The Icon and the Axe
Page 74
Far greater than Sanine was The Petty Demon, on which a little-known St. Petersburg schoolteacher, Fedor Teternikov (Sologub), had been quietly working for ten years. The book puts on display a Freudian treasure chest of perversions with subtlety and credibility. The name of the novel's hero, Peredonov, became a symbol of calculating concupiscence for an entire generation. The name literally means "a Don done over," and may refer to the hero of Don Quixote, Sologub's favorite book from childhood.72 His Don, however, seeks not the ideal world but the world of petty venality and sensualism, poshlosf. He torments his students, derives erotic satisfaction from watching them kneel to pray, and systematically befouls his apartment before leaving it as part of his generalized spite against the universe. The sexual perversion that underlies his hallucinations and paranoia is underscored by a secondary plot featuring a love affair between the youthful Sasha
and Ludmilla, which has undertones of voyeurism, transvestism, and-• above all-homosexuality.
The theme of voluptuous corruption even in "innocent youth" is a constant feature of Sologub's eerie short stories-and of many written in imitation of him. It seems appropriate that this theme should be presented to the mass audience of the West most dramatically and effectively through the work of a transplanted Russian, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Yet Sologub's world of perversion is far more subtle and profound, suggesting more universal involvement in the all-consuming world of poshlost'. Peredonov, far from being the source of vulgar depravity in the novel, is merely the heightened expression of the general condition of man. The petty demons are everywhere; and no one can be sure where fantasies end and perversions begin, because one man's dream is another man's act and men and women are involved even in one another's gender.
After the extraordinary success of his Petty Demon, Sologub turned to the writing of a trilogy designed to satisfy his own Quixotic desire to redeem man from the world of sensuality and mediocrity. Unlike Gogol, Sologub was able to finish his attempt at a Divina Commedia; but the Purgatorio and Paradiso of his poetic imagination tend to offer only more subtle forms of the same preoccupation with sex that had characterized the Petty Demon. Written between 1907 and 1911, the trilogy bears the title Legend in the Making, although its original title was Charms of the Dead. It begins with the famous declaration that although life is "vulgar . . . stagnant in darkness, dull and ordinary," the poet "creates from it a sweet legend . . . my legend of the enchanting and beautiful."73
In the first part, Drops of Blood, we are in the same town that provided the site for The Petty Demon; but attention is now focused on the mysterious poet Trirodov, who has taken up residence there. Perversion is projected onto the phallic towers and subterranean passageways of his country estate, where he presides over a weird colony of "silent children" but ventures forth to take part in revolutionary agitation. The second part of the trilogy, Queen Ortruda, takes one to an imaginary kingdom of lithesome virgins and naked boys on a Mediterranean island, where a volcano is continually preparing for a final eruption, which kills the queen and serves as a mixed symbol of sexual orgasm, political revolution, and death. In the last section, Smoke and Ash, Trirodov leaves Russia to take over the vacant throne of the burned-out Mediterranean kingdom. Thus, the poet-magician reaches a kind of Nirvana by fleeing the real world of the Peredonovs and petty demons to the non-being of an imaginary kingdom-beyond good and evil, beyond male and female (as his name "three genders" suggests), beyond the
1. i^rescenau
different reincarnations of his personality (also suggested by the variant reading of his name as "three types"), perhaps beyond life itself.
In one of his late stories, "The Future," Sologub speaks of "a place where the future gleams through an azure veil of desire . . . where those as yet unborn rest in peace."74 Four souls in this happy place suddenly conceive the desire to be born into the world, each expressing a special fondness for one of the primal elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Sologub goes on to tell how the first became a miner and was buried alive, the second was drowned, the third burned alive, and the fourth hanged. He concludes by asking:
Oh, why did Will lead them forth from the happy place of non-existence!76
In one of his late short stories, "The Kiss of the Unborn," he lends a certain lyric beauty to this gloomy view of the world. The story begins with the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy, who had become discouraged by reading in the works of Tolstoy and other Russian intellectuals that truth could not be found in life. The boy's unmarried aunt sets off to console her sister, the boy's mother, but soon turns to thinking about her own unborn son: the purely imaginary fruit of an unrequited early love. Suddenly, in the midst of her lonely weeping before the door of her sister, the unborn son appears to her, gives her a kiss, and thanks her for sparing him the agony of being born into the world. She goes in then to see her sister "full of calm and happiness," suddenly armed with "power to strengthen and console."76
The happiness of those who are never born was preached most eloquently by Vasily Rozanov, the high priest of the new cult of sex who likened himself to a fetus in the womb asking not to be born "because I am warm enough here."77 Through Rozanov, the Dostoevskian origins of the new sensualism can be most dramatically traced. Rozanov gave a kind of physical immediacy to this link by seeking out and marrying Dostoevsky's former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova, and launched the new philosophic interest in Dostoevsky with his lengthy essay of 1890, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
For Rozanov, Dostoevsky appeared as the harbinger of a new supra-rational freedom: a liberation first hinted at in the Notes from the Underground and finally developed in the Legend. Rozanov insists that Lobachev-sky's non-Euclidian mathematics (which were being reproduced in a variety of new editions in the 1880's) demonstrated the teritativeness of scientific truths,78 and that Dostoevsky's works showed the falsity of any scientific attempt to organize society. Neither God nor reality can be apprehended by reason alone. The only way to rediscover both is through sexual experience.
The cult of the immediate, which had been a precarious way back to traditional Christianity in Dostoevsky, became for Rozanov the way back to a God who is not Christ but Dionysius. Rozanov's "sexual transcendentalism"79 exalts the religion of the early Hebrews and primitive fertility cults over the ascetic and unnatural traditions of Christianity, which by sterilizing the idea of God have prepared the way for atheism: the inevitable attitude of thought devoid of sex.
Rozanov agreed with the general preference for the earthy, anguished Dostoevsky over the aristocratic, moralistic Tolstoy expressed in Merezhkov-sky's famous series on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But he dissented from Merezhkovsky's view that Dostoevsky was a kind of Christian seer. This tendency to view Dostoevsky as the prophet of a renovated Christianity and The Brothers Karamazov as (to cite Gorky's phrase) "a fifth gospel," predominated in the Religio-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg from the time of its dedication "to the memory of Vladimir Solov'ev" in 1907 until its dissolution in 1912. The view was perpetuated in the brilliant critical works on Dostoevsky written by two of the society's most famous members: Viacheslav Ivanov and Nicholas Berdiaev.
Although Berdiaev has subsequently become better known in the West, Ivanov was in many ways the more seminal thinker. A student of Mommsen in Berlin who had become converted to the Nietzschean idea that "a new organic era" was at hand, Ivanov bade his associates join him in plunging "from the real to the more real"; to leave behind the prosaic realities of the present for a future that will bring with it a new tragic sense. Ivanov insisted that he longed not for the unattainable but simply "for that which has not yet been attained."80 "Viacheslav the Magnificent" was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh-floor apartment "The Tower," overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full s
wing until after supper had
been served at 2 a.m.
Nietzsche was in a sense the guiding spirit, for Ivanov looked nostalgically to the lost world of classical antiquity through the eyes of Nietzsche's own academic discipline-philology-and worshipped at the shrine of the vitalistic Dionysus: the god of fertility and wine and patron of drama and choral song. But from the time of his early studies of 1904-5, "Nietzsche and Dionysus," "The Religion of Dionysus," and "The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God," to his scholarly dissertation on Dionysus defended at Baku in 1921,81 Ivanov tended to see in the Dionvsian cult a prefiguration of Christianity; and he became after his exile
in 1925 a resident of Rome and convert to Catholicism. Berdiaev, who later became an emigre apologist for Christianity within the Orthodox fold, was in pre-Revolutionary days closer to Nietzsche in such books as The Meaning of the Creative Act of 1916.
