Icon and Axe

2. The Forest

THE MOST IMPORTANT immediate consequence for Russia of the Mongol sweep across the Eurasian steppe in the thirteenth century was that the once-outlying forest regions of the north now became the main center of an independent Orthodox culture. What the change of geographical focus from the central Dnieper to the upper Volga really meant can never be precisely ascertained. Pitifully few documentary or archeological materials have survived the fights, frosts, and fires of the north. Cultural historians are inclined to stress continuities with the Kievan age, pointing out that the principal cities of the northeast—Vladimir, Suzdal, Riazan, Rostov, and Yaroslavl—were almost as old as Kiev; that Vladimir had been the ruling seat of the leading Kievan princes for many years prior to the sack of Kiev; and that Novgorod, the second city of Kievan times, remained free of Mongol invasions and provided continuity with its steadily increasing prosperity. The characters, events, and artistic forms of Kievan times dominated the chronicles and epics “which assumed their final shape in the creative memory of the Russian north.”¹ The ritualized forms of art and worship and the peculiar sensitivity to beauty and history—all remained constant features of Russian culture.

Yet profound, if subtle, changes accompanied the transfer of power to the upper Volga: the coldest and most remote frontier region of Byzantine-Slavic civilization. This region was increasingly cut off not just from declining Byzantium but also from a resurgent West, which was just rediscovering Greek philosophy and building its first universities. The mention of Russia that had been so frequent in early medieval French literature vanished altogether in the course of the fourteenth century.² Russian no less than Western European writers realized that the Orthodox Eastern Slavs now comprised a congeries of principalities rather than a single political force. The chroniclers in the Russian north sensed that they were somewhat cut off, using the term “Rus’” primarily for the old politico-cultural center on the Dnieper around Kiev.³

A sense of separation within the domain of the Eastern Slavs had already been suggested by the tenth-century Byzantine distinction between “near” and “distant” Rus’; and in the thirteenth century the distinction between “great” Russia in the north and “little” Russia in the south was gradually transplanted from Byzantium to Russia. What apparently began as a pure description of size eventually became a favored pseudo-imperial designation in the north. Individual towns like Novgorod and Rostov called themselves “the Great.” Details of the life of Alexander the Great—a favorite subject in the epic literature of the East—were blended by the chroniclers of the Russian north into the idealized life of Alexander Nevsky⁴—whose victory over the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights two years later was followed by a reign as Great Prince of Vladimir. His victorious exploits helped compensate for the simultaneous humiliation at the hands of the Mongols and made him seem no less “great” than the earlier Alexander. By the late fifteenth century, Ivan III had brought greatness out of legend and into reality, subordinating most of the major cities of the Russian north to Moscow. The first grand duke of Muscovy to call himself tsar (Caesar), he also became the first of several imperial conquerors of modern Russia to be known as “the Great.”

There was, however, nothing great, or even impressive, about Great Russia in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth century. It must have seemed highly unlikely that the Eastern Slavs in the bleak Volga-Oka region would in any way recapture—let alone surpass—the glories of the Kievan past. Kiev and the original region of Rus’ along the Dnieper had been despoiled by the still-menacing Mongols. The Volga was frozen for much of the year and blocked to the south by Mongol fortresses. Flat terrain and wooden fortifications offered little natural protection from eastern invaders. Slavic co-religionists to the west were preoccupied with other problems. To the northwest, Novgorod had carved out an economic empire of its own and moved increasingly into the orbit of the expanding Hanseatic League. Further north, the rugged Finns were being converted to Christianity, not by the once-active Orthodox missionaries of Novgorod and Ladoga, but by the Westernized Swedes. Directly to the west, the Teutonic and Livonian knights provided a continuing military threat; while Galicia and Volhynia in the southwest were drifting into alignment with the Roman Church. Most of what is now White (or West) Russia was loosely ruled by the Lithuanians, and much of Little Russia (or the Ukraine) by the Poles. These two western neighbors were, moreover, moving toward an alliance that was sealed by marriage and the establishment of the Jagellonian dynasty in 1386.

The surviving centers of Byzantine-Kievan civilization in Great Russia were relatively isolated from these alien forces. As a result, it is difficult to explain the changes in Russian cultural life that accompanied the move from “little” to “great” Russia simply in terms of new contact with other civilizations. There was, to be sure, increased borrowing from the Tatars and from pre-Christian pagan animism in the north. But there are great risks in suggesting that either of these elements provides some simple “key” to the understanding of Russian character. The famed aphorism “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar” and the ingenious hypothesis that there was in Russia an enduring dvoeverie (or duality of belief between official Christianity and popular paganism) tell us more about the patronizing attitude of Western observers and the romantic imagination of Russian ethnographers respectively than about Russian reality as such.

Of these two theories, that of continuing animistic influences takes us perhaps deeper into the formative processes of Russian thought.⁵ The Tatars provided a fairly clear-cut imaginative symbol for the people and an administrative example for the leaders, but were an external force whose contact with the Russian people was largely episodic or indirect. Pre-existent pagan practices, on the other hand, were a continuing force, absorbed from within by broad segments of the populace and reflecting a direct response to inescapable natural forces. If the fragmentary surviving materials cannot prove any coherent, continuing pagan tradition, there can be no doubt that the cold, dark environment of Great Russia played a decisive role in the culture which slowly emerged from these, the silent centuries of Russian history. As in the other wooded regions of Northern Europe—Scandinavia, Prussia, and Lithuania—brooding pagan naturalism seemed to stand in periodic opposition to a Christianity that had been brought in relatively late from more sunlit southerly regions. Far more, however, than her forest neighbors to the west, Great Russia thrust monasteries forth into the wooded wastes during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus, in Great Russia, there was not so much a duality of belief as a continuing influx of primitive animism into an ever-expanding Christian culture.

The animistic feeling for nature blended harmoniously with an Orthodox sense of history in the springtime festival of Easter, which acquired a special intensity in the Russian north. The traditional Easter greeting was not the bland “Happy Easter” of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, “Christ is risen!” The standard answer “In truth, risen!” seemed to apply to nature as well as man; for the resurrection feast came at the end not just of the long Lenten fast, but of the dark, cold winter. Easter sermons were among the most carefully preserved and frequently recopied documents from the Kievan period. To their Byzantine elegance was added in the north the simple assertion that “the goodness hidden in the hearts of the holy shall be revealed in their risen bodies” just as trees long veiled in snow “put out their leaves in the spring.”⁶

The weakening of central authority and the presence of new enemies—both natural and human—forced a deepening of family and communal bonds within the widely scattered communities of the Russian north. Authority in most areas was naturally invested in “elders” and exercised through extended family relationships. Within the Christian name of each Russian is included even today the name of his father. The prevailing Russian words for “country” and “people” have the same root as “birth”; “native land” and “land ownership,” the same as “father.”⁷ The individual had to subordinate himself to group interests to accomplish his daily tasks: the communal clearing of land, building of fortifications and churches, and chanting of group prayers and offices. Later attempts to find in the “Russian soul” an innate striving toward communality (sobornost’) and “family happiness” may often represent little more than romantic flights from present realities. But the practical necessity for communal action is hard to deny for the early period; and already in the fourteenth century the word “communal” (sobornaia) apparently began to be substituted for the word “catholic” (kafolicheskaia) in the Slavic version of the Nicene Creed.⁸

For better or worse, the sense of sharing experience almost as members of a common family was an important element in forming the cultural tradition of modern Russia. Intensified by common suffering and glorified memories of Kievan times, this feeling was perhaps even deeper in the interior than in the more prosperous and cosmopolitan centers of Novgorod, Smolensk, and Polotsk to the west. It was in this inner region that the cult of the Mother of God was developed with the greatest intensity. Feasts like that of the intercession (Pokrov) of the Virgin—unknown to Kiev—were introduced in this region; and a cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin (Uspensky Sobor) enjoyed in Vladimir and Moscow the central role played by the more purely Byzantine Santa Sophia in Kiev and Novgorod. Although this cult of the Virgin was also growing concurrently in Byzantium and even in the West, it appears to have generated a special primitive intensity and sense of familial intimacy in the Russian interior.

