The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 169

the Second Coming of Christ; for others, with a charismatic leader of the masses or a neo-Romantic cult of the poet as quasi-divine prophet. The poetic variant was especially attractive, since it integrates Dionysian inspiration with the Apollonian ideals of restraint, sobriety, and disciplined form. In this spirit, Merezhkovsky wrote an essay for the 1899 Pushkin Centennial claiming that this most perfect of poets was precisely “the Russian solution to the tragedy of dualism dramatizedbyNietzscheand symbolizedbytheApollonian–Dionysian polarity” – the genius who could bridge spirit and flesh, art and life, East and West.6 Unsurprisingly, Leo Tolstoy vigorously condemned the Nietzsche cult (which he encountered in vulgarized form and which he vulgarized further). In January 1900, the same month Uncle Vanya so shocked him at the Moscow Art Theatre, Tolstoy wrote with some irritation in his diary that Chekhov’s short story “Lady with a Pet Dog” was “all Nietzsche,” adding: “Previously people who hadn’t evolved for themselves a clear philosophy of life, one that could distinguish good and evil, used to seek anxiously; now they think they are beyond good and evil, but they remain on this side, that is, they are almost

animals.”7

A final factor jolting Russian art out of the mimetic-Realist groove was Einstein’s revolution in the physics of time and space. The theory of relativity, made public in 1905, augmented Newtonian laws of energy, mass, and momentum with the innovative postulates that time could dilate, length could contract, and the “reality” of time and space depend upon the perspective, distance, and velocity of the observer. These ideas affected not only science; they also stunned and fascinated creative artists working in all media. In Russia, Einstein was invoked to legitimize multiple and local points of view, individual initiative, and fantastic theories for restructuring life and abolishing death. That consummate physicist fed into longstanding Russian debates over the freedom of the soul against the dead determinism of matter. Readers of The Brothers Karamazov might recall how Dmitry, already in prison, rails against the mechanistic theories of the French physiologist Claude Bernard: is it possible, Dmitry frets, that it’s all “nerves in the brain,” and “that’s why I’m able to think, . . . and not because I have a soul?” (Book Eleven, ch. 4, p. 589). In 1880, Dostoevsky had been defending human freedom against the empiricist tradition in Russian science, which investigated behavior modification through manipulation of external stimuli. The mystical Symbolists continued Dostoevsky’s polemic against the tyranny of visible matter. By 1904, the lines were drawn: one year before Einstein announced his theory, Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his clinical research on digestive processes. The fame of Pavlovian mechanistic reflexology peaked just before World War I.