Women, make haste to love us, For we sing of wonders still, And we are the last thin cracks That progress has yet to fill!99
Sensualism was, however, not entirely without its official patrons in the early years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, the Revolution was in a very real sense "permeated with sex" for Alexandra Kollontai, the gifted daughter of a Ukrainian general and first commissar of public welfare in the new Bolshevik regime. Between the publication of her New Morality and the Working Class in 1919 and her collection Free Love in 1925, she campaigned incessantly for free love in the new society. She argued, however, for sublimating the physical side of love ("wingless eros") to a socially creative love, with wings, which seeks a kind of spiritual union with the new proletarian society.100 Thus, just as Bogdanov saw the proletariat as God, Kollontai saw it as a kind of cosmic sex partner. She favored (to cite the title of one of her stories) "the love of worker bees," with women as queen bees, producing children from semi-anonymous fathers whose true love lies in productive labor. In a famous metaphor one of her fiotional female creations insisted that sexual intercourse in itself had no greater significance than the simple act of drinking a glass of water.101
Although she favored monogamy for purely practical reasons, she was an ardent apologist for the liberalized divorce laws that were promulgated
early in the Soviet era. Both she and her wealthy Finnish mother were divorcees. Her own supreme love affair was clearly the one she enjoyed with the working class. A wealthy intellectual, she identified herself with the most ruggedly proletarian faction of Bolshevism, the so-called Workers' Opposition, which vainly sought to combat the growing power of the new state bureaucracy with a system of decentralized trade union control. Unlike others in the movement, she was not disbarred from further positions of authority after its repudiation in 1921. She spent the entire period from 1923-45 in high diplomatic posts, most of them in the Scandinavian regions that she knew so well (involving herself in such colorful episodes as her attempt to negotiate an end to the Russo-Finnish War together with another militant Bolshevik feminist, the Esthonian-born playwright Hella Wuolijoki, whose most famous work, the Loretta Young movie The Farmer's Daughter, deals with that enduring popular symbol of promiscuity).102 Kollontai's advocacy of sexual liberation can be said to represent in some ways a curious and short-lived introduction of Scandinavian perspectives into the gloomy puritanical picture of Russian Bolshevism. The fact that she was the only important opposition leader within the Bolshevik Party to survive the purges of the thirties could testify to some vestigial nostalgia among old Revolutionaries for her image of the Revolution as "eros with wings."
There was little room for eros in the Bolshevik ethos, however. The last great festival of public passion may well have been the remarkable production of the play Carmencita and the Soldier, at the Moscow Art Theater in 1923. This "lyric tragedy" was an original reworking of Bizet's Carmen designed to focus attention exclusively on the savage, love-hate relationship between man and woman. The chorus of older tragedies was reintroduced, and the frivolities of the opera eliminated in an effort to depict that which Nietzsche had written in the margin of his score of Bizet's Carmen at the "Habanera": "Eros as the Greeks imagined him, bitterly demonic and untamed."103
The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic. Solov'ev, the author of the turn to sensualism, had begun in his last years to have visions of the devil rather than of sophia, and seems to have felt himself strangely drawn toward the Antichrist of his last writings.104 Within a few years of Solov'ev's death, his follower Alexander Blok moved from his earlier mystical reverence for "the beautiful lady" who brought harmony to the universe to his poetic preoccupation with "the unknown woman," an enigmatic prostitute from the nether world of the city taverns. The less well remembered figure of Alexander Dobroliubov actually championed the worship of Satan, and wrote poems and tracts extolling "the beauty of
death" before turning to a life of ascetic self-mortification and radical sectarian preaching.106 Demons are everywhere in the literary world of Sologub, where the lure of the flesh is almost invariably related to the power
of Satan,
Alexis Remizov, one of the most popular storytellers of the late imperial period, believed that the world was ruled by the devil. His portrayal of Satan in the vernacular language and fantastic metaphor of the Russian countryside made him seem almost a congenial figure. Remizov's popular marionette production The Devil's Show was a kind of satanic mystery play; and his Flaming Russia of 1921 paid tribute to Dostoevsky as the author of the strange dualism and "theomachism" (bogoborchestvo, or "struggle with God") that underlay his own exotic writings. Chiurlionis suggested that the sun was really black; and in Satan's Diary, the last work of Leonid Andreev, the author identifies with Satan, who-in the shape of an American millionaire-records his deceptions and triumphs in a deeply corrupted world.106
Diabolism also found expression in music, where Scriabin professed to find a kind of exaltation of the devil in the music of Liszt and in his own celebration of sensual delights. The devil found his most notable conquest in the field of painting, where the gifted figure of Vrubel moved from early religious paintings to experimentalism to anguish and insanity in the course of an artistic quest centered on representing Lermontov's Demon in painting.107
From his early representation of the demon as a seated figure similar in form to his earlier Pan, Vrubel proceeded to a final picture which showed the demon stretched out horizontally, as if on a rack, with his head cocked up at an unnatural angle, staring out in horror at the viewer. It is as if the devil were conducting a kind of final satanic review of his lesser servants: those "pillars of society" who always lined up in ignorant admiration before any work of a widely acclaimed artist. Vrubel both shocked and fascinated society by returning periodically to retouch and further distend his devil even after it was placed on public exhibit. The only refuge left on earth was to be found in an insane asylum, where Vrubel spent the last years before his death in 1910. The devil which haunted Vrubel had, of course, fascinated thinkers of the romantic age throughout Europe. Faust was, after all, inconceivable without Mephistopheles; and in their brooding about paradises lost or regained, the romantics found Milton's Satan somehow more credible and interesting than his God. In their determination to revitalize the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth-century philosophers, romantic philosophers often preferred to equate vitality with Satan rather than attempt to redefine or rehabilitate the discredited idea of God.
