scale and with a richness of color that became characteristic of Muscovite painting. In 1892 a wealthy merchant, P. M. Tret'iakov, donated his vast collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow, where a gallery bearing his name was established-the first ever devoted exclusively to Russian painting. Two other Moscow merchants, Serge Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, subsequently brought to Russia more than 350 French impressionist and postimpressionist paintings: the greatest collection of Western art since Catherine the Great's massive importation of Rembrandts. Moscow became the major center inside Russia for experimental modern artists like Kandinsky, who made the city the subject of a number of his paintings.
Among the young painters in Moscow stimulated to fresh experimentation by the Shchukin and Morozov collections was Casimir Malevich, an artist in many respects even more revolutionary than Kandinsky. Like so many of the avant-garde, Malevich was influenced by a curious combination of primitive Russian art and the newest, most sophisticated art of the West. His development through a bewildering variety of approaches in search of
the basic elements of painting illustrates the peculiar Promethean passion that became characteristic of experimental modern art in Russia. Like Kandinsky, Malevich soon left the world of recognizable people and objects for the fresh start of his "black square on a white ground" followed by his famous "white on white" series of 1918.
As Malevich's art became more radical in form, it became more Promethean in purpose; for he sought to free the visual arts from "the tyranny of easel painting" and impose his new ideal forms on the wallpaper, the buildings, the plates-even the coffins-of the future. In what he called "my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of the objective world," he and his followers attempted to found in the year of Scriabin's death, 1915, an "art of pure sensation,"38 which he called Suprematism and later "the art of the fifth dimension."39 The latter phrase, used at a time when Einstein's fourth dimension was still known only to specialists, was no mere figure of speech. As he put it in one typical passage:
. . . man's path lies through space. Suprematism is the semaphore of color. . . . The blue color of clouds is overcome in the Suprematist system, is ruptured and enters white, as the true, real representation of infinity, and is therefore freed from the colored background of the sky.40
Thus even line and color, the last links which Kandinsky's art enjoyed with the real world, are severed in Malevich's doctrine. A reviewer described him as "a rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence";41 and he himself insisted in a manifesto of 1922 that man
is preparing on the earth to throw his body into infinity-from legs to aeroplanes, further and further into the limits of the atmosphere, and then further to his new orbit, joining up with the rings of movement towards the absolute.42
Malevich stands as a kind of artistic prophet of the space age, practical preparations for which were already being undertaken by Constantine Tsiolkovsky, a sickly, self-taught genius from the Russian interior. As early as 1892, he had written about the scientific feasibility of a journey to the moon, and in 1903 he began a long series of amateur cosmic probes with his own small-scale, jet-propelled ballistic appliances. "This planet," he wrote, "is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend all one's life in a cradle."43
Space tended to replace for twentieth-century Russia the symbol of the sea with all its symbolic overtones of purification, deliverance from the ordinary, and annihilation of self. The Russian Prometheans spoke no more of an ark of faith or a ship at sea, but of a new craft that would take them
into outer space. After his "white on white" series of 1918, Malevich did not paint again for nearly a decade, producing instead a series of sketches for what he called an "idealized architecture": future dwelling places for humanity bearing the name planity, from the Russian word for "airplane." Malevich's only serious rival for dominance of the artistic avant-garde in the 1920's, Vladimir Tatlin, was ostensibly far more down to earth with his doctrine of utilitarian "constructivism" and his demand for a new living art of "real materials in real space." But he too reflected this Promethean urge to move out and master that space. Increasingly, his three-dimensional constructions acquired an upward, winged thrust that seems to be tugging at the wires connecting them to earth. Tatlin spent most of the last thirty years of his life designing a bizarre new glider that looked like a giant insect and was called a Letatlin-a fusion of the Russian word "to fly" and his own name.44
The first thirty years of the twentieth century in Russia was a period in which traditional terms of reference seemed largely irrelevant. As Leo Shestov, the philosopher and future Russian popularizer of Kierkegaard, proclaimed in his Apotheosis of Groundlessness in 1905: "Only one assertion has or can have objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible."45 Men believed in an earthly "world without end," to cite the title of a Futurist anthology of 1912.46 Followers of Fedorov continued to believe that the resurrection of the dead was now scientifically possible; Mechnikov argued that life could be prolonged indefinitely by a diet centered on yoghurt; and a strange novel of 1933, Youth Restored, by the most popular writer of the 1920's, Michael Zoshchenko, offered a final Promethean reprise on the Faust legend by portraying an old professor who believes that he can restore his youth merely through the exercise of his will.47
Beyond the five dimensions of Malevich's art lay the seven dimensions offered by the philosopher, psychologist, and Oriental traveler P. D. Uspensky. Beginning with his Fourth Dimension of 1909, he provided new vistas for self-transformation: a completely internal "fourth way" which lies beyond the three past ways to godliness of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. He offered-in the words of two of his later book titles-"a key to the enigmas of the world" and "a new model for the universe."48 He insisted that man was capable of a higher inner knowledge that would take him into "six-dimensional space." There are three dimensions in time, which are a continuation of the three dimensions of space, and which lead in turn to a "seventh dimension" of the pure imagination.49
In St. Petersburg, Prometheanism found its most extreme-and historically important-expression in the movement known as "God-building" (Bogostroitel'stvo). St. Petersburg intellectuals were, predictably, more con-
cerned with social questions than their Moscow counterparts; and, amidst the agitation of the first decade of the new century, a group of Marxist intellectuals struck upon the Promethean idea of simply transferring to the urban proletariat the attributes of God. "God-building" developed partly in reaction to "God-seeking," an earlier movement of St. Petersburg intellectuals who followed Merezhkovsky in turning from aesthetic to religious questions. Their return to philosophic idealism (and in many cases Orthodox Christianity) was celebrated in a variety of publications from the periodicals New Road (1903-4) and Questions of Life (1905-6) to the famous symposium of 1909, Landmarks (Vekhi), which offered an impressive philosophic challenge to the positivist and Marxist categories which had long dominated the philosophic thinking of the urban intelligentsia. A musical landmark in this return to religious mysticism was the primarily choral opera The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which was finished amidst the revolutionary turmoil of 1905-6 and first produced ear
ly in 1907 by the last survivor of the "mighty handful," Rimsky-Korsakov.
God-building developed somewhat later than God-seeking, and sought to harness the religious anguish of the intellectuals not to traditional faith but to the coming revolution. During the dark days of reaction that followed the failure of the Revolution of 1905, a group of intellectuals sought to supplement Marx with a more inclusive and inspiring vision of the coming revolution. Led by Maxim Gorky, the rough-hewn writer and future high priest of Soviet literature, and Anatol Lunacharsky, the widely traveled critic who became the first commissar of education in the new Soviet state, the God-builders considered themselves to be merely elaborating the famous Marxist statement that philosophers should change rather than merely explain the world. Traditional religion was always linked with intellectual confusion and social conservatism, and the "God-seekers" were only rebuilding the tower of Babel rather than moving on to the New Jerusalem.60 Nevertheless, religious conviction had been the greatest force for change in history, Lunacharsky contended, and Marxists should, therefore, conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God. Gorky concluded his long Confession of 1908 with a prayer to "the almighty, immortal people!"
The Icon and the Axe Page 72