The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Shortly before his death in 1919, this prince of sensualism retreated altogether from the Revolutionary chaos around him to the Monastery of St. Sergius and the Holy Trinity, where he wrote his Apocalypse of Our Time. The Russian Revolution was, he declared, a catastrophe of apocalyptical proportions for all human civilization. It was the result not of Revolutionary agitation but of the total failure of Christianity to deal with the social and physical spheres of life. Believing that the original apocalypse of St. John was written as an indictment of the early Christian Church, Rozanov designed his new apocalypse as an indictment of the modern church, which has stood by helplessly amidst war, famine, and revolution, making the flight to Bolshevism all but inevitable. Rozanov seemed to be longing for the church to reassert in this Time of Troubles the leadership that it had assumed during the Smuta three centuries earlier, which had led to the national revival of the seventeenth century under the new Romanov dynasty. Appropriately enough, Rozanov wrote his Apocalypse in the Monastery of St. Sergius, which alone had not fallen under foreign domination during this earlier Time of Troubles. He received the sacrament shortly before his death, which took place (to cite the title of one of his best works) "in the shadow of church walls."129

  In Rozanov's religion, the flesh was made word, rather than the word flesh, as Berdiaev noted. His views represented the fulfillment of the cult of earthy immediacy (pochvennosf) that his idol Dostoevsky had launched. He called for a "return to the passions and to fire" near the end of the Apocalypse, insisting that there is more theology "in a bull mounting a cow" than in the ecclesiastical academies, and citing Dostoevsky in support of the

  view that "God has taken the seeds of other universes and sowed them in the earth."130

  Apocalypse and judgment were immediate sensuous realities for Rozanov just as the physical world had been. He could not believe in "the immortality of the soul" (he invariably put such abstract phrases in quotation marks) but could not bring himself to believe that "the little red beard" of his best friend would ever perish. He envisaged himself as standing before God on Judgment Day saying nothing, only sobbing and smiling.

  Rozanov died early in 1919 before finishing his Apocalypse; but in the following year there was written an even more remarkable description of the coming end, in the prophetic novel We by Eugene Zamiatin. A former naval engineer and Bolshevik, Zamiatin portrays the coming totalitarianism with such penetrating acuteness that We has never yet been published in the USSR. The scene of the novel is "the United State," a horrendous Utopia of the future, which has subordinated the earth to a mysterious "Well-Doer" and a uniform "Table of Hours." The latter is a kind of cosmic extension of the railroad timetable: "that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature." Election Day is the Day of Unanimity, and order is maintained by electric whips, with death by evaporation the ultimate sanction.

  The narrator and hero-like everyone in the United State-is known by a number (D-503) rather than a name. D-503 is still, however, a recognizable human being-indeed, in some ways, a distilled representation of the silver age. He combines Prometheanism and sensualism, the two abiding attitudes of that period; and the tension in the novel arises from the inherent conflict between the two. On the one hand he is the ultimate Prometheus: a mathematician who has built "the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral," an object that is about to "integrate the indefinite equation of the Cosmos" by sending to all other planets "the grateful yoke of reason … a mathematically fauldess happiness." At the same time, however, D-503 suffers from an irrational attachment to a woman, I-330, who is associated with the music of the past, which, unlike the mathematical harmony of the present, is the product of purely individual inspiration ("an extinct form of epilepsy").

  I-330 leads D-503 out beyond the Green Wall of the United State to a wilderness in which live the Mephi: semi-bestial survivors of the Two Hundred Years' War which preceded the founding of the United State. The Mephi are, of course, the ultimate sensualists, children of Mephis-topheles, as their name suggests. In their world the breasts of women break through the uniforms of the state like the shoots of plants in spring; fire is worshipped; and insanity advocated as the only form of deliverance. Only

  the Mephi have not succumbed to "the mistake of Galileo" in believing that there is "a final number."