Yet there is something strange and uniquely Russian about Vrubel's
effort to encase Satan in a painting. It was a kind of inversion of the quest launched in Russian painting by Alexander Ivanov a half century earlier.108 As in the case of Ivanov, Vrubel's effort became a kind of focal point of the communal interests and expectations of the entire intellectual elite. Just as Ivanov had attempted to portray "The Appearance of Christ to the People," Vrubel was trying to have the devil make his appearance to the people. But whereas Ivanov's Christ was an artistic failure, Vrubel's Demon was a relative success. Romanticism had found its icon; and the sensualists of late imperial Russia, their patron saint.
Apocalypticism
This sense of the satanic presence led to a brooding and apocalyptic mentality. Apocalypticism, the third key characteristic of the era, was in many ways the by-product of the unresolved psychological tension between the other two: Prometheanism and sensualism. How, after all, can one reconcile great expectations with petty preoccupations? an intellectual belief in a coming Utopia and a simultaneous personal involvement in debauchery? One way of holding on to both commitments was to convince oneself with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that apocalyptical change was in the offing, that the sensualism of today forebodes the transformation of tomorrow. As Diaghilev put it during the revolutionary year of 1905 (in a toast delivered in connection with the exhibit of three thousand Russian historical portraits which he organized at the Tauride Palac
e):
We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.109
The second and more obvious source of apocalypticism was the popular religious mentality which tended to influence even many of the openly irreligious contributors to the emerging mass culture of the early twentieth century. Reading and writing were now becoming regular activities of many with a primitive, peasant background for whom it seemed natural to talk of change in apocalyptical terms.
The stridently secular manifestos of the futurists were filled with
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images of prophecy and martyrdom. The poet Maiakovsky, who rapidly became their leader, called himself "the thirteenth apostle" and "an uncrowned king of souls," whose body will someday be "lifted to heaven like the communion wafer by prostitutes to cleanse them of their sins." His sonorous verse captures, like the zaumny iazyk, the language of pure sound of Khlebnikov, some of the musical cascading quality of the original zaumny iazyk of the church: the blagovestie of church bells. If the bells of "rejoicing" are harsh ones, jangled out of tune by the iconoclastic poet, his ultimate assurance of salvation is phrased in the language of apocalypse, which is, after all, a kind of "theology beyond reason." He alone, the ultimate romantic, "will come through the buildings on fire" to see "the second tidal flood."110 If futurist poets were led into a kind of masochistic apocalypticism in their effort to reach beyond the ordinary world, abstract artists tended to follow a similar path in their quest for a new art of pure form and color. Kandinsky in the critical period of his development, during 1912-14, repeatedly returned to the theme of apocalyptical horsemen and the Last Judgment in the canvases with which he slowly rode altogether out of the world of objective art.111
In the feverish literature of this decade of war and revolution, apocalypticism became an increasingly central theme. Solov'ev's posthumously published short story of the Antichrist heralded a host of imitators who were, for the most part, less interested in his positive vision of ultimate Christian unification than in his negative vision of the coming Asian domination of Europe.
Merezhkovsky's trilogy, Christ and Antichrist, presented a vast historical panoply of the death of gods under Julian the Apostate, their resurrection under Leonardo da Vinci, and a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist that had begun under Peter and was to be resolved on Russian soil.112 Far more interesting and original was the apocalyptical work of Boris Bugaev, the brooding son of a famous Moscow mathematician who became a leading symbolist writer and moved from Buddhism to theosophy to anthroposophy: the attempt to create a new humanistic culture by the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner.113 Early in his religious and philosophic studies Bugaev became fascinated with the inner links that he felt existed between the intelligentsia and the popular religious mentality. He chose the pen name Andrew Bely-combining that of the "first chosen" saint who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia with the word for "white," the apocalyptical color. Bely thus rebaptized himself with a name which symbolized his own sense of mission in bringing tidings of apocalypse to the Russian people. Like Solov'ev he saw the problem in terms of the confrontation of Europe and Asia with Russia as the critical arena of conflict. Like Briusov, who
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wrote apocalyptically about "the coming Huns" during the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-5,114 Bely was haunted by this unexpected Asian victory and soon embarked on a great novelistic trilogy East or West. The first part appeared in two large volumes in 1910 under the title Silver Dove, telling the story of a Moscow student who gives away all his earthly goods in order to follow a mad flagellant "Mother of God." He is in search of a world-wide resurrection: a union of West and East through a conflagration out of which will come the bird that can rise to heaven: the "dove" of the sectarian tradition, the firebird of Russian mythology. The practice of self-immolation by the Old Believers is represented as a kind of prophetic anticipation of what the entire world is about to experience on the way to salvation.
The outbreak of World War I and the enormous casualties on the eastern front seemed to provide further evidence to Bely that the end was indeed coming; and the second part of the trilogy which appeared in 1916, under the title Petersburg, is even more haunted by the distortion of traditional shapes and the sense of approaching catastrophe. He sees the calamity being brought on by "both father and son, both reactionary and revolutionary," who are equally nihilistic at heart, secret collaborators in bringing on "the kingdom of the beast, … of the Antichrist, of Satan."115
The outbreak of revolution seemed to Bely and many others to be the beginning of the last great earthly struggle that would deliver men from the reign of Antichrist to that of the returned Messiah. "Christ is Risen," Bely wrote in a famous hymn to the Revolution just a few months after Blok's Twelve.116 At almost the same moment Russia was called the "new Nazareth" by the most authentically earthy and rural of all the great poets of the age, Serge Esenin.117 Another peasant poet, Nicholas Kliuev, hailed the Revolution as a sign of messianic deliverance, in his remarkable works of the early twenties: "Song of a Bearer of the Sun," "The Fourth Rome," and "Lenin," in which he compared the Bolshevik leader to Avvakum.118 It was not long before the new revolutionary regime became equated with Antichrist rather than Christ. The identification of the Revolutionary leader with the returning Christ in Blok's "Twelve" had been only tentative and symbolic, and Blok died disillusioned in 1921. Berdiaev, Merezhkovsky, Kandinsky, Remizov, and many others had emigrated abroad permanently by 1922, and begun writing about the new order in tones of Spenglerian gloom.119 Even Gorky, a man of lower-class origin, who was close to Lenin, went abroad late in 1922 for a long stay. His departure was but one sign of the revulsion that passed through precisely those writers who were closest to the simple people and to the great hopes they had originally had for the Revolution.
r.
The city joined the railroad train as the symbol of apocalypse. An apocalyptical poem of 1903 by Briusov, "The Pale Horse," inspired Blok to write in 1904 "The Last Day," the first in a gloomy series called The City.120 The modern city was "a curse of the beast," to cite the title of Andreev's famous story of 1908: "the final curse of man," a labyrinth with "many doors and no exits," populated by people with "small compressed, cubic souls."121 Bolshevism was only the last and most extreme product of the "steel fever" of the cities, of an "electrical uprising"122 which was leading men to Armageddon and the final straggle between "iron and the land."123 People were only minor actors in this Manichean battle between factory chimneys and the cupolas of churches. Chimneys became "red fingers" of the beast threatening to rip out of the soil the onion domes of the faithful, or trumpets reaching above the city to announce the Last Judgment.124
Within the accursed cities "earth no longer resembles earth. . . . Satan has beaten and trampled it down with iron hoofs . . . riding over it like a foaming horse across a meadow."125 The image of an apocalyptical horseman is blended into that of an armored train carrying the curse of the city out into the countryside and provinces by means of "dragon trains," "the iron serpent in the clean field," "the forty-mouthed creature":
Did you see
Racing over the steppe,
On cast-iron paws
Knifing through lakes of mist
Snorting with iron nostrils
– the train?
And after him
Across the great lawn
As in some festival of desperate races
Pitching his thin legs forward
The galloping red-maned foal?126
> The train symbol was given new suggestiveness by the Bolshevik use of brightly ornamented propaganda trains and Trotsky's repeated forays to the front in an armored command train during the Civil War. Among the most powerful early prose accounts of this period are Vsevelod Ivanov's Armoured Train No. 14-??, the chapter "Train No. 58" in Pil'niak's panoramic Naked Year, and Nikitin's memorable story "Night," in which the Civil War is portrayed as a nocturnal collision between two armored trains, red and white, moving from East and West to a fated collision in the heart of Russia.127
Almost alone among the visionary writers of the silver age, Bely returned permanently to the USSR in 1923, professing to see signs of deliverance rather than apocalypse in the new order. Yet the second part of his trilogy, Petersburg, written between 1913 and 1916, had already presented an apocalyptical picture of men and women in a half-mad city paralyzed by a box containing a bomb, which no one can either disarm or discard. His literary efforts of the twenties-such as the Baptized Chinamen and Moscow-are less successful; and his attempt to invest older religious symbols with new Bolshevik content are even more inept than in his "Christ is Risen." His most successful work after Petersburg was Kotik Letaev, depicting the coming into awareness of a small child by journeying imaginatively back into the child's infant and even pre-natal experience. This world had already been discovered by the greatest of all literary apocalypticists of the period-Vasily Rozanov, who had variously fancied himself as a fetus longing to remain in the womb and as "the baby Rozanov lost somewhere on the breast of the earth."128
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