Within the family the mother seems to have been the binding force. In a society whose rich and imaginative epic literature contains few references to romantic love and no idealized pair of lovers, the mother tended to become an unusually important focus of reverence and affection.⁹ If the father’s role in the family was likened in the household guide of the mid-sixteenth century (Domostroy) to that of the head of a monastery, the mother’s role might well have been compared to that of its saint or spiritual “elder.” She was a kind of living version of the omnipresent icons of the “Mother of God”—the “joy of all sorrows” and “lady of loving kindness,” as the Russians were particularly prone to call Mary. Men monopolized the active conduct of war and affairs, whereas women cultivated the passive spiritual virtues of endurance and healing love. Women quietly encouraged the trend in Russian spirituality which glorified non-resistance to evil and voluntary suffering, as if in compensation for the militant official ethos of the men. Women played a decisive role in launching and keeping alive the last passionate effort to preserve the organic religious civilization of medieval Russia: the famed Old Believer movement of the seventeenth century.¹⁰

Even in later years great emphasis was placed on the strong mother figure, who bears up under suffering to hold the family together; and to the grandmother (babushka), who passes on to the next generation the mixture of faith and folklore, piety and proverb, that comprised Russian popular culture.¹¹ Russia itself came to be thought of less as a geographical or political entity than as a common mother (matushka) and its ruler less as prince or lawmaker than a common father (batiushka). The term “Russian land” was feminine both in gender and allegorical significance, related to the older pagan cult of a “damp mother earth” among the pre-Christian Eastern Slavs.

Earth is the Russian “Eternal Womanhood,” not the celestial image of it; mother, not virgin; fertile, not pure; and black, for the best Russian soil is black.¹²

The river Volga also was referred to as “dear mother” in the first Russian folk song ever recorded and “natal mother” in one of the most popular: the ballad of Stenka Razin.¹³

The extension of Kievan civilization on to the headwaters of this the largest river in Eurasia proved the means of its salvation. The very inhospitability of this northern region offered a measure of protection from both east and west. The Volga provided an inland waterway for future expansion to the east and south; and its tributaries in northwestern Russia reached almost to the headwaters of other rivers leading into the Baltic, Black, and Arctic seas.

But the movement out to the sea and onto the steppe came later in Russian history. This was essentially a period of retreat into a region where the dominant natural feature was the forest.

In speaking of the region, Russian chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depart from their usual tendency to use the name of a dominant city, referring instead to zaleskaia zemlia, “the wooded land”: a pointed reminder that the virgin forest was the nursery of Great Russian culture.¹⁴ Even in modern times, popular folklore taught that the primeval forest had extended all the way up to heaven.¹⁵ In the formative early period, the forest represented a kind of evergreen curtain for the imagination, shielding it from the increasingly remote worlds of Byzantine and Western urbanity.

It is probably not too much to say that the wooded plain shaped the life of Christian Muscovy as profoundly as the desert plain that of Moslem Arabia. In both areas food and friendship were often hard to find, and the Slavic like the Semitic peoples developed warm compensating traditions of hospitality. At the lowest level, peasants presented the ritual bread and salt to all arrivals; at the highest level, princes welcomed visitors with the elaborate banquets and toasts that have remained characteristic of official Russian hospitality.

If life in the scorching desert was built around the dwelling in the oasis and its source of water, life in the frozen forest was built around the dwelling in the clearing and its source of heat. From the many words used for “dwelling place” in Kievan Russia, only izba, meaning “heated building,” came into general use in Muscovy.¹⁶ Being permitted to sit on or over the earthenware stove in a Russian dwelling was the ultimate in peasant hospitality—the equivalent of giving a man something to drink in the desert. The hot communal bath had a semi-religious significance, still evident today in some Russian public baths and Finnish saunas and analogous in some ways to the ritual ablutions of desert religions.¹⁷

Unlike the desert nomad, however, the typical Muscovite was sedentary, for he was surrounded not by barren sand but by rich woods. From the forest he could extract not only logs for his hut but wax for his candles, bark for his shoes and primitive records, fur for his clothing, moss for his floors, and pine boughs for his bed. For those who knew its secret hiding places, the forest could also provide meat, mushrooms, wild berries, and—as its greatest culinary prize—sweet honey.

Man’s rival in the pursuit of honey through the forests was the mighty bear, who acquired a special place in the folklore, heraldic symbolism, and decorative wood carvings of Great Russia. Legend had it that the bear was originally a man who had been denied the traditional bread and salt of human friendship, and had in revenge assumed an awesome new shape and retreated to the forest to guard it against the intrusions of his former species. The age-old northern Russian customs of training and wrestling with bears carried in the popular imagination certain overtones of a primeval struggle for the forest and its wealth, and of ultimately re-establishing a lost harmony among the creatures of the forest.¹⁸

The fears and fascinations of Great Russia during these early years were to a large extent the universal ones of war and famine. The former was made vivid by the internecine warfare of Russian princes as well as periodic combat with Tatars and Teutons. Famine was also never far away in the north where the growing season was short and the soil thin; and where grain could not even be planted until trees were arduously uprooted and soil upturned with fragile wooden plows.

But the forest also gave rise to special fears: of insects and rodents gnawing from below and of fire sweeping in from without. Though common to most societies, fear of these primitive forces was particularly intense in Great Russia. In the military language of our own times, they could be said to represent the guerrilla warriors and thermonuclear weapons of an adversary bent on frustrating the peasants’ efforts to combat the cold and dark with the “conventional” defenses of food, clothing, and shelter. Even when he had cleared and planted a field and built a hut, the muzhik of the north was plagued by an invisible army of insects and rodents burrowing up through the floorboards and gnawing at his crops. During the brief summer months of warmth and light, he was harassed by swarms of mosquitoes; and when he put on his crude furs and fabrics for the winter, he exposed his body to an even deadlier insect: the omnipresent typhus-bearing louse.

The very process by which the body generated warmth within its clothing attracted the louse to venture forth from the clothing to feast upon its human prey; and the very communal baths by which Russians sought to cleanse themselves provided a unique opportunity for the louse to migrate from one garment to another.¹⁹ The flea and the rat collaborated to bring Russia epidemics of the black plague in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries that were probably even worse than those of Western Europe.²⁰ The peasant’s wooded hut, which provided rudimentary protection against the larger beasts of the forest, served more as a lure to its insects and rodents. They hungrily sought entrance to his dwelling place, his food supply, and—eventually—his still warm body.

Pagan magicians taught that insects actually begin to eat away at men while they are still alive; and that death comes only when men cease to believe in the occult powers of the sorcerer.²¹ The word “underground” (podpol’e) literally means “under the floor,” and suggests insects and rodents who “creep up” (podpolzat’) from beneath. The first official English ambassador in the mid-seventeenth century was advised by Russian officials to sleep together with his servants “lest the Rats run away with them being single.”²²

“The most mischievous enemies of unprotected and primitive man are not the big carnivora,” insisted a nineteenth-century student of the Russian peasantry, “but the lower forms of creation—the insects, the mice, rats … which overwhelm him by their numbers and omnipresence.”²³ No less than the revolutionary who wrote these words, conservative writers like Gogol equated the ever-increasing swarm of inspectors and officials sent out to the countryside with these ubiquitous insects and rodents. Dostoevsky was even more frightened and fascinated by man’s links with the insect world from his early Notes from the Underground to his apocalyptical images in The Possessed of a rat gnawing at an icon and the human community turning into an anthill. Dostoevsky fills his works with haunting references to spiders and flies,²⁴ which are lifted to the level of the grotesque by his sole surviving imitator in the Stalin era: Leonid Leonov. From his Badgers to The Russian Forest, Leonov mixes realistic plots with such surrealist creatures as “a new sort of cockroach,” a 270-year-old rat, and an unidentified “giant microbe” prowling construction sites.²⁵

Even stronger in the forest was the fear of, and fascination with, fire. Fire was “the host” in the house—the source of warmth and light that required cleanliness in its presence and reverent silence when being lit or extinguished. In the monasteries, the lighting of fires for cooking and baking was a religious rite that could be performed only by the sacristan bringing a flame from the lamp in the sanctuary.²⁶ One of the words for warmth, bogat’ia, was synonymous with wealth.

Russians tended to see the heavenly order in terms of the famous writings attributed to the mystic Dionysius, for whom angels are “living creatures of fire, men flashing with lightning, streams of flame … thrones are fire and the seraphims … blazing with fire.”²⁷ Russians often mention Christ’s statement that “I have come to send fire on the earth” and the fact that the Holy Spirit first came down to man through “tongues of fire.”²⁸

When a church or even an icon was burned in Muscovy it was said to have “gone on high.”²⁹ Red Square in Moscow, the site of ritual processions then as now, was popularly referred to as “the place of fire.”³⁰ The characteristic onion dome of Muscovite churches was likened to “a tongue of fire.”³¹

A basic metaphor for explaining the perfect combination of God and man in Christ had long been that of fire infusing itself into iron. Though essentially unchanged, this human “iron” acquires the fiery nature of the Godhead: the ability to enflame everything that touches it. A Byzantine definition of Christian commitment that became popular in Russia explained that “having become all fire in the soul, he transmits the inner radiance gained by him also to the body, just as physical fire transmits its effect to iron.”³² Or again from Dionysius:

Fire is in all things … manifesting its presence only when it can find material on which to work … renewing all things with its lifegiving heat … changeless always as it lifts that which it gathers to the skies, never held back by servile baseness.…³³

Heat not light, warmth rather than enlightenment, was the way to God.

At the same time, fire was a fearful force in this highly inflammable civilization: an uninvited guest whose sudden appearance came as a reminder of its fragile impermanence. The popular expression for committing arson even today is “let loose the red rooster,” and the figure of a red rooster was often painted on wooden buildings to propitiate him and prevent a dreaded visitation. Leonov likens a spreading forest fire to a horde of red spiders consuming everything in its way.³⁴

Moscow alone was visited with some seventeen major fires in the period from 1330 to 1453, and was to be gutted by flames many more times between then and the great fire of 1812. The recorded histories of Novgorod mention more than a hundred serious fires.³⁵ A seventeenth-century visitor remarked that “to make a conflagration remarkable in this country there must be at least seven or eight thousand houses consumed.”³⁶ Small wonder that fire was the dominant symbol of the Last Judgment in Russian iconography. Its red glow at the bottom of church frescoes and icons was recognizable even from afar whenever, in their turn, the flames of the church candles were lit by the faithful.

Perun, the god of thunder and creator of fire, held a pre-eminent place in the pre-Christian galaxy of deities, and the bright-plumed firebird a special place in Russian mythology. Ilya of Murom, perhaps the most popular hero of Christianized epic folklore, was modeled on (and given the Slavic name of) the prophet Elijah, who sent down fire on the enemies of Israel and ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. The first form of the drama in Russia was the “furnace show,” on the Sunday before Christmas, in which the three faithful Israelites—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—were rescued by God from Nebuchadnezzar’s fire. Although taken over from Byzantium, this drama received a new richness of staging and musical setting in Russia. Real fire was introduced in the Russian version; and, after their rescue, the three Israelites circulated through church and town to proclaim that Christ was coming to save men, just as the angel of the Lord had rescued them from the furnace.³⁷ In the first of the critical religious controversies of the seventeenth century, the fundamentalists passionately and successfully defended the rite whereby flaming candles were immersed into the waters that were blessed on Epiphany to remind men that Christ came to “baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”³⁸ In 1618 the head of Russia’s largest monastery was beaten by a mob and forced to perform a penance of a thousand prostrations a day for trying to do away with this uncanonical rite. One of the tracts written to denounce him, On the Enlightening Fire, accused him of trying to deny Russia “the tongue of fire that had descended upon the apostles.”³⁹ Fire was the weapon of the fundamentalists in the 1640’s as they burned musical instruments, foreign-style paintings, and the buildings of the foreign community itself in Moscow. After the fundamentalists had been anathemized in 1667, many of these “Old Believers” sought self-immolation—often with all their family and friends in an oil-soaked wooden church—as a means of anticipating the purgative fires of the imminent Last Judgment.⁴⁰

Apocalyptical fascination with the cleansing power of flames lived on in the traditions of primitive peasant rebellion—and indeed in the subsequent tradition of ideological aristocratic revolution. The atheistic anarchist Michael Bakunin fascinated Europe during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-9 with his prophetic insistence that “tongues of flame” would shortly appear all over Europe to bring down the old gods. After hearing Wagner conduct a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Leipzig in 1849, Bakunin rushed forward to assure him that this work deserved to be spared the imminent world conflagration. Fascinated by this man (whom he called the “chief stoker” of revolution), Wagner was haunted by the fact that the opera house did perish in flames shortly thereafter, and may well have been influenced by Bakunin in his characterization of Siegfried, his own fire music, and his over-all conception of “The Downfall of the Gods.”⁴¹ When Russia produced its own musical revolution in the early twentieth century, the symbol of fire was equally central: in Scriabin’s “Poem of Fire” and the spectacular fusion of music with the dance in Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s “Firebird.”

Their firebird, like the two-headed imperial eagle, perished in the flames of the 1917 revolution, which the winds of war had fanned out of Lenin’s seemingly insignificant Spark. Some poets of the old regime felt what one of them called “the attraction of the moth-soul to fiery death,”⁴² while one of the first and greatest to be killed by the new regime left behind a posthumous anthology called Pillar of Fire.⁴³ During the terrorized silence that followed under Stalin, the stage production which evoked the greatest emotional response from its audience was probably Musorgsky’s “popular music drama” Khovanshchina, which ends with the self-destruction of an Old Believers’ community—using real flame on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. The image recurs in the work of Pasternak; but the question of what arose from the cultural ashes of the Stalin era belongs to the epilogue rather than the prologue of our story. Suffice it here to stress that the sense of spiritual intimacy with natural forces already present in earlier times was intensified in the inflammable forest world of Great Russia, where fire contended with fertility; the masculine force of Perun with the damp mother earth for control of a world in which human beings seemed strangely insignificant.

Why Russians did not sink into complete fatalism and resignation during the dark days of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries can perhaps be explained in terms of two key pairs of artifacts that stayed with them through all the fires and fighting of the period: the axe and icon in the countryside, and the bell and cannon in the monastery and city. Each element in these pairings bore an intimate relationship to the other—demonstrating the close connection between worship and war, beauty and brutality, in the militant world of Muscovy. These objects were also important in other societies, but they acquired and retained in Russia a special symbolic significance even for the complex culture of modern times.

Axe and Icon

NOTHING BETTER illustrates the combination of material struggle and spiritual exultation in Old Russia than the two objects that were traditionally hung together in a place of honor on the wall of every peasant hut: the axe and the icon. The axe was the basic implement of Great Russia: the indispensable means of subordinating the forest to the purposes of man. The icon, or religious picture, was the omnipresent reminder of the religious faith which gave the beleaguered frontiersman a sense of ultimate security and higher purpose. If the axe was used with delicacy to plane and smooth the wooden surface on which these holy pictures were painted, the icon, in turn, was borne militantly before the peasantry whenever they ventured forth into the forests with axes for the more harsh business of felling trees or warding off assailants.

The axe was as important to the muzhik of the north as a machete to the jungle dweller of the tropics. It was the “universal tool” with which a Russian could, according to Tolstoy, “both build a house and shape a spoon.”⁴⁴ “You can get through all the world with an axe” and “The axe is the head of all business”⁴⁵ were only two of many sayings. As one of the first and best students of daily life in early Russia has explained:

In the bleak wild forests and in the fields wherever the axe went, the scythe, plow, and whirl-bat of the bee-keeper followed; wherever axes cut into them, forests were destroyed and thinned, houses were built and repaired, and villages created within the forests.…⁴⁶

Pre-Christian tribes of the region frequently used axes for money and buried them with their owners. The axe was popularly called the “thunderbolt,” and stones found near a tree felled by lightning were revered as part of the axehead used by the god of thunder.

The baptized Muscovite was no less reverential to the axe. He used it to cut up, plane, and even carve wood. Not until relatively recent times were nails—let alone saws and planes—widely used in building.⁴⁷ Axes were used for close-range fighting, neutralizing the advantages that might otherwise be enjoyed by wolves, armored Teutonic swordsmen, or Mongol cavalry.

One of the very few surviving jeweled works from the twelfth-century Russian north is, appropriately, the initialed hatchet of the prince most responsible for the transfer of power from Kiev to the north: Andrew Bogoliubsky.⁴⁸

The axe played a central role in consolidating the new civilization of the upper Volga region. With it, Russians eventually cut out the zasechnaia cherta—long clearings lined by sharpened stumps and cross-felled trees—as a defense against invasion, fire, and plague.⁴⁹ The axe was the standard instrument of summary execution, and became an abiding symbol of the hard and primitive life on Europe’s exposed eastern frontier. There is a certain suppressed bitterness toward more sheltered peoples in the proverb “To drink tea is not to hew wood.” The Russian version of “The pen is mightier than the sword” is “What is written with the pen cannot be hacked away with an axe.”⁵⁰

More than the rifles from the west and the daggers from the east, the axe of the north remained the court weapon of the Russian monarchy. Even though their name literally meant “shooters,” the streltsy, Russia’s first permanent infantry force of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drilled with axes and carried them in processions. The axe was the principal weapon used by the tsars for putting down the urban rebellions of the seventeenth century, and by the peasants for terrorizing the provincial nobility and bureaucracy during their uprisings. Leaders of these revolts were publicly executed by a great axe in Red Square in the ritual of quartering. One stroke was used to sever each arm, one for the legs, and a final stroke for the head. Lesser figures merely had their hands, feet, or tongues chopped off.

Though anachronistic as a weapon by the nineteenth century, the axe lived on as a symbol of rebellion. The radical intellectuals were accused by moderate liberals as early as the 1850’s of “seeking out lovers of the axe” and inviting Russians “to sharpen their axes.”⁵¹ Nicholas Dobroliubov, the radical journalist of the early 1860’s, summarized the utopian socialist program of his friend Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? as “Calling Russia to Axes.” The first call inside Russia for a Jacobin revolution, the proclamation “Young Russia” on Easter Monday of the same 1862, proclaimed prophetically that Russia will become “the first country to realize the great cause of Socialism,” and announced “we will cry ‘To your axes’ and strike the imperial party without sparing blows just as they do not spare theirs against us.”⁵² By the late 1860’s, the notorious Nechaev had set up a secret “society of the axe” and young Russia had begun to develop a conspiratorial tradition of revolutionary organization that was to help inspire Lenin’s own What Is To Be Done? of 1902: the first manifesto of Bolshevism. The sound of an axe offstage at the end of Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, announced the coming end of Imperial Russia. The terrifying purges of the 1930’s, which brought to an end the hopes of the original visionary revolutionaries, finally played themselves out in distant Mexico in 1940 with the sinking of an ice axe into the most fertile and prophetic brain of the Revolution: that of Leon Trotsky.

Those who opposed revolution as the answer to Russia’s problems often did so by playing back the old theme of the ravished forest eventually triumphing over the axes of men. The felled tree goes to its death more gracefully than dying man in Tolstoy’s Three Deaths; and a fresh green sapling was planted over his grave by his request. Leonov’s powerful novel of the mid-fifties, The Russian Forest, indicates that the Soviet regime played a key role in cutting down the forest, which becomes a symbol of Old Russian culture. If Leonov leaves the reader uncertain whether he stands on the side of the axe or the fallen trees, the political custodians of the Revolution made it clear that they stood behind the axe. Khrushchev publicly reminded Leonov that “not all trees are useful … from time to time the forest must be thinned.” But Khrushchev himself was felled by political fortune in 1964; while Leonov, still standing, reminded his successors in power that “an iron object—that is, an axe—without the application of intelligence can do a great deal of mischief in centralized state use.”⁵³

Returning to the primitive forest hut of the early Russian peasant, one finds that there was one object which invariably hung next to the axe on the crude interior wall: a religious painting on wood, known to the Russians as a “form” (obraz), but better known by the original Greek word for picture or likeness: eikon. Icons were found wherever people lived and gathered in Russia—omnipresent reminders of the faith which gave the frontiersman of the east a sense of higher purpose.

The history of icons reveals both the underlying continuity with Byzantium and the originality of Russian cultural development. Though there is probably a continuous history back to the facial death portraits of early Egypt and Syria, holy pictures first became objects of systematic veneration and religious instruction in sixth- and seventh-century Byzantium at the time of a great growth in monasticism.⁵⁴ In the eighth century, the original iconoclasts led a movement to reduce the power of monks and destroy all icons. After a long struggle, they were defeated and icon veneration was officially endorsed at the second Council of Nicaea in 787: the last of the seven councils recognized as universally binding by the Orthodox world.

The Slavs were converted in the wake of this “triumph of Orthodoxy”—as the council was popularly called—and inherited the rediscovered Byzantine enthusiasm for religious painting. A sixth-century legend that the first icon was miraculously printed by Christ himself out of compassion for the leper king of Edessa became the basis for a host of Russian tales about icons “not created by hands.” The triumphal carrying of this icon from Edessa to Constantinople on August 16, 944, became a feast day in Russia, and provided a model for the many icon-bearing processions which became so important in Russian church ritual.⁵⁵

“If Byzantium was preeminent in giving the world theology expressed in words, theology expressed in images was given preeminently by Russia.”⁵⁶ Of all the methods of depicting the feasts and mysteries of the faith, the painting of wooden icons soon came to predominate in Muscovy. Mosaic art declined as Russian culture lost its intimate links with Mediterranean craftsmanship. Fresco painting became relatively less important with the increasing dependence on wooden construction. Using the rich tempera paints which had replaced the encaustic wax paints of the pre-iconoclastic era, Russian artists carried on and amplified the tendencies which were already noticeable in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantine painting: (1) to dematerialize the figures in icons, presenting each saint in a prescribed and stylized form; and (2) to introduce new richness of detail, coloring, and controlled emotional intensity. The Russian artist stenciled his basic design from an earlier, Byzantine model onto a carefully prepared and seasoned panel, and then painted in color and detail. He gradually substituted pine for the cypress and lime of Byzantine icons, and developed new methods for brightening and layering his colors.

Although it is impossible to apply to icon painting those precise techniques of dating and classification familiar to Western art historians, certain regional characteristics had clearly emerged by the late fourteenth century. Novgorod used vigorous compositions with angular lines and unmixed bright colors. Tver had a characteristic light blue, Novgorod a distinctive bright red. Pskov, the nearby “younger brother” of Novgorod, introduced gold highlighting into robes. Distant Yaroslavl specialized in supple and elongated figures, sharing the general preference of the “northern school” for more simple and stylized design. Between Novgorod and Yaroslavl there gradually emerged in the Vladimir-Suzdal region a new style which surpassed the style of either, and produced some of the finest icons in the long history of the art. The paintings of this Moscow school broke decisively with the severity of the later Byzantine tradition and achieved even richer colors than Novgorod and more graceful figures than Yaroslavl. One recent critic has seen in the luminous colors of Andrew Rublev, the supreme master of the Moscow school, inner links with the beauties of the surrounding northern forest:

He takes the colors for his palette not from the traditional canons of color, but from Russian nature around him, the beauty of which he acutely sensed. His marvelous deep blue is suggested by the blue of the spring sky; his whites recall the birches so dear to a Russian; his green is close to the color of unripe rye; his golden ochre summons up memories of fallen autumn leaves; in his dark green colors there is something of the twilight shadows of the dense pine forest. He translated the colors of Russian nature into the lofty language of art.⁵⁷

Nowhere is Rublev’s artistic language more lofty than in his most famous masterpiece, “The Old Testament Trinity,” with its ethereal curvatures and luminous patches of yellow and blue. The subject illustrates how Russian iconography continued to reflect the attitudes and doctrines of the church. Since the Trinity was a mystery beyond man’s power to visualize, it was represented only in its symbolic or anticipatory form of the three angels’ appearance to Sarah and Abraham in the Old Testament. God the Father was never depicted, for no man had ever seen Him face to face. The Holy Spirit was also not represented in early iconography; and when the symbol of a white dove later entered from the West, pigeons came to be regarded as forbidden food and objects of reverence.

Naturalistic portraiture was even more rigorously rejected in Russia than in late Byzantium; and the break with classical art was even more complete. The suggestive qualities of statuary made this art form virtually unknown in Muscovy; and a promising tradition of bas-relief craftsmanship in Kievan times vanished altogether in the desire to achieve a more spiritualized representation of holy figures.⁵⁸ The flat, two-dimensional plane was religiously respected. Not only was there no perspective in an icon, there was often a conscious effort through so-called inverse perspective to keep the viewer from entering into the composition of a holy picture. Imaginative physical imagery of Western Christendom (such as the stigmata or sacred heart) was foreign to Orthodoxy and finds no representation in Russian art. Fanciful figures of classical antiquity were much less common in Russian than in Byzantine painting; and many were expressly excluded from Russian icons.

The extraordinary development of icon painting and veneration in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Russia—like the original development in seventh-century Byzantium—occurred during a period of weakened political authority. In both cases, iconolatry accompanied a growth in monasticism.⁵⁹ The omnipresent holy pictures provided an image of higher authority that helped compensate for the diminished stature of temporal princes. In Russia, the icon often came to represent in effect the supreme communal authority before which one swore oaths, resolved disputes, and marched into battle.

But if the icon gave divine sanction to human authority, it also served to humanize divine authority. The basic icon for the all-important Easter feast is that of a very human Jesus breaking down the gates of hell and emerging from the fires into which he had been plunged since Good Friday—a scene rarely depicted in the Easter iconography of the West, where the emphasis was on the divine mystery of resurrection from an empty tomb. The early church had strenuously opposed the “Apollinarian” attempt to deny the reality of Christ’s human nature, beating down this heresy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Partly because there had been support for Apollinaris’ ideas in the Western Roman Empire, Christians of the Eastern Empire came to equate the fall of Rome with acceptance of this heresy. Byzantium came to view sacred pictures as emblems of a Christendom still resplendent in the “new Rome” of Constantinople at a time when the West had plunged into barbarism and darkness. At the same time, the victory over the iconoclasts represented a triumph over indigenous Eastern inclinations (derived largely from Jewish and Moslem teachings) to view as blasphemous all human images of the divine. Byzantium brought the unifying force of ideology into its multi-national empire by rejecting the idea common to many Oriental religions and Christian heresies that human salvation involved transforming one’s humanity into something altogether different.⁶⁰

The humanizing tendency of icon painting is noticeable in the images of the Virgin, which in twelfth-century Byzantium began to turn toward the infant Christ and to suggest maternity as well as divinity. One such icon, in which a large and composed Virgin presses her face down against that of Jesus, became the most revered of all icons in Russia: the Vladimir Mother of God, or Our Lady of Kazan.⁶¹ The migration of this twelfth-century masterpiece from Constantinople to Kiev and thence to Suzdal and Vladimir even before the fall of Kiev symbolizes the northward movement of Russian culture. The cult of the Mother of God was considerably more intense in the North. The transfer of this icon to the Cathedral of the Assumption inside the Moscow Kremlin in the late fourteenth century enabled it to become a symbol of national unity long before such unity became a political fact. She was the supreme mother image of old Russia: at peace with God, yet compassionately inclined toward her infant son. Generation after generation prayed for her intercession within the cathedral dedicated to her entrance into heaven.

The history of this icon demonstrates the close collaboration between faith and fighting, art and armament, in medieval Russia. Brought north by the warrior prince Andrew Bogoliubsky, the icon was transferred to Moscow in 1395 expressly for the purpose of inspiring the defenders of the city against an expected seige by Tamerlane in the late fourteenth century. The name “Kazan” for the icon derives from the popular belief that Ivan the Terrible’s later victory over the Tatars at Kazan was the result of its miraculous powers. Victory over the Poles during the “Time of Troubles” in the early seventeenth century was also attributed to it. Many believed that Mary had pleaded with Jesus to spare Russia further humiliation, and that he had promised to do so if Russia would repent and turn again to God. Four separate yearly processions in honor of the icon were established by 1520, moving within a few decades out of the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin across Red Square to St. Basil’s (also called “Kazan”) cathedral. This icon was also often used to sanctify troops setting off to battle, and “to meet” other icons or dignitaries coming to Moscow.⁶²

In addition to the cult that developed around this icon, new poses of the Madonna began to appear in bewildering profusion. Most models were Byzantine; but there were uniquely Russian variations of this general type of “Our Lady of Tenderness” in some of which the Virgin bends her neck down beyond the point of anatomical possibility to embrace the Christ child. Some four hundred separate styles of representing the Virgin have been counted in Russian icons.⁶³ Some of the most popular and original resulted from a growing tendency to translate hymns of the church into visual form. The interdependence of sight, sound and smell had long been important in the liturgy of the Eastern Church; and beginning in the twelfth century, there was an increasing tendency to use sacred art as a direct illustration of the sung liturgy and seasonal hymns of the church.⁶⁴ Already in the fourteenth-century Russian north, new church murals were becoming, in effect, musical illustrations.⁶⁵ The Russian Christmas icon—“The Assembly of the Pre-sanctified Mother of God,” illustrating all creation coming in adoration before the Virgin—is a direct transposition of the Christmas hymn. Increasingly popular in Russia also were icons of the Virgin surrounded by a variety of scenes taken from the set of twenty-four Lenten hymns of praise known as akathistoi.⁶⁶ Individual icons were also drawn from this series, such as the “Virgin of the Indestructible Wall,” which perpetuated in almost every Russian city and monastery the Byzantine image of the Virgin strengthening the battlements of Constantinople against infidel assault. So great was the preoccupation with battle that semi-legendary warriors and contemporary battle scenes soon became incorporated into these holy pictures, making them an important source for the history of weaponry as well as piety.⁶⁷

Hardly less dramatic than the broadening of subject matter and refinement of technique was the development of the iconostasis, or icon screen, Russia’s most distinctive contribution to the use of icons. In Byzantium and Kiev, illustrated cloths and icons had often been placed on the central or “royal” doors that connected the sanctuary with the nave of the church and on the screen separating the two. Holy pictures had been painted and carved on the beam above the screen.⁶⁸ But it is only in Muscovy that one finds the systematic introduction of a continuous screen of icons extending high above the sanctuary screen, representing a kind of pictorial encyclopedia of Christian belief. From at least the end of the fourteenth century, when Rublev and two others designed the beautiful three-tiered iconostasis for the Archangel Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin—the earliest surviving iconostasis—these illustrated screens began to be a regular feature of Russian churches. Beyond the many icons at eye level on the sanctuary screen were added up to six higher rows of icons, often reaching up to the ceilings of new churches.⁶⁹

The Russian icon screen represented a further extension of the process of humanizing Orthodoxy—offering a multitude of pictorial links between the remote God of the East and the simple hopes of an awakening people. Placed between the sanctuary and the congregation, the icon screen lay “on the boundary between heaven and earth,”⁷⁰ and depicted the variety of human forms through which God had come from out of His holy place to redeem His people. Each icon provided an “external expression of the transfigured state of man,”⁷¹ a window through which the believing eye could peer into the beyond. The icon screen as a whole provided a pictorial guide to the sanctification which only the church could give.

The tapers that were lit by the faithful to burn in large candelabras before the icon screen throughout and beyond each service transformed the otherwise dark and cold church into a “candlelight kingdom.”⁷² These flickering flames reminded the congregation of the forms which God the Father had mysteriously assumed within the “life-giving Trinity”: the Son, who appeared to his apostles as pure light at the Transfiguration prior to His death; and the Holy Spirit, which came to them as pure flame at Pentecost after his final ascension.⁷³

The iconostasis enabled Russians to combine their love of beauty with their sense of history. Lines became more supple and color richer as icon panels grew larger and the screens more comprehensive. Just as the individual lives of saints were gradually grafted into vast chronicles of sacred history, so icons were soon incorporated into these comprehensive pictorial records of sacred history that moved from Old Testament patriarchs and prophets in the highest row to local saints in the lowest. The panels in the center moved down to man—as had God Himself—through the Virgin to Christ, who sat at the center of the main “prayer row” of panels immediately over the royal doors. Modeled on the Pantokrator, who had stared down in lonely splendor from the central dome of Byzantine cathedrals, “Christ enthroned” acquired on the Russian iconostasis a less severe expression. The Lord’s hitherto distant entourage of holy figures was brought down from the cupola of earlier Byzantine churches and placed in a row on either side of the traditional images of the Virgin and John the Baptist. These newly visible saints were inclined in adoration toward Christ, who, in turn, seemed to beckon the congregation to join their ranks as He looked straight ahead and held out the gospel, usually opened to the text “Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.”⁷⁴ As if in response, the faithful pressed forward during and after services to kiss as brothers in Christ the saints who stood closest to them on the sacred screen. This, like most acts of worship and veneration in Orthodox Russia, was accompanied by the bow or prostration of humility and by a sweeping, two-fingered sign of the cross: the public confession of faith.

The development of the iconostasis and the intensification of icon veneration in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russia set off Russian art from that of Western Christendom, where holy pictures were viewed increasingly as optional ornaments without any intrinsic theological significance,⁷⁵ and where artists were rediscovering—rather than moving away from—classical models and free inventiveness in depicting sacred subjects. Russia was moving not toward a renaissance, a new release of emancipated creativity and individual self-awareness, but toward a synthetic reaffirmation of tradition. Unlike the earlier “medieval synthesis” of the West, that of Russia was not based on an abstract analysis of the philosophic problems of belief but on the concrete illustration of its glories. The emotional attachment to sacred pictures helps explain why neither the art forms nor the rationalistic philosophy of classical antiquity played any significant role in the culture of early modern Russia. There were no important Russian imitators of the Renaissance art of Italy and Flanders, despite ample contact with both regions; and the rationalistic ideas that were brought into late medieval Russia through Westward-looking Novgorod appealed only to a small, cosmopolitan elite and were consistently banned by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of icons for Muscovite culture. Each icon reminded man of God’s continuing involvement in human affairs. Its truth could be immediately apprehended even by those incapable of reading or reflection. It offered not a message for thought but an illustration for reassurance of God’s power in and over history for men who might otherwise have been completely mired in adversity and despair.

Amidst this sea of pictures, thought tended to crystallize in images rather than ideas; and the “political theory” that developed in early Russia has been well described as a belief that “the Tsar is, as it were, the living icon of God, just as the whole Orthodox Empire is the icon of the heavenly world.”⁷⁶ The icon screen provided, moreover, a model for the hierarchical order of Russian society. Each figure occupied a prescribed position in a prescribed way, but all were unified by their common distance from the God of the sanctuary, and by their dependent relationship to the central panel of Christ enthroned. The term chin (“rank”) was used both for the general order of the icon screen, and for the central deēsis, or “prayer row,” which was the largest, easiest to see, and the source of many of the most famous large icons now in museums. Chin became the general term for prescribed rank in Muscovy, and its verbal form uchiniti the main word for command. By the seventeenth century, this concept had become the basis of an entire social order. Tsar Alexis’ law code of 1649 was an almost iconographic guide for the behavior of each rank in society; and a few years later he even drafted a chin for his hunting falcons.⁷⁷

Russia was fated to maintain hierarchical forms of society while progressively shedding the religious idealism that had originally sanctioned them. Alexis’ law code remained in effect until 1833, but the iconographic tradition was shattered and the church split even before the end of his reign in the seventeenth century. Naturalistic figures and theatrical compositions were introduced awkwardly and eclectically from Western models; older icons vanished beneath metal casings and layers of dark varnish; and serpentine rococo frames agitated the icon screen and seemed to constrict the holy figures they surrounded. The traditional chin of Muscovy had been replaced by the chinovnik (“petty bureaucrat”) of Petersburg; and icon painting as a sacred tradition, by icon production as a state concession. The icon is only “good for covering pots,” proclaimed Vissarion Belinsky in the 1840’s,⁷⁸ pointing the way to the new artistic iconoclasm of the Russian revolutionary tradition.

Yet the spell of the icon was never completely broken. Nothing else quite took its place, and Russians remained reluctant to conceive of painting as men did in the West. Russians remained more interested in the ideal represented by a painting than in its artistic texture. To Dostoevsky, Holbein’s “Christ in the Tomb” suggested a denial of Christian faith; Claude Lorraine’s “Acis and Galatea,” a secular utopia. The print of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna over his writing desk was the personal icon of his own effort to reconcile faith and creative power.⁷⁹ The revolutionaries themselves looked with the eyes of icon venerators on the heroic naturalism of much nineteenth-century Russian secular painting. Many found a call to revolutionary defiance in the proud expression of an unbowed boy in Repin’s famous “Haulers on the Volga.” Just as the Christian warriors of an earlier age had made vows before icons in church on the eve of battle, so Russian Revolutionaries—in the words of Lenin’s personal secretary—“swore vows in the Tret’iakov Gallery on seeing such pictures.”⁸⁰

Large-scale cleaning and restoration in the early twentieth century helped Russians rediscover at long last the purely artistic glories of the older icons. Just as the hymns and chants of the church had provided new themes and inspiration for early Russian iconographers, so their rediscovered paintings gave fresh inspiration back to poets and musicians as well as painters in late imperial Russia. Under the former seminarian Stalin, however, the icon lived on not as the inspiration for creative art but as a model for mass indoctrination. The older icons, like the newer experimental paintings, were for the most part locked up in the reserve collections of museums. Pictures of Lenin in the “red corner” of factories and public places replaced icons of Christ and the Virgin. Photographs of Lenin’s successors deployed in a prescribed order on either side of Stalin replaced the old “prayer row,” in which saints were deployed in fixed order on either side of Christ enthroned. Just as the iconostasis of a cathedral was generally built directly over the grave of a local saint and specially reverenced with processions on a religious festival, so these new Soviet saints appeared in ritual form over the mausoleum of the mummified Lenin on the feast days of Bolshevism to review endless processions through Red Square.

In the context of Russian culture this attempt to capitalize politically on the popular reverence for icons represents only an extension of an established tradition of debasement. The Polish pretender Dmitry, the Swedish warrior Gustavus Adolphus, most of the Romanovs, and many of their generals had themselves painted in semi-iconographic style for the Russian populace.⁸¹ An émigré Old Believer—for whom all modern history represents a foredoomed divergence from the true ways of Old Russia—looked with indifference and even joy upon the transfer of the icon of Our Lady of Kazan from a cathedral to a museum early in the Soviet era:

The Queen of Heaven, divesting herself of her regal robes, issued forth from her Church to preach Christianity in the streets.⁸²

Stalin added an element of the grotesque to the tradition of politically debasing spiritual things. He introduced new icons and relics in the name of science, then proceeded to retouch and desecrate them, before his own image and remains were posthumously defiled. The lesser figures on the Soviet iconostasis had removed the central icon of Stalin enthroned, and largely destroyed the new myth of salvation. But in the uncertain age that followed, lithographs of Lenin and giant cranes continued to hover over prefabricated concrete huts piled on one another much as the icon and the axe had over the wooden huts of a more primitive era

Bell and Cannon

IF THE ICON AND THE AXE in the peasant hut became abiding symbols for Russian culture, so too did the bell and cannon of the walled city. These were the first large metal objects to be manufactured indigenously in the wooden world of Muscovy: objects that distinguished the city from the surrounding countryside and fortified it against alien invaders.

Just as the icon and the axe were closely linked with one another, so were the bell and cannon. The axe had fashioned and could destroy the wooden board on which the painting was made. Likewise, the primitive foundry which forged the first cannon also made the first bells; and these were always in peril of being melted back into metal for artillery in time of war. The bell, like the icon, was taken from Byzantium to provide aesthetic elaboration for the “right praising” of God; and both media came to be used with even greater intensity and imagination than in Constantinople. The development of the elaborate and many-tiered Russian bell tower—with its profusion of bells and onion-shaped gables—parallels in many ways that of the iconostasis. The rich “mauve” ringing of bells so that “people cannot hear one another in conversation”⁸³ became the inevitable accompaniment of icon-bearing processions on special feast days. There were almost as many bells and ways to ring them as icons and ways to display them. By the early fifteenth century, Russia had evolved distinctive models that differed from the bells of Byzantium, Western Europe, or the Orient. The Russian emphasis on massive, immovable metal bells sounded by metal gongs and clappers led to a greater sonority and resonance than the generally smaller, frequently swinging, and often wooden bells of the contemporary West. Although Russia never produced carillons comparable to those of the Low Countries, it did develop its own methods and traditions of ringing different-sized bells in series. By the sixteenth century, it has been estimated that there were more than five thousand bells in the four hundred churches of Moscow alone.⁸⁴

Just as the icon was but one element in a pictorial culture that included the fresco, the illuminated holy text, and the illustrated chronicle, so the bell was only part of a torrent of sound provided by interminable chanted church services, popular hymns and ballads, and the secular improvisations of wandering folk singers armed with a variety of stringed instruments. Sights and sounds pointed the way to God, not philosophic speculation or literary subtlety. Services were committed to memory without benefit of missal or prayer book; and the “obedient listeners” in monasteries were subjected to oral instruction. Not only were the saints said to be “very like” the holy forms on the icons, but the very word for education suggested “becoming like the forms” (obrazovanie).

The interaction between sight and sound is also remarkable. If the iconography of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russia drew special inspiration from holy singing, and the Russian icon came to be a kind of “abstract musical arabesque … purified, like music, of all but its direct appeals to the spirit,”⁸⁵ so the new method of musical notation that was simultaneously coming into being in Muscovy had a kind of hieroglyphic quality. The authority of the classical Byzantine chant appears to have waned after the fourteenth century—without giving way to any other method of clearly defining the intervals and correlations of tones. In its place appeared the “signed chant”: a new tradition of vocal ornamentation in which “melody not only flowed out of words, but served as the mold on which words were set in bold relief.”⁸⁶ When written down, the embellished red and black hooked notes offered only a shorthand guide to the direction of melody rather than a precise indication of pitch; but the vivid pictorial impression created by the signs gave rise to descriptive names such as “the great spider,” “the thunderbolt,” “two in a boat,” and so on.⁸⁷

Though even less is known about secular than sacred music in this early period, there were apparently patterns of beauty in it, based on repetition with variation by different voices. The exalted “rejoicing” (blagovestie) of the bells used an overlapping series of sounds similar to that which was used in the “many-voiced” church chant—producing an effect that was at the same time cacophonous and hypnotic.

Russians felt the same mixture of joyful religious exultation and animistic superstition in the ringing of the bells as in the veneration of icons. Just as icons were paraded to ward off the evil spirits of plague, drought, and fire, so were bells rung to summon up the power of God against these forces. Just as icons were paraded around the boundaries to sanctify a land claim, so bells were rung to lend solemnity to official gatherings. In both cases, spiritual sanctification was more valued than legal precision. As with the icon, so with the bell, men valued them for their anagogical power to lift men up to God:

The weak sounds of wood and metal remind us of the unclear, mysterious words of the prophets, but the loud and vigorous play of bells is like the rejoicing of the Gospel, radiating out to all the corners of the universe and lifting one’s thoughts to the angelic trumpets of the last day.⁸⁸

The forging and ringing of bells, like the painting and veneration of icons, was a sacramental act in Muscovy: a means of bringing the word of God into the presence of men. This “word” was the logos of St. John’s gospel: the word which was in the beginning, was revealed perfectly in Christ, and was to be praised and magnified until His Second Coming. There was no need to speculate about this unmerited gift, but only to preserve intact the inherited forms of giving thanks and praise. There was no reason to write discursively about the imperfect world of here and now when one could see—however darkly—through the beauty of sights and sounds a transfigured world beyond.

The importance of bells in lending color and solemnity to church proceedings was heightened by the general prohibition on the use of musical instruments in Orthodox services. Only the human voice and bells were permitted (with an occasional use of trumpet or drum in such rituals as the furnace show or a welcoming procession). The absence from early Muscovy of polyphony or even a systematic scale made the rough but many-shaded harmonies sounded upon the bells seem like the ultimate in earthly music. Just as Muscovy resisted the contemporary Western tendency to introduce perspective and naturalism into religious painting, so it resisted the concurrent Western tendency to use bells to provide orderly musical intervals or to accompany (with fixed tonal values and often in conjunction with an organ) the singing of sacred offices.⁸⁹

The bell played an important part in material as well as spiritual culture through its technological tie-in with the manufacture of cannon. Already by the late fourteenth century—only a few years after the first appearance of cannon in the West—Russians had begun to manufacture cannon along with bells; and, by the sixteenth century, they had produced the largest of each item to be found anywhere in the world. So important were these twin metal products to Muscovy that the largest example of each was given the title “Tsar”: the bell, “Tsar Kolokol,” weighing nearly half a million pounds; the cannon, “Tsar Pushka,” with a barrel nearly a yard wide.

They represent the first example of “overtaking and surpassing” a superior technology. But they illustrate as well the artificiality of the accomplishment. For the bell was too large to hang, the cannon too broad to fire. Technological accomplishments in both fields were, moreover, in good measure the work of foreigners from the time in the early fourteenth century when a certain “Boris the Roman” first came to cast bells for Moscow and Novgorod.⁹⁰

If the bell predated the cannon as an object of technological interest, the cannon soon replaced it as the main object of state concern. Many bells in provincial cities and monasteries were systematically melted down to provide cannon for the swelling Russian armies of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century; but innumerable bells remained in Moscow, the skyline of which was dominated by the soaring 270-foot Bell Tower of Ivan the Great, which Boris Godunov had erected on a hill inside the Kremlin at the very beginning of this period. This tower was intended (like another massive bell tower built by Patriarch Nikon just outside Moscow in the latter part of the century) to be the crowning glory of a “New Jerusalem” on Russian soil: a center of civilization built in partial imitation of the old Jerusalem, and with enough embellishment to suggest the New. The tower in the Kremlin provided the shelter from which the fundamentalist Old Believers later hurled stones at official church processions.⁹¹ These defenders of the old order resisted the cannon fire of government troops for eight years in their northern monastic redoubt at Solovetsk. After this last, storied bastion fell, they spread out to the provinces to watch for the approach of the Tsar’s “legions of Antichrist” from the bell towers of wooden churches, whence they sounded the signal to set fire to the church and the true believers within.⁹²

The later Romanov tsars revealed both uneasy consciences and bad taste by filling the ancient monasteries with votive baroque bell towers. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the older bell towers had been largely displaced, restrictions placed on the excessive ringing of bells, and their special position in worship services challenged by the intrusion of organs and other instruments into Russian liturgical music.

Yet the echo of bells lingered on. They ring again majestically at the end of the coronation scene in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov; and the theological hint of redemption offered by their “ringing through” (perezvon) on the eve of festive days is recaptured by the little barking dog of that name that leads Alyosha’s youthful comrades to reconciliation at the end of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.

In the world of politics, too, the bell called up memories. Bells had been used in some of the proud, Westward-looking cities of medieval Russia to summon the popular assembly (veche). The final silencing of the assembly bell of Novgorod in 1478 ended the tradition of relative freedom from imperial authority and partial popular rule which until then Novgorod had shared with many commercial cities of the West. The ideal of non-despotic, representative government impelled the early-nineteenth-century reformer to

take myself in imagination back to Novgorod. I hear the ringing bell of the popular assembly … I throw the chains off my feet, and to the “Who goes there?” of the guard, I proudly reply: “a free citizen of Novgorod!”⁹³

and the romantic poet to

sound forth like the bell in the assembly tower in the days of the people’s celebrations and misfortunes.⁹⁴

When, a few years later, lyricism turned to anguish, Gogol gave a new, more mysterious quality to the image in one of the most famous passages in all Russian literature. Likening Russia to a speeding troika (carriage with three horses) near the end of Dead Souls, he asks its destination. But “there was no answer save the bell pouring forth marvellous sound.”

A prophetic answer came a few years later in the prefatory poem to the first issue of Russia’s first illegal revolutionary journal—appropriately called Kolokol (The Bell). The long-silent social conscience of Russia will henceforth—promised the editor, Alexander Herzen—sound out like a bell

swinging back and forth with a tone which shall not cease to reverberate until … a joyful, orderly, and quietly heroic bell begins to ring in every man.⁹⁵

But Herzen’s summoning bell was soon drowned out by the shrill sounds of the Nabat: the special alarm bell traditionally used in times of fire or attack and the name of the first Russian periodical urging the formation of a Jacobin revolutionary elite.⁹⁶ Tkachev, the editor of Nabat, was vindicated by the eventual victory of Lenin’s professional revolutionaries. But under Bolshevism, all bells fell silent—their function to some extent taken up by the hypnotic sounding of machines, which announced the coming of an earthly rather than a heavenly paradise.

The enduring Russian fascination with cannon was evidenced in Ivan IV’s storied storming of Kazan in 1552; the shooting out of the cannon by a Moscow mob in 1606 of the remains of the False Dmitry, the only foreigner ever to reign in the Kremlin; the determination of Chaikovsky to score real cannon fire into his overture commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in 1812; and in the later tsars’ use of a hundred cannon to announce their anointment during a coronation.⁹⁷ Stalin was neurotically preoccupied with massed artillery formations throughout the Second World War; and his military pronouncements conferred only on the artillery the adjective grozny (“terrible” or “dread”) traditionally applied to Ivan IV.⁹⁸ Subsequent Soviet success with rockets can be seen as an extension of this long-time interest. There seems a kind of historic justice to the interdependence in the late 1950’s between the dazzling effects of cosmic cannoneering and the renewed promises of a classless millennium.

The Communist world that had come into being by then corresponded less to the prophecies of Karl Marx than to those of an almost unknown Russian contemporary, Nicholas Il’in.⁹⁹ While the former spent his life as an uprooted intellectual in Berlin, Paris, and London, the latter spent his as a patriotic artillery officer in Russian central Asia. Whereas the former looked to the rational emergence of a new, basically Western European proletariat under German leadership, the latter looked to the messianic arrival of a new Eurasian religious civilization under Russian tutelage. At the very time Marx was writing his Communist Manifesto for German revolutionaries refuged in France and Belgium, Il’in was proclaiming his Tidings of Zion to Russian sectarians in Siberia. Il’in’s strange teachings reflect the childlike love of cannon, the primitive ethical dualism, and the suppressed fear of Europe, which were all present in Russian thinking. His followers marched to such hymns as “The Bomb of the Divine Artillery”; divided the world into men of Jehovah and of Satan (Iegovisty i Satanisty), those sitting at the right and left hand of God (desnye i oshuinye); and taught that a new empire of complete brotherhood and untold wealth would be formed by the followers of Jehovah along a vast railroad stretching from the Middle East through Russia to south China.

In a similar, but even more visionary vein, Nicholas Fedorov, an ascetic and self-effacing librarian in late nineteenth-century Moscow, prophesied that a new fusion of science and faith would lead even to the physical resuscitation of dead ancestors. Russia was to give birth in concert with China to a new Eurasian civilization, which was to use artillery to regulate totally the climate and surrounding atmosphere of this world, and thrust its citizens into the stratosphere to colonize others. His vision of cosmic revolution fascinated both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and influenced a number of Promethean dreamers in the earliest Soviet planning agencies.¹⁰⁰ His most inspired followers fled, however, from Bolshevik Russia to Harbin, Manchuria, to form a quasi-religious commune, which was in turn engulfed when the wave of Leninist, political revolution spread from their native to their adopted land.

Russian history is full of such prophetic anticipations, just as it is of reappearing symbols and fixations. That which has fallen before axe or cannon has often buried itself into the consciousness, if not the conscience, of the executioner. That which is purged from the memory lives on in the subconscious; that which is expunged from written records survives in oral folklore. Indeed, one finds in modern Russian history much of the same recurrence of basic themes that one finds in the unrefined early traditions of bell ringing and popular singing.

It may be, of course, that these echoes from childhood no longer reverberate in the adult Russia of today. Even if real, these sounds may be as enigmatic as the ringing of Gogol’s troika; or perhaps only a dying echo: the perezvon that remains misleadingly audible after the bell has already fallen silent. To determine how much of Old Russian culture may have survived, one must leave aside these recurring symbols from the remote past and turn to the historical record, which begins in the fourteenth century to provide a rich if bewildering flow of accomplishment that extends without interruption to the present. Having looked at the heritage, environment, and early artifacts of Russian culture, one must now turn to the rise of Muscovy and its dramatic confrontation with a Western world in the throes of the Renaissance and Reformation.