  In a series of surrealistic scenes, D-503 almost succumbs to their world of energy, which is contrasted with the entropy of the United State. Insisting on the infinite and Dionysian in face of the need for rationality is, however, ominously likened early in the novel to placing one's hand over the barrel of a rifle. As D-503 begins to succumb, this image becomes magnified to apocalyptical proportions. With the "forces of unreason" on the loose, Doomsday is at hand. D-503 prepares for suicide, but, at the very end, he is mysteriously brought back to daylight. His faith in finitude and the power of reason is restored by an operation which removes his soul. We is not only a brilliant forerunner of the anti-utopian Brave New World and 1984, it is also a culmination of the essentially anti-Christian preoccupation with Prometheanism and sensualism in the late imperial period. It might even be called a kind of black scripture for the satanists. Black masses had, after all, become a fashionable form of diversion in certain aristocratic circles; and Khlebnikov had not been alone in seeing "the world upside down" and life itself as little more than "a game in Hell."131 We is divided into forty "records" (rather than chapters), a number almost certainly suggested by the length of Christ's temptation and of the flood. It is related in the chronicle form of the Gospels, beginning with a black parody of the first chapter of St. John ("I am only copying-word by word . .. Before taking up arms, we shall try out the word") and a kind of annunciation ("The great historic hour is near, when the first INTEGRAL will rise into limitless space"). It ends with a surrealistic mock passion, crucifixion, descent, and resurrection of a hero whose age is that of Christ at the time of his passion. These events occur in the final "records," which correspond to the last days of Christ. The wall is shattered like the temple of Jerusalem; his descent into hell is portrayed through the image of the latrine in the underground railway, where he meets the Anti-God of the sensualists in a satanic parody on the image of Christ seated in glory at the right hand of God the father. Amidst the "unseen transparent music" of the waters in the latrine, Satan approaches D-503 from a toilet seat to the left. He introduces himself with an affectionate pat, and soon proves to be nothing more than a gigantic phallus: the true God of this neo-primitive and unnaturally erotic age. His "neighbor" is nothing but "a forehead-an enormous bald parabola" with "indefinable yellow lines of wrinkles" that suddenly seemed to be "all about me." This strange shape assures D-503 that he is capable of orgasm and not the "discarded cigarette butt" (which D-503 had assumed himself to be after an unsuccessful attempt at sexual union with I-330).

  I understand you, I understand completely-he said-but just the same you must calm down: it is not necessary. All of that will return, it will inevitably return.132

  He then tries to get D-503 to believe that "there is no infinity." Comforted by this thought, D-503 hastens to finish his chronicle on toilet paper and "put down a period just as the ancients placed a cross over the pits into which they threw their dead." In the last record, the fortieth, he is mysteriously resurrected and shown the path to salvation. This is again a kind of parody of the final vision of glory in the New Testament. The walls of the New Jerusalem are "a temporary wall of high voltage waves"; its bells are one giant Bell (Kolokol), which is the name given a torture chamber. Into it is led a mysterious person with sharp white teeth and dark eyes, a final satanic metamorphosis of the missing Madonna into the sensuous "unknown lady" of the silver age. As she is placed under "the Bell" she stares out at D-503 rather like the Queen of Spades in Pushkin's story and Chaikovsky's opera and the Demon of Vrubel's painting. However, for D-503, from whom the soul has now been removed, she is a creature from another world. He turns instead to look on "the Numbers who have betrayed reason"
as they enter into the purgatory of the Gas Chamber, which will reintegrate them in preparation for "the ascent up the stairs to the machine of the Well-Doer."

  This new heaven was a hell to Zamiatin, for whom Christian imagery was primarily a device for heightening man's sense of the grotesque. Thus, in the comatose aftermath of the Civil War, the author of We turns away from Christian symbols to those of the primordial, pre-Christian world in an effort to depict the unprecedented events that had just taken place. Pil'niak wrote an apostrophe to "damp mother earth"; and in 1924, the year when Leonov presented a collection of dinosaur fossils consumed by fire as the symbol of the end of the old order, Zamiatin turned from the future depicted in We to suggestions of the primordial past in his famous story "The Cave." His eerie picture of man's reversion to stone-age conditions during the Civil War begins with a verbless vignette:

  Glaciers, mammoths, wastelands. Nocturnal, black rocks somehow like houses; in the rocks-caves.133

  Within the caves, men forage around in search of food and fuel, furtively hiding from "the icy roar of some super-mammothish mammoth" which "roamed at night among the rocks where ages ago Petersburg had stood." In one of the caves, amidst such symbolic artifacts as an axe and a copy of Scriabin's Opus 74, a cultured hero sits half-hypnotized by "the greedy

  View of Russian Liberalism

  PLATE XX

  "new men" during the reign of Alexander II viewed the rising power of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is reflected in the masthead (Plate XX) of the satirical journal Iskra ("The Spark"). This short-lived journal, by borrowing from the radical press of England and France the weapon of political caricature, paved the way for future Soviet propagandists. The masthead depicted here was first introduced early in 1861.

  The coiling serpent is labeled "disrespect for law, for the rights of personality and property . . . self-assumed power and fist-justice . . ." The human parade moves from money through gambling, alcohol, and "speculators" to a scene that shows a mounted, villainous "monopoly" triumphant over a cringing and obese caricature of Justice, whose scales show money far outweighing "truth." At the far right emerge the final fruits of the depraved system: the cannon-bearing zealots of the new post-Crimean chauvinism, a woman trumpeting "publicity," and a man pushing the locomotive that was spreading the new industrial order throughout the empire. It seems appropriate that Lenin later chose the same title, Iskra (derived in both cases from earlier usage by the Decembrists), for the seminal weekly publication of revolutionary Bolshevism, which he founded in 1900.

  PLATE XXII

  PLATE XXI

  imperial periuu is weu miuirutci* uy iuuH.r»v›. ^ ~j namic Suprematism" (Plate XXI): a typical product of the revolutionary style of non-objective art which he conceived in 1913, proclaimed in a manifesto of 1915, and exemplified in a variety of such paintings during the period of war and revolution.

  The cultural richness and stylistic variety of this age was obliterated by the canonization under Stalin of "socialist realism," a two-dimensional poster art devoted largely to the glorification of socialist construction and, increasingly, Great Russian historical successes.

  There were, however, more imaginative efforts to portray the ideal of the new proletarian culture; and Malevich (unlike most of the best experimental artists from the pre-revolutionary era) stayed on in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1935, seeking to introduce the leaven of art into the dough of a new mass culture. The sturdy but faceless form of his simple, semi-abstract "Woman with a Rake (Plate XXII) offers a cleaner artistic statement of the idealized "heroine of socialist labor" than official Soviet art, and a secular icon to replace the semi-abstract religious image of a woman with child with which the illustrations for this book (and in many ways the story of Russian culture) begin. It is perhaps a fitting, final irony that the Byzantine Vladimir "Mother of God" is still on public view in the Tret'ia-kov Gallery in Moscow, whereas this thoroughly contemporary Russian painting of a working woman is consigned to the reserve collection of the same museum.

  cave-god: a cast-iron stove." In a weird sequence of scenes, the Christian symbols he mentions initially fade away and he becomes in effect a stone age man-robbing his neighbor and burning all available written work in order to feed his new God. At the end of the story

  . . . everything is one gigantic, silent cave. Narrow endless passageways… dark, ice-encrusted rocks; and in the rocks are deep holes glowing crimson; there, in the holes by the fire are people squatting . . . and heard by no one, . . . over the boulders, over the caves, over the squatting people comes the huge, measured tread of some super-mammothish mammoth.

  In his "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy," written in 1923, Zamiatin made explicit his opposition to the "measured tread of the mammoth" that was taking over Russia:

  Revolution is everywhere, in everything; it is endless, there is no last revolution, no last number. Social revolution is only one of innumerable numbers: the law of revolution is not social, but infinitely greater-a cosmic and universal law. . . .13i

  He invokes Nietzsche to show that dialectical materialism has become the ideological "crutch" for a "weak-nerved" generation unable to face "the fact that today's truths become tomorrow's mistakes. . . . This (the only) truth is only for the strong. . . ." Realism was the literary language appropriate only for the outmoded "flat coordinates of a Euclidian world." True realism now requires a feeling for

  The absurd. Yes. The meeting of parallel lines is also absurd. But it is absurd only in the canonical, flat geometry of Euclid: in non-Euclidian geometry it is an axiom. . . . For today's literature the flat surface of life is what the earth is for an airplane: a take-off path for the climb from ordinary life to true being [ot byta ? bytiiu] to philosophy to the fantastic.

  Into the world of the fantastic, Zamiatin plunged along with others of the "Serapion Brotherhood," the brilliant new literary group named for a story of Ernst Hoffmann about a hermit in a cave who believed in the reality of his own visions. Primitive images of apocalypse continued to populate the visions of Zamiatin, as can be seen simply from the titles of his later works: Attila and The Flood.135 Zamiatin's work stands as a kind of valedictory not only for the imaginative Silver Age but for the century of cultural ferment that had led up to it. He was gloomily convinced that "the only future for Russian literature is its past";136 and he left behind one last image of the writer's task, an elegiac reprise on the symbol of the sea as apocalypse.137 In times such as these, Zamiatin contends, the writer is like a lonely lookout

  on the mast of a storm-tossed ship. He still stands high above the din of the ordinary deckhands, and is better able to survey dispassionately the dangers that lie ahead. Yet he too stands to sink with the ship of humanity, which is already listing at a forty-five-degree angle and may soon be confronted with the all-consuming ninth wave of the apocalypse.

  Silence soon fell on this anti-authoritarian modernist. We and many of Zamiatin's other writings could only be published abroad, where he too went in 1931, dying six years later in Paris at the very time when Babel, Pil'niak, Gorky, and others were going to their death within the USSR. Zamiatin's belief in infinite numbers and unending Revolutionary aspiration was giving way to Stalin's world of fixed quotas and five-year plans; crescendo, to silence; electrification, to liquidation.

  In summarizing the cultural upheaval during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one may say that all three major currents-Prome-theanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism-helped sweep Russia further away from its moorings in tradition. Intellectuals drifted from one of these rushing currents to another-unable to chart a stable course, but unwilling to look back for familiar landmarks. Each of the three attitudes of the age was an extension of an idea already present among the anguished aristocratic philosophers of the nineteenth century: Prometheanism made explicit the transfer from God to man of the title to dominion over the external world; sensualism brought to the surface their secret fascination with the world of immediate physiologi
cal satisfaction and with its demonic patron; apocalypticism represented an agonizing, often masochistic clinging to the Judeo-Christian idea of retribution by those unable to believe in salvation.

  The first two emphases in Russian thought can be considered an Eastern intensification of a general European trend. Russian Prometheanism reflected the faith of many Europeans in the new creative vistas opened up by the growth of science, industry, and human inventiveness. This faith was particularly vivid in Eastern Europe, where the rapidly growing, increasingly cosmopolitan cities seemed to offer new possibilities to hitherto static peasant empires.

  Sensualism tended to be the creed of the aging aristocrat rather than the prodding parvenu-of those who saw in industrial development the multiplication rather than the solution of the world's problems. Russian sensualism was closely related to the contemporary turn toward sex and irrationalism in men like Swinburne, Wilde, Lawrence, and Rimbaud. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions which properly merit the overused designation of decadence, Russian sensualism was generally less pictorially lurid and programmatically anti-moral than that of the Anglo-French sen-