Rozanov went much further, insisting that there was a basic conflict between Dionysus and Christ. In a famous speech to the Religio-Philo-sophical Society, Rozanov attacked Jesus as a figure who never laughed or married, and pleaded for a new religion of uninhibited creativity and sensuality.82 Rozanov's proposal was given support by Nietzsche's suggestion that all morality is rationalization and that a new type of superman is needed with the courage to live beyond the stultifying categories of good and evil. Shestov's Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy saw these two figures as the twin prophets of a new world in which the tragic spirit was to be freed from the shackles of morality for a new life of sensual and aesthetic adventure.83 Shestov later sought to contrast the German with Tolstoy, the bete noire of silver age aestheticism, in his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche.84 The tendency to identify Dostoevsky with Nietzsche rather than Christ was particularly marked among those of Jewish origins like Shestov and A. Shteinberg, who tended to see in Dostoevsky a revolutionary new "system of freedom," to cite the title of a lecture series he gave in St. Petersburg in 1921.85
Another important source of the new sensualism was the return to primitivism in the arts. Kandinsky had turned to the lubki, or popular wood cuts, of Old Russia for inspiration, and published in 1904 his Poems without Words, a portfolio of his own cuts, en route to his more abstract and experimental compositions. Malevich also went through a primitivist period; as did Michael Larionov, who turned to folk themes, simple figures, and distorted anatomies in a desperate effort to find a truly original Russian style of art. He eventually created a purely abstract style of "rayonism," which sought to base painting on "rays of color" rather than lines and fields of color. But in the experimental, interim period that followed the Revolution of 1905, Larionov championed the introduction of pornographic material into painting: salacious slogans in his "Soldier" series and ingenious improvisations on sexual shapes in his subsequent "Prostitute" series.86 These and other primitive and suggestive paintings were exhibited in Moscow early in 1912 by a group with the deliberately shocking name "The Donkey's Tail," which represented "the first conscious breakaway from Europe"87 within the artistic avant-garde. A similar movement through primitivism to modernistic innovation can be traced in music. Stravinsky's revolutionary "Rite of Spring" was suggested to him by an unexpected and erotic vision
of a solemn pagan rite in which a circle of elders watched a young girl dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring and fertility.88
The bawdiness of Larionov endeared him to the literary futurists, who used him and his friends as illustrators for their works. The use of erotic motifs, infantile forms of expression, and vulgar epigrams became common to painters and poets alike of the "futurist" persuasion, who were in pre-war Russia generally more preoccupied with the sensuous and personal than the original Franco-Italian futurist Marinetti, who had been more interested in "the aesthetics of the machine." Russian futurism represented, in the title of its most famous manifesto, "a slap in the face of public taste." Rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes and dandies of Edwardian England, the Russian futurists delighted in bizarre attire-appearing on the street with abstract signs painted on their cheeks and radishes in their buttonholes. The painter-poet Burliuk brothers, who organized the futurist tour of 1913-14, typified the egocentric exuberance of the movement. Vladimir, a professional wrestler, carried mammoth weights with him everywhere he went, and his equally gigantic older brother, David, appeared with the legend "I am Burliuk" painted on his forehead.
If one can speak of a synthetic proclamation of liberated sensualism comparable to Scriabin's Promethean proclamation, it would probably be the futuristic movie "Drama in Cabaret No. 13," which was filmed late in 1913. In contrast to the melodramas set in remote times and places which were the standard fare of the infant Russian movie industry, this film was simply an average bawdy day in the life of the futurists. Its actors were the artists themselves-the Burliuk brothers, Maiakovsky, and Larionov- behaving in particularly shocking ways as they satirized the movie industry, the society that patronized it, the world itself, and the entire subject of sex, through which one senseless generation leads on to another.
By late 1913, sensualism was giving way to Prometheanism, and the subjective side of futurism ("ego-futurism") to a more dispassionate and formal "cubo-futurism." Malevich was the harbinger of the new, designing cubistic sets and costumes in December, 1913, for the futurist opera with the appropriately Promethean title, Victory over the Sun. People were transformed into "moving machines" by costumes of cardboard and wire. Some actors spoke only with vowels, others only with consonants, while blinding lights and ear-splitting sounds rocked through the theater in an effort to give man "victory over the sun": freedom from all dependence on the traditional order of the world.89 Freud, too, make his impact on the new art; and plays were written in which the various roles did not represent different people but different levels and aspects of one person.90
In the manifesto that accompanied his first Suprematist exhibition in December, 1915, Malevich insisted:
Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure-painting composition.91
Shameless nudes had, however, not altogether vanished from Russian culture. They dominated the literary debut late in 1916 of one of Russia's great storytellers of this century, Isaac Babel.92 His description of a seduction in the manner of the French naturalists, whom he admired, attracted the wrath of the government authorities, who transferred to the inventive young writer from Odessa the puritanical denunciations and threats that could no longer be visited upon the absent Larionov. Yet nowhere was sensualism more in evidence than in the inner circles of the imperial government itself. The imperial family was under the sway of the notorious Rasputin, and the rival court figures who succeeded in killing this "holy devil" in December of 1916 were if anything even more corrupt than the remarkable peasant holy man from Siberia. Protopopov, the minister of the interior who was Rasputin's friend and protege, was a sensualist thought by many to be a practitioner of necrophilia. Prince Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitry (the high aristocrats who carried out the poisoning, shooting, and drowning of the rugged Rasputin) were widely renowned for their sexual exploits and intrigues.93
Within a year, however, all these figures had been swept aside by the winds of change. First came the gust from the progressive bloc of liberal reformers in the Duma, then the unexpected hurricane of March, 1917, which ended the autocracy, and finally the swirling winds of civil war set in motion by the Bolshevik coup of November.
Revolution and civil war turned the attention of Russian writers from the private to the public arena, and made apocalypticism, the third ideological current of the age, suddenly seem the most relevant of all. Blok, who had already felt himself "drawn into the whirlpool" by "the lilac world of the first revolution," now tended to see in the erotic and mystical "unknown lady" of his earlier poems only the mother of harlots spoken of in the Book of Revelation.94 Sensua
l desire was cauterized with the fire of revolution and civil war, and zealously repressed by the puritanical Bolsheviks once power was consolidated.
Nonetheless, sensualism-like other attitudes of the late imperial period-did not vanish immediately under the new regime. One writer likened the experience of revolution to that of a "voluptuous shudder."95 A remarkable Soviet novel of the early twenties tells of an aristocratic girl
who, by becoming head of a local secret police, converts her sexual appetite into state-sanctioned sadism, proudly proclaiming that "the revolution is all permeated with sex for me."90 Another tale tells of a deacon who leaves his religious calling ostensibly to join the Revolutionary forces, but actually to live freely with the prostitute Marfa. "Underneath all his Marxism rank Marfism was hidden," the author wryly observes.97 Most memorable of all is the picaresque sensuality and ironic spirit in Babel's tales of the revolutionary era, Red Cavalry, of 1926, and in his Odessa Tales of the following year dealing with the Odessa underworld.
There was an engagingly straightforward irrationalism about the bohemian sensualism of the "Imaginist" school of poetry, which was formed in 1919. Seeking to "smash" grammar and return to primitive roots and suggestive images, they produced such remarkable works as Vadim Shershenevich's 2x2=5 and Anatoly Marienhofs / Fornicate with Inspiration.9* Before the group collapsed in 1924 and Shershenevich settled down to the prosaic task of becoming Upton Sinclair's Russian translator, this leader of the group wrote a number of poems exalting the anti-progressive sensualism that was still widespread among the intelligentsia: