Icon and Axe

3. The “Cursed Questions”

UNDER NICHOLAS I, the imperial pendulum swung back from French Enlightenment to German discipline far more decisively than it had done during the brief reigns of Peter III and Paul. The various contacts and associations with the German-speaking world that had been growing fitfully but steadily in importance were climaxed during the long and superficially glittering reign of Nicholas by new bonds of princely and aristocratic brotherhood. Russian and German rulers stood together as guardians of the conservative restoration sealed at the Congress of Vienna. Far closer to his Germanophile mother than to his much older and more cosmopolitan brothers, Constantine and Alexander I, Nicholas married a Prussian princess and leaned constantly throughout his own thirty-year reign on his father-in-law and brother-in-law, who successively ruled Prussia as Frederick William III and IV. The addition to the Russian Empire of the Baltic provinces with their German baronial overseers further flooded the Russian aristocracy with Germans, and led to the famous incident whereby an aristocrat given his choice of new rank by the Tsar asked to be redesignated “a German.”¹ Survivors of the Alexandrian era complained in exile that Russia’s movement into Central Europe had been its undoing:

The Germans have conquered Russia in the very process of letting themselves be conquered. This is what happened in China with the Mongols, in Italy with the Barbarians, in Greece with the Romans.²

Extending the Prussian ideal of military discipline to all corners of society, Nicholas became the běte noire of liberals and nationalists throughout Europe. Leaning for civil order on the investigative activities of his newly created “Third Section,” Nicholas was said to have meant by the phrase le bien-ětre général en Russie, “it is well to be a general in Russia.”³

Nicholas’ reign occupies in some respects a place in Russian history similar to that of Peter the Great, of whom Nicholas’ official apologists were such great admirers.⁴ Like Peter, Nicholas came to power at the end of a period of religious and political ferment in which allegiances and institutions all seemed subject to change. Like Peter, Nicholas was primarily a soldier, fascinated from boyhood with military weapons and technology; and sought to re-establish order on military lines with the aid of a Lutheran-style church clearly subordinate to the state. Just as Peter came into power by curbing rebellion within the palace guard in Moscow, so Nicholas ascended to the throne while crushing the Decembrist uprising within the new elite regiments in St. Petersburg.

Peter, of course, was opening, while Nicholas was shutting, windows to the West. But the century between the end of Peter’s reign and the beginning of Nicholas’ had brought too much cultural exposure to the West ever to be blocked off; ideas from the West could not be stopped as Magnitsky would have wished. Like a swollen river suddenly confronted with a major obstacle, the flow was merely diverted into channels that had hitherto carried only a small trickle of ideas. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism replaced politics and religion in the mainstreams of Russian culture.

For awhile it seemed that Russian intellectual life was to be diverted from practical concerns altogether. Many leading figures went abroad for visits that slowly lengthened into semi-exile. Many of Russia’s finest minds moved into the realm of the distant or theoretical. In Kazan in the aftermath of the Magnitsky era, a young mathematician, Nicholas Lobachevsky, sought to supplant Euclid with a new “pan-geometry.” His modern geometry, perhaps the greatest Russian contribution to scientific thought during the reign of Nicholas, earned him an unprecedented six terms as rector of Russia’s easternmost university.⁵ Another area of scientific accomplishment lay in astronomy, which had been since the days of Kepler an area of active inquiry in the navigation-minded Baltic world. The long nights and northern lights stimulated interest, and as early as 1725 there was an observatory in St. Petersburg. Russia later fell heir to a larger observatory at Tartu, and in the 1830’s Russia turned to the building of an observatory at Pulkovo, outside St. Petersburg, which became the largest in the world upon its completion in 1839. Its director, F. G. W. Struve, had turned from literary to astronomical studies during the late years of Alexander’s reign, and his life’s work at Pulkovo was a long study of a relatively nebulous astronomical subject: the Milky Way. Another fascination of the age was comets, which were a lively topic of speculative discussion, particularly before and after the rare appearance of Halley’s comet in 1835.⁶ The most important philosophic journal of the Nicholaevan period called itself The Telescope.

