Selected Essays

Pushkin & Scriabin (Fragments)

Pushkin and Scriabin¹ are two transmutations of a single sun, two transmutations of a single heart. Twice the death of an artist gathered the Russian people and kindled the sun over them. They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death, as people are said to live a full life; their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory.

I wish to speak of Scriabin’s death as of the highest act of his creativity. It seems to me the artist’s death ought not to be excluded from the chain of his creative achievements, but rather examined as the last conclusive link. From this wholly Christian point of view, Scriabin’s death is amazing. It not only is remarkable as the fabulous posthumous growth of the artist in the eyes of the masses, but also serves as it were as the source of this creativity, as its teleological cause. If one were to tear the veil of death from this creative life, it would flow freely from its cause—that is, death—which disposes itself around it as if around its own proper sun, and absorbs its light.

Pushkin was buried at night. Was buried secretly.² The marble of St. Isaac’s—that magnificent sarcophagus—never did receive as expected the solar body of the poet. At night they placed the sun in its coffin, and the runners of the sled that carried the poet’s dust off to the funeral service squeaked in the January frost.

I recall the picture of the Pushkin funeral to evoke in your memory the image of a nighttime sun,³ the image of the last Greek tragedy created by Euripides—a vision of the unfortunate Phaedra.

In the fateful hours of purification and storm, we have raised Scriabin aloft, whose sun-heart burns above us; yet alas! this is not the sun of redemption but the sun of guilt. Affirming Scriabin as her symbol at the time of the World War, Phaedra-Russia . . .

. . . Time can go backward: the whole course of our most recent history, which with terrific force has turned away from Christianity to Buddhism and theosophy, testifies to this . . .

There is no unity! “Worlds are many, all dispose themselves in their orbits, god reigns over god.” What is this: hallucination or the end of Christianity?

There is no personality! “I”—it’s a transient condition; you have many souls and many lives! What is this: hallucination or the end of Christianity?

There is no time! The Christian chronology is in danger, the frail ledger of the years of our era is lost—time tears backward with a roaring hum and a swoosh, like a blocked torrent—and the new Orpheus flings his lyre in the seething spume: there is no more art . . .

Scriabin is the next stage after Pushkin of Russian Hellenism, one more consistent disclosure of the Hellenistic nature of the Russian spirit. Scriabin’s immense value for Russia and for Christianity was determined by the fact that he was a raving Hellene. Through him, Hellas entered into a blood relationship with the Russian sectarians who burned themselves in their coffins. In any case, he is much closer to them than to the Western theosophists. His chiliasm was a purely Russian passion for salvation; what there is of antiquity in him is the madness with which he expressed this passion.

. . . Christian art is always an action based on the great idea of redemption. It is an “imitation of Christ” infinitely various in its manifestations, an eternal return to the single creative act that began our historical era. Christian art is free. It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, “art for art’s sake.” No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ. And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ—that is the keystone of Christian esthetics. Art cannot be a sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed. What then is left? A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-and-seek of the spirit! The divine illusion of redemption, which is Christian art, is explained precisely by this game Divinity plays with us, permitting us to stray along the byways of mystery so that we would, as it were of ourselves, come upon salvation, having experienced catharsis, redemption in art. Christian artists are as it were the freedmen of the idea of redemption, rather than slaves, and they are not preachers. Our whole two-thousand-year-old culture, thanks to the miraculous mercy of Christianity, is the world’s release into freedom for the sake of play, for spiritual joy, for the free “imitation of Christ.”

Christianity took its place and stood there in an absolutely free relationship to art, and this no human religion of any kind has been able to do either before or after it.

Nourishing art, giving art of its flesh, offering it in the way of a sturdy metaphysical foundation the most real fact of redemption, Christianity demanded nothing in return. Christian culture is therefore not threatened by the danger of inner impoverishment. It is inexhaustible, infinite, because, triumphing over time, again and again it condenses grace into magnificent clouds and lets it pour out in life-giving rain. One cannot be sufficiently emphatic in pointing out the fact that, for its character of eternal freshness and unfadingness, European culture is indebted to the mercy of Christianity in its relationship to art.

Still unstudied is the realm of Christian dynamics—the spirit’s activity in art as a free self-affirmation in the basic fact of redemption—in particular, music.

In the ancient world music was considered a destructive element. The Hellenes feared flutes, considering Phrygian harmony dangerous and seductive, and Terpander had to fight for each new string of the lyre with great effort. The untrusting attitude toward music as a dark and suspicious element was so strong that the state took music under its tutelage, declaring it a state monopoly, civic harmony, eunomia. But even in this form, the Hellenes could not bring themselves to grant music its independence: the word seemed to them a necessary antidote, a loyal guard, a constant companion of music. The Hellenes did not know pure music, properly speaking—it belongs entirely to Christianity. The mountain lake of Christian music managed to hold out against enemy attacks only after that profound transformation that turned Hellas into Europe.

Christianity did not fear music. With a smile, the Christian world said to Dionysus: “Well, go ahead, give it a try; order your maenads to tear me apart: I am all wholeness, all personality, all welded unity!” This confidence that the new music has in the decisive triumph of personality, integral and unharmed, is as strong as that. This confidence in personal salvation—I would say—enters Christian music as an overtone, while working the coloration of Beethoven’s sonority into the white marble of Sinai’s glory.

Voice is personality. The piano is a siren. Scriabin’s break with the voice, his great bewitchment with the siren of pianism, signals the loss of the Christian sense of personality, of the musical “I am.” The wordless, strangely mute chorus of Prometheus goes on being the same seductive siren.

Beethoven’s catholic joy, the synthesis of the Ninth Symphony, that “triumph of white glory,” is inaccessible to Scriabin. In this sense he broke away from Christian music and went his own way . . .

The spirit of Greek tragedy has awakened in music. Music has completed its cycle and returned from whence it came: once again, Phaedra calls out to the nurse, once again Antigone demands libation and burial for the beloved body of her brother.

Something has happened to music, some sort of wind has swooped down and broken the dry and sonorous rushes. We demand a choir; the murmur of the thinking reed has begun to bore us. . . . For a long, long time we played with music, without suspecting the danger that lurks in it, and while (perhaps from boredom) we were inventing a myth not invented but born, foam-born, purple-born, of imperial origin, the legitimate heir of the myths of antiquity—the myth of forgotten Christianity.

. . . of the vineyards of the old Dionysus: I seem to see the closed eyes and the light, triumphant, small head, tilted slightly upward. This is the muse of remembering—the lightfoot Mnemosyne, senior in the circle of the dance. From her light, fragile face, the mask of oblivion falls, her features smooth out; memory triumphs, though it be at the cost of death: to die means to remember, to remember means to die. . . . To remember no matter what it might entail! To fight oblivion, even to the death: that is Scriabin’s motto, that is the heroic tendency of his art! In this sense I said Scriabin’s death was the highest act of his creativity, that it showers him with a blinding and unexpected light.

. . . finished—was in full swing. Anyone who feels himself a Hellene must be on his guard now as two thousand years ago. You can’t Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can repaint a house. The Christian world is an organism, a living body. The tissues of our world are renewed by death. We have to struggle with the barbarism of a new life, because there, in the new life which is in full bloom, death is unvanquished! While death exists in the world Hellenism will be, because Christianity Hellenizes death. . . . The Hellenic, fructified by death, is just what Christianity is. The seed of death, having fallen on the soil of Hellas, burst miraculously into bloom: our whole culture has grown from this very seed; we keep the ledger of the years from that moment when the land of Hellas accepted it. Everything Roman is sterile, because the soil of Rome is stony, because Rome is Hellas deprived of grace.

Scriabin’s art has a direct relationship to that historical task of Christianity that I call the Hellenization of death, and through this receives its profound meaning.

. . . there is music—it contains in itself the atoms of our being. To the degree that melody in its pure form corresponds to the unique feeling of personality as Hellas knew it, so harmony is characteristic of the complex post-Christian sense of “I.” Harmony was a sort of forbidden fruit for the world as yet not implicated in the Fall. The metaphysical essence of harmony is in the narrowest sense connected with the Christian concept of time. Harmony is crystallized eternity, it is all in a cross section of time, in that section of time that knows only Christianity. . . . the mystics energetically reject eternity in time, while accepting this cross section available only to the righteous, while affirming eternity—a Kantian category cloven by the sword of the seraph. The center of gravity of Scriabin’s music lies in harmony: harmonic architectonics.