sualists of this period. Russian sensualism was tinged with aesthetic melancholy, rooted in the German philosophic tradition of Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Wagner's Tristan: a world of insatiable metaphysical longing in which life was a "disease of the spirit"; sexual experience, the means through which the foredoomed human will best expresses itself; and the "Death and Transfiguration" of the body, the only "cure" for the flesh-contaminated spirit.138
Apocalypticism was, however, an attitude that was in many ways more uniquely confined to Russia in the still-optimistic pre-war European world. To be sure, some Western writers like Verhaeren had seen apocalyptical meaning in the rise of the modern "tentacular city," and there was an undercurrent of biblical-tinged pessimism even in such a triumphant spokesman of the European imperial age as Rudyard Kipling. But nowhere else in Europe was the volume and intensity of apocalyptical literature comparable to that found in Russia during the reign of Nicholas II. The stunning defeat by Japan in 1904-5 and the ensuing revolution left an extraordinarily large number of Russians with the feeling that life as they had known it was irrevocably coming to an end. There was a tendency to see apocalyptical significance in everything, from the rise of Asia to the reappearance of Halley's Comet in 1910.139 Unable to find joy or consolation in religion, the Russian creative artist nonetheless looked with fascination at the apocalyptical literature of the Bible and Russian folklore. These writings commended themselves to the brooding psychological condition of Russian writers, and also provided a model for the art they hoped to produce; for tales of apocalypse were both uniquely familiar to the new mass audience that they hoped to reach and, at the same time, rich in the esoteric symbolic language that they themselves admired.
In its apocalypticism as in other ways, the culture of this disturbed age seems at times to represent a throwback to the distant past: more a finale to the Old than a prelude to the New Russia. Artists seemed more to be looking back to the secrets of the seven days that created the world than forward to the slogans of the ten days which shook it. They sought the sources, not the benefits, of electricity; the lost lines and colors of the old icons, rather than the photographic heroism of the new movies.
Russian Prometheanism thus had elements of Utopian compulsion and poetic fantasy that resemble less the optimistic and utilitarian scientism of contemporary Europe than the religious intoxication of earlier Russian heresy-the Judaizers with their pseudo-scientific "Secret of Secrets"; the Boehmist mystics with their esoteric paths to androgyny and divinity; and the recurrent sectarian prophets who sought to supplant traditional Chris-
tendom with a new group that would immediately realize the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Sensualism and apocalypticism were attitudes more reminiscent of the time of Ivan III and IV than of Alexander II and III. Philotheus of Pskov had seen a prophetic connection between the present reality of Sodom and the coming victory of the "third Rome," just as many in the Silver Age were prone to see their own decadence as the harbinger of final deliverance. But what precisely was to come out of Sologub's "dust and ashes"? Was it to be the enigmatic Christ of Blok's poem? Boris Savinkov's or Briusov's "Pale Horse," the fourth and most mysterious of the horsemen of the apocalypse? Stravinsky's and Balmont's "Firebird," the spectacular phoenix of pre-Christian Slavic mythology? or perhaps only the prehistoric dinosaurs of Zamiatin's "Cave"?
The more Russia's experimental intellectuals tried to plunge into the future, the more they tended to drift back into the past. Old themes and metaphors kept returning in new dress-such as the Hamlet symbol. Blok wrote a great deal about the character and even courted his future wife by acting out the scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia.140 In the early twenties the play provided the framework for a new Revolutionary parable which was acted out with great eclat by Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright. The new Hamlet portrayed a kind of Manichean struggle between the passionate and heroic Hamlet (and his allies, Horatio and Ophelia) and the haughty and repressive figure of the King (and his allies Polonius and the courtiers).141 Gothic sets were used to emphasize that this drama took place in the Middle Ages, prior to the coming of light; and the King's forces wear dark costumes and repellent expressions, whereas those of Hamlet are light. The Ghost-as the unalloyed voice of revolutionary conscience-is represented by a pure shaft of light.
From a variety of perspectives Russians seemed to be feeling their way back to the shrine of light, the mythological, pre-Christian sun gods of the East. "Let us be like unto the sun," Balmont had written in one of the most widely quoted of the early symbolist poems. Remizov's Following the Sun of 1907 was but one of many hymns of praise to the real and imagined sun gods of Eastern mythology. Gorky's Confession of the following year hailed "the people" as "the master of the Sun."142 In 1909 Blok found his symbolic harbor for the long-lost ship at sea in the all-consuming, coldly impersonal Sun:
Set forth your boat, plunge to the distant pole
through walls of ice . . . And midst the shudders of the slow-moving cold
Acclimate your tired soul
So that here on earth it will nothing need
When from there the rays come streaming through.143
The same sun symbol becomes one of intoxicating neo-pagan life affirmation in early post-Revolutionary poetry: Khlebnikov's "Chains of Blue," Kliuev's Song of the Sunbearer, and Maiakovsky's "Extraordinary Adventure," where the poet plays host to the sun at tea, and is told:
Let us sing
In a world of dull trash. I shall pour forth my sun And you-your own In verse.
Together the "double-barreled suns" break through "a wall of shadows and jail of nights" and pledge themselves
To shine always
To shine everywhere
To the depth of the last days
To shine
And nothing else.144
Maiakovsky invokes the Sun God of antiquity in the final ecstatic hymn of his Mystery Bouffe, the famed dramatic apotheosis of the new order, which he presented on the steps of the St. Petersburg stock exchange building in the early days of the Soviet regime:
Over us sun, sun and sun . . .
The sun-our sun!
Enough! . . .
Play a new game!
In a circle!
Play with the sun. Roll the sun. Play in the sun!145
"Mystery" had, of course, also been the title of Scriabin's unfinished revolutionary symphony of sound, speech, and smell-which seems strangely reminiscent of the Church liturgy. There, too, drama, speech, and music were fused with the color of the icons and the smell of incense. Scriabin and Maiakovsky were, each in his own idiom, writing mystery plays for a new organic society in which all participated in the common ritual the aim of which was not entertainment but redemption. But if they were Christian in form, they were in many ways mystical and semi-Oriental in content. Meierhold insisted that there were no mystery plays in modern times and
that "the author of 'Prometheus' is longing for the Banks of the Ganges."148 Khlebnikov was preoccupied with mystical, Asian themes and called himself "A dervish, a yogi, a Martian . . ."147 adopting the ancient Slavonic version of Vladimir, "Velimir," as his pen name. His search for a language of pure sounds as a prerequisite for the Utopian society to be created by his "society for the presidents of the world" also bears some resemblance to the quest of earlier, Slavic Christendom. There, too, the liturgy, the "common work" of salvation, proceeded through the rhythmic incantations of the human voice to the joyous and climactic ringing of bells: a pure "language beyond reason," a zaumny iazyk prefiguring the celestial rejoicing of the world to come.
The entire emphasis on the non-literary, supra-rational arts is a throwback to the culture of Old Muscovy, with its emphasis on sights, sounds, and smells. Yet in Old Russia there had been a unifying faith to give each of the art media a common focus and a willingness to accept its limitations. In modern Russia the poetry of Blok and Khlebnikov was straining to burst into music. The music of Scriabin was seeking to u
nravel the language of color; and the colors of Kandinsky, the language of music. Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art, was in some ways the most deeply rooted of all in the aesthetics of Muscovy. He sought not art for its own sake but "the spiritual in art," and sought to end idle spectatorism by re-creating the intimacy between man and art that existed in earlier religious art. His painting was based on pure line and color-the two primary ingredients of icon painting. Kandinsky's art was-like that of the ancient icons-not concerned with the visual aspects of the external world, but was rather a kind of "abstract musical arabesque . . . purified like music of all but its direct appeals to the spirit."148
Yet the most abstract and purified of all sound, the language farthest "beyond reason," is that of silence. The most inclusive of all colors is the all-containing womb of white: the "white on white" of Malevich's painting, the bely which the "symphonic" novelist chose for his very name. An unleashed fantasy of line leads men into the infinity of space. A mystical longing for annihilation often followed the frenzied assertion of Promethean power. Whiteness, space, and infinity had replaced the sea as the symbol of this fulfillment-in-obliteration.
Moving within a generation from authoritarian traditionalism to ego-futurism, Russian culture had produced an extraordinary "commotion of verse and light."149 But everything had been taken to excess; and it seems strangely symbolic that the awesome decimation of the artistic community in the mid-thirties began with Andrew Bely's death in 1934 from overexposure to the sun.
Russia was not yet a fully self-sustaining industrial power, and had not yet evolved social and political institutions capable of combining the philosophy of its new leaders and the traditions of its people. By the late twenties the awesome decision was made to build socialism with "the methods employed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids."150 The thirties witnessed the merciless herding of workers into new industrial complexes and of peasants into new collectives. The "commotion of verse and light" gave way to the coercion of prose and darkness. It is to the fate of Russian culture in the wake of Stalin's "second revolution" that attention must now be turned.
2. The Soviet Era
J4or a long time after 1917, it was not entirely clear how profound a break in cultural tradition was implied in the founding of a new social order. The various proposals for bringing about a total break with past culture-whether through the God-building intoxication of Proletkult or the masochistic Eurasianism of the Scythians-were rejected along with the visionary social and economic programs of "war communism." Following the end of the Civil War and beginning of the New Economic Policy in 1921, a more permissive atmosphere was established; and some came to think in the course of the twenties that considerable cultural variety was to be tolerated within the new Revolutionary state.1
Perhaps the dominant literary group of the early twenties, the so-called fellow travelers (poputchiki), accepted the new Soviet state while professing reservations about its ideology. The even more heterodox "Serapion Brotherhood" took shape in 1921, and a number of leading pre-revolution-ary literary figures soon returned to resume their writing careers. Two gifted young novelists, Alexis Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg, came back from the emigration in 1923 to produce works that showed little hint of the servility to Stalin that became characteristic of their later works. Tolstoy incorporated into his prose writings many of the anti-urban, anti-utopian ideas of the peasant poets, notably in his "Sky-blue Cities," in which an anarchistic intellectual sets fire to a newly constructed Soviet town.2 Ehrenburg introduced Jewish themes into his writings of the twenties. The founding of the Yiddish magazine Shtrom {Stream) in Moscow in 1922 helped Russia retain its central role in vernacular Yiddish culture despite Jewish population losses to newly independent Poland and to the emigration. A more ancient Hebrew culture also spoke forth through the newly formed Moscow Habima Theater, which was soon taken over by the prestigious advocate of "fantastic realism," Eugene Vakhtangov. Until his death in 1924, this Hebrew theater exerted a strange fascination on its Russian audiences. Ancient chants mixed with modern gestures in humorous yet
haunting scenes showing the soul-the famed Dybbuk-coming back from the dead to take possession of the living.
… all of Moscow, ravaged, reduced to rags, weary from hunger, fear, and revolution without regard to race or religion . . . rushed every evening to assault the 125 seats of the minute and improvised Habima amphitheater. . . . Subjugated, gasping for breath in this suburb-cemetery of the vanities of a condemned nobility-men who had just lived through the most modern, the most implacably mechanical of revolutions crowded around words that they did not understand. . . . The theater was returning to its origins and they were submitting to its religious spell. The mysticism, the ancient chaos, the animal divinity of the crowd-all that makes up the secret and powerful depth of revolutions was expressed by the Dybbuk and imposed on Moscow.3
It may seem surprising that a Hebrew troupe was able to provide such a vital leaven for Russian culture, particularly at a time when the native stage was itself in full flower. But
In certain liturgical hymns each verse is preceded with a word in Hebrew. The faithful do not understand it; but by modulating it strangely and mysteriously, the clear Christian hymn is impregnated, the unknown word strikes against the faithful and confers an unsuspected profundity. Thus did the Hebraic soul of the Habima act upon the Russian soul.4
At the same time, the futurists provided a more secular form of cultural stimulus, continuing to clamor for public attention on the pages of Lef ("Left Front in Literature"), which began to appear in 1923 with the collaboration of Maiakovsky and Meierhold. Older traditions of satirizing contemporary life were revived by promising new writers, such as the Odessa team of Ilf and Petrov and Michael Zoshchenko. The latter, the son of a Russian actress and a Ukrainian painter, became probably the most widely read contemporary Soviet writer in the twenties, with more than a million copies of his works sold from 1922 to 1927.5 In the field of history, non-Marxist and pre-Revolutionary figures like Tarle and Platonov continued to work inside Russia, though some of their works (and many in the literary world) were published in Berlin. Serge Prokof'ev, one of the greatest Russian composers, returned to take up permanent residence in the USSR in 1927, and was followed within a year by Maxim Gorky, its most renowned prose writer.
Even religion seemed to be receiving a new lease on life in the USSR of the mid-twenties. In 1926 the newly chosen Patriarch of the Russian Church was released from prison. In the following year, both he and the
patriarchal church were grudgingly recognized by the regime and the puppet "Living Church" allowed to die. The various sects-and particularly the locally organized and administered communities of the newly consolidated Protestant community (the "Evangelical Christians-Baptists")-grew rapidly in strength. Lenin's secretary, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, was an historian of Russian sectarianism who argued with some success that the indus-triousness, productivity, and communal methods of the sects might have something to contribute to the construction of a socialist society."
The relatively permissive cultural atmosphere of the twenties was, in part, the result of Bolshevik preoccupation with political consolidation and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of seven years of international and internal war. In part also it was the result of the relatively optimistic and humanistic reading of Marx's theories of culture that were advanced by the reigning ideologists of the early Soviet period: Deborin in philosophy and Voronsky in literature.7 These men insisted that a new culture must follow rather than precede a new proletarian society. Following Marx and his most brilliant interpreter among the Bolsheviks, Nicholas Bukharin, they considered literature and art part of the superstructure rather than the base of human culture. Art could, thus, be transformed only in the wake of profound social and economic change. In the meantime, the arts had a duty to absorb the best from past culture and provide an independent reflection of reality in a complex era of transition. The practical consequences of this po
sition were to discredit the earlier hopes for "immediate socialism." One could no longer speak seriously of replacing the traditional university with a new "fraternity ef teachers, students and janitors"; nor of replacing the family system with "the new family of the working collective."8 Gradually, however, it became apparent that this relaxation of control and return to old ways was only temporary. Whereas about two fifths of all publishing was outside of government hands at the time of Lenin's death early in 1924, only one tenth had survived three years later.9 The beginnings of tightening ideological control can be traced to the founding of the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, Bolshevik, in 1924,10 and to a series of party discussions on the role of literature in the new society held in 1924 and 1925. Although the party resolutions rejected the demand of the extremist "on guard" faction for detailed party regulation of literature, they did assert the right of party control over "literature as a whole" and call for a centralized "All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers" (VAPP): the first in an apostolic succession of increasingly powerful organs for tight regulation. In the same 1925 a comparable group was formed on what was soon to be called "the musical front," "The
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