There was also a romantic interest in exotic portions of the Russian Empire itself. One scientific explorer, who was forced to make a long disclaimer of any association with Masonic or secret societies upon returning from abroad in 1830, even idealized the frozen northern region of Novaia Zemlia (New Land).

Novaia Zemlia is a real land of freedom, where each man may act and live as he wishes. It is the only land where there is no police force or other ruling force besides hospitality.… In Novaia Zemlia each man who arrives is greeted as an honest man.⁷

The most important flight from harsh realities was, however, the flight to German romantic philosophy. On soil that was thoroughly prepared by the occult theosophic pursuits of higher order Masonry, the seeds of Schelling’s and Hegel’s great philosophic systems were now sown. The harvest was to be rich indeed, for these cosmic systems provided the thinking aristocracy not only with consolation from the frustrations of the Nicholaevan age but also with a vocabulary to discuss certain deep philosophical questions that troubled them.

Thus, far from turning to new problems, the aristocratic intellectuals resolved to make one last heroic effort to answer the old ones. The material world, which was increasingly preoccupying a Western world in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, was simply not yet on the agenda of Russian thought. Occult spiritual forces were still thought to rule the world; and small circles of dedicated truth seekers were believed capable of understanding and serving these forces. As the optimism and reformist enthusiasm of the Alexandrian era waned, Russian thinkers turned from the outer to the inner world: from practical affairs to problematic philosophy. Beneath the tranquil surface of Nicholaevan Russia, disturbing questions were asked as never before about the meaning of history, art, and life itself. In their increasingly desperate effort to answer these so-called “cursed questions,” they turned to Germany no less enthusiastically than Nicholas himself—but to its universities rather than its drill fields. The answers they found in the philosophy taught at these outwardly conservative institutions were new, and in many cases potentially revolutionary.

The Flight to Philosophy

OLD RUSSIA had repeatedly and consistently rejected the need for any systematic secular philosophy. “The Russians are philosophers not in words, but in deeds,”⁸ Krizhanich wrote sadly after his unsuccessful efforts to introduce Western philosophic ideas into seventeenth-century Russia. Philosophy was rejected not only because it was irrelevant to salvation but because it can lead men—in the words of an early nineteenth-century Old Believer—“to contemplate the overthrow of kingdoms.”⁹

Thus, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, philosophy held for the Russian mind some of the exotic fascination of soaring comets and distant lands. Almost from the first introduction of philosophy into the curriculum of Moscow University, it acquired the subversive reputation of being a rival and potential substitute for revealed religion. Even during the early years of Catherine’s reign, a follower of Hume was forced to resign from the university and a dissertation on natural religion publicly burned. With the founding of new universities early in Alexander’s reign and the influx of German-trained professors, German philosophic idealism gained such a foothold that Magnitsky could with some justice speak of “substituting Kant for John the Baptist and Schelling for Christ.” So heavily censored were lectures on philosophy by the end of Alexander’s reign that the most serious discussion of broad philosophic issues often took place in faculties like medicine and jurisprudence. In the wake of the revolution of 1848, Nicholas I abolished philosophy altogether as a legitimate subject of study. This extraordinary ban was lifted in 1863, but other crippling restrictions on academic philosophy remained in effect until 1889.¹⁰

The effect of such harassment was not to prevent the study of philosophy but rather to force it out of the classroom into the secret society: away from an atmosphere of critical discipline into one of uncritical enthusiasm. The philosophy that was popularized by Schwarz was similar to that with which the ancient Gnostics had opposed the worldliness of late Hellenistic culture. Schwarz believed in a supra-rational knowledge (gnosis or mudrost’, premudrost’) which could harmonize reason with revelation. To the clinical study of the natural world, they opposed the mystical “light of Adam,” which man could recapture only through inner purification and illumination.

The most important single influence on the formation of a Russian philosophical tradition was Jacob Boehme, of whom Schwarz, Saint-Martin, and the other heroes of higher order masonry were little more than popularizers. In Boehme’s richly metaphorical writings, all of the universe—even evil—became expressions of the wisdom of God. It was this “wisdom of God” (theