The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Thou art my God and the creator of all gods, which thou hast fashioned from the beauties of the spirit in the toil and struggle of thy search-

  ings!

  And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!

  Thus do I believe and confess!51

  Some contemporary critics referred to Gorky's position as "demotheism" or "people-worship,"52 and there are many resemblances to the more extreme forms of populism. But Gorky spoke in the more universal language of the silver age. He referred to all men, not merely Russians; to the conquest of death, not merely of hunger. In the final sentence of the Confession, Gorky holds out the image of "the fusion of all peoples for the sake of the great task of universal God-creation."53

  An anonymous Marxist pamphlet published in 1906 and subsequently reissued by the Soviet regime bluntly declared that man is destined to "take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal."54

  Death is only a temporary setback, Lunacharsky affirmed as early as 1903:

  Man moves toward the radiant sun; he stumbles and falls into the grave. But … in the ringing clatter of the grave-diggers' spades he hears creative labor, the great technology of man whose beginning and symbol is fire. Mankind will carry out his plans . . . realize his desired ideal.55

  His Faust and the City declares that the idea of an immortal God is only an anticipatory "vision of what the might of men shall be,"56 and ends ecstatically with the people crying over the dead body of Faust "he lives in us!. .. Our sovereign city roused in might."57

  After the Revolution, Lunacharsky turned to an undertaking that had attracted many past Russian artists: the composition of a trilogy which would provide a new redemptive message for mankind. Like Gogol's Dead Souls, Dostoevsky's Brothers, and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, Luna-charsky's trilogy was never finished. In keeping with the spirit of the silver age, the first part, Vasilisa the Wise, was fantastic in form and cosmic in pretensions. The second part, "a dramatic poem," Mitra the Saviour, was never published, and the final part, The Last Hero, was apparently never written. The last lines we have of the trilogy is the paean at the end of the mythological Vasilisa to the coming of "man's divinity on earth."58 Such talk was clearly dangerous in a society bent on camouflaging its own myths and absolutes with scientific terminology.

  The figure who best portrayed the Promethean vision of the early God-builders was Alexander Malinovsky, a brilliant theorist who has suffered the relative oblivion of those who neither joined the emigration nor rose to high authority in the new Soviet state. Shortly after taking his first regular position as a journalistic critic in 1895 at the age of twenty-two, Malinovsky assumed a new name which remained with him and accurately conveys the image he had of his own high calling: Bogdanov, or "God-gifted." He

  soon became active in the Social Democratic movement, siding immediately with the Bolsheviks after the split of 1903, and helping edit their theoretical journal New Life, where he began his friendship with Gorky.

  Bogdanov believed that the ultimate key to the future lay not in the economic relationships and class struggles that were characteristic of past history, but in the technological and ideological culture of the future that was already being created by the proletariat. Marx's fascination with dialectical struggle was an unfortunate holdover from his youthful Hegelianism. In the manner of Saint-Simon rather than Marx, Bogdanov argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without a positive new religion: that the unifying role once played in society by a central temple of worship and religious faith must now be played by the living temple of the proletariat and a pragmatic, socially oriented philosophy of "empiriomonism."

  In a long series of studies, beginning with his Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature in 1899, Bogdanov developed the idea that the revolutionary movement would lift man beyond the level of economics, and nature beyond all previous laws of material determinism. The key to this program of cultural regeneration within the revolutionary movement was presented in a long work published in installments throughout the decade 1913-22 under the title The Universal Organizational Science {Tectology). This new super-science of "tectology" was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual culture and the physical experience of the "working collective," in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture reworked.59

  Bogdanov felt that the creation of a new proletarian culture should precede the political annexation of power by the Bolsheviks. His concept of God-building through tectology was designed-like Sorel's concurrent call for a new heroic myth-to kindle enthusiasm and assure the revolutionary movement of success not only in gaining power but also in transforming society. Like Sorel, Bogdanov was enthusiastic over the initial Bolshevik annexation of power; and he rushed into print with a series of writings designed to spell out the God-building possibilities of the new society: the second part of his Tectology (1917) and two Utopian novels, Red Star (1918) and Engineer Menni (1919). Though originally published in 1908, Red Star produced its greatest impact when it appeared in the second, 1918 edition.60 Its image of an earth dweller suddenly transported to another planet which was in a feverish ecstasy of socialist construction seemed to many the image of a new socialist society into which Russia might suddenly leap. The novel was reprinted several times; and Bogdanov's organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture (JProletkuli) enjoyed nationwide

  popularity throughout the period of Civil War and "war communism"- publishing about twenty journals throughout Russia during those difficult days.

  Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult to the Commissariat for Education. Bogdanov's organization was censured for its claim to have brought about "immediate socialism" in the cultural sphere, a proletarian culture totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. Bogdanov, for his part, in a suppressed pamphlet of 1919, had already expressed the fear that the new rulers were merely a parasitic class of managerial organizers.61 Proletkult was soon abolished altogether; he and his followers, the so-called Workers' Truth group, denounced; and his prestige undercut by the time Tectology was completed in 1922. Bogdanov spent his last days in the relatively obscure but appropriately visionary post of director of an institute for "the Struggle for Vital Capacity" (Zhiznesposobnost'). He died in 1928, apparently from a dangerous experiment involving transfusions of his own blood-a front-line casualty, as it were, in his undaunted efforts to take harmony and immortality away from imaginary gods and put them into the real life of men. The most extreme Prometheanism of the age was found in the so-called Cosmist movement, an offshoot of the God-building movement that flourished in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years of 1918-21. The Cosmists and the closely related Blacksmith {Kuznitsa) group of Moscow poets spoke with a kind of frenzied hyperbole about the imminent transformation of the entire cosmos. Under the leadership of Alexis Kuz'min, who took the appropriate pen name Extreme (Kraisky) and entitled his first fantastic book of poems The Smiles of the Sun,62 the Cosmists burst forth with expletives: "We shall arrange the stars in rows and put reins on the moon" and "We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the palace of World Freedom."63

  One important feature of Revolutionary Prometheanism was its attractiveness to long-submerged minority groups of the Russian Empire. At a time when a groping and desperate Tsar was increasingly relying on repression and Russification, minority peoples looked increasingly to the new worlds being opened up in the cosmopolitan culture of the silver age. Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and Lazar Lissitzky played a key role in the experimental painting of the day; and the Lithuanian painter-musician-writer, Michael Chiurlionis, anticipated much of the most revolutionary art of the day and exerted a shadowy influence over much of the Russian avant-garde. Among the Revolutionaries the role of minority people was no less conspicuous; and it seem
s appropriate to conclude with two of the most visionary, brilliant, and universal-minded of all Russian Revolutionaries: the

  Pole, Waclaw Machajski, and the Jew, Leon Trotsky. The silencing of their voices in the course of the twenties was a measure of the retreat of the new regime from the great expectations of the earlier period.

  Machajski, who wrote under the pseudonym A. Vol'sky, believed even more passionately than Bogdanov in the need for a totally new type of culture. One must move beyond the culture not only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also of the newest and most insidiously oppressive social class, the intellectuals. Beginning with his Evolution of Social Democracy in 1898, the illegally published first part of his magnum opus, The Intellectual Worker, Machajski warned that articulate intellectuals will inevitably find their way to the head of the revolutionary movement and become the controlling oligarchy within any future revolutionary regime. In order to protect the interests of the inarticulate manual workers he called for a world-wide "workers' conspiracy" dedicated to gaining enough economic improvement to permit the workers to raise their level of literacy and culture. Only in this manner could the advantage that the intellectual enjoyed over the worker be neutralized, and the working class assured that a genuine proletarian culture rather than a mythic culture of the intellectuals be built after the revolutionary attainment of power.

  Machajski's position resembles the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel, with its belief in "direct action" in the economic sphere and the development prior to any bid for power of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian working class culture. His form of social analysis is also reminiscent of Pareto's theory of the "circulation of elites," Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," and Burnham's subsequent theory of a purely "managerial revolution." But unlike all these figures Machajski remained an unreconstructed optimist, confident that the workers' conspiracy could save the Revolution and develop fully the Promethean possibilities of the proletariat. Machajski's ideas, which were particularly popular in Siberia, were anathemized by the Bolshevik leadership with particular venom long before his death in I926.64

  Even more dramatic was the gradual fall from grace in thy 1920's of Leib Bronstein, known as Trotsky, the passionate and prophetic co-author of the Bolshevik coup. From his early days as a populist and a renegade Jew, Trotsky had seen in the coming revolution the possibilities for a total reshaping of human life. Change was to come about not so much through the staged, dialectical progressions that Marx had outlined as through an uninterrupted or "permanent" revolution, through a "growing over" (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution, of the Rusj sian Revolution into an international revolution, and of a social revolution into a cultural transformation of mankind.

  Thus, although Trotsky professed dissatisfaction with the mysticism of the God-builders and Cosmists, he leaves no doubt in his abundant writings on cultural matters about his own "limitless creative faith in the future." In the last lines of his famous collection, Literature and Revolution, written in 1925, when his own authority was already on the wane, he expresses confidence in man's ability

  to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.

  . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.65

  Even above these peaks rose the sky-borne hope of transforming the cosmos expressed in "The Chains of Blue," the longest poem ever written by Khlebnikov in his "alphabet of stars." But at the end of a long "blue chain" of images, the poet gives us a prophetic glimpse into a future that was to devour its futurists. He suddenly introduces the familiar figure of Prometheus. But it is a distorted image in which we see only his liver being devoured by eagles.66

  Sensualism

  Along with the effort to storm the heavens went a simultaneous impulse to plunge into the depths. Cosmic Prometheanism was accompanied by a counter-current of personal sensualism; boundless public optimism, by morbid private pessimism. Indeed, the early years of the twentieth century brought about a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.

  In part, the new sensualism was a reaction against the long-dominant moralism and ascetic puritanism of the radical tradition which had been carried to extremes in the late Tolstoy. The new generation of writers delighted in the knowledge that their main source of inspiration, Vladimir Solov'ev, had used the sage of Yasnaya Polyana as the model for his portrayal of the Antichrist. They longed to rediscover the delights of sex and artistic indulgence which Tolstoy had denied himself no less systematically than had Pobedonostsev.

  Exaltation of the flesh was to some extent caused by the rapid advent of a mass, urban culture. The lonely, atomized man of the city found in sex

  one of his few surviving links with the vital, natural world dimly remembered from his rural boyhood. The provincial, rural elements that increasingly flooded the ranks of art and literature also tended to bring with them elements of earthy folklore, of a popular culture previously suppressed by the official, Orthodox culture of the Empire. The novels of bleak realism that had previously concentrated on characteristic sufferings of the countryside-¦ starvation and exploitation-now turned in the first decade of the new century to the peculiar shame of the cities-sexual degradation. From Leonid Andreev's picture of syphilis and suicide in The Abyss and In the Fog to Alexander Kuprin's panorama of urban prostitution in The Pit, the Russian reading public was subjected to vivid portrayals of sordid sexuality. To a large extent, however, the increasing preoccupation with sexual matters was a logical development of the romantic preoccupation with the will that had become characteristic of the emancipated aristocratic intelligentsia. Having tried to discover the will of the historical process in the early nineteenth century and the will of the people in the late century, the intellectuals now turned to discovering the inner recesses of their own wills. They now sought to discover not just "the other shore," the new society dreamed of in the nineteenth century, but also "the other side" of human personality. It is significant that both phrases came from German-the language of romantic longing. The original title of Herzen's call for Russia to fulfill the revolutionary hopes that had been betrayed in the West by the failure of 1848 was Vom andern Ufer; and Die andere Seite was the title of a widely studied German treatise in psychology calling for a new "psycho-graphic" art.67

  In part, the new sensualism was a Nietzschean effort to find "bloody truths" capable of supplanting the lifeless truisms of a society just entering into a phase of bourgeoisation and national delusions, such as that which Germany had experienced in Nietzsche's lifetime. But Russian sensualism was more than an aristocratic program for replacing Christ with Dionysus in the manner of Nietzsche or Stefan George. It was also at times a confused plebeian effort to revitalize the image of Christ with the flesh that had been taken away from him by the official churchmen in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky's Schilleresque praise of the earthy and spontaneous, his allusion to "the indecent thoughts in the minds of decent people . . . which a man is afraid to tell even to himself"68 was taken as a signpost pointing to a new world of experience. Ivan Karamazov's dictum that, in the absence of God, "all things are permissible" became a kind of invitation to sexual adventure for a new generation.

  The final repeal of the censorship in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 led to an increasingly candid public discussion of sex. A feverish

  climax was reached in 1907 with the appearance of Viacheslav Ivanov's semi-mystical exaltation of sex in his collection of poems, Eros; his celebration of the varieties of the sexual act in Veneris Figurae; and an apologia for homosexuality in the story Wings, by Michael Kuzmin, who suddenly became one of the favorite authors of the age.69 The most remarkable literary events of
this time of titillation were the two best-selling novels of 1907, Sanine by Michael Artsybashev and The Petty Demon by Fedor Sologub.70 Sanine, read today, appears as a bad imitation-even a caricature- of the cheap sexual novel. The scene is continually being prepared for seductions in stereotyped nocturnal surroundings to the accompaniment of pretentious monologues on the artificiality of everything but sex, with names like Lida used for added metaphorical suggestion. The reason for the extraordinary impact of Sanine was simply that Russian readers saw in it a new philosophy of life. Its philosophical asides (sometimes referred to as "mental ejaculations") ridicule Tolstoy and other moralists, urging men to be true to their sensual desires in the realization that life is senseless and death the only ultimate reality. The novel reaches a climax with three suicides; and self-inflicted death becomes the main theme of many of Artsybashev's subsequent works, such as At the Brink in 1911-12. But the preoccupation with sex as the only source of meaning in life was all the public remembered about Artsybashev.

  Turgenev's novels had offered to the tired liberals of the 1840's the Schopenhauerian consolation that sexual love provided man with a "focus for willing," "the kernel of the will to live," and suicide a means of overcoming the meaningless monotony of life.71 In like manner, Artsybashev-shchina-the most tongue-twisting of all isms of the late imperial period- rehabilitated for a large segment of the disillusioned and apolitical aristocracy the cult of sex and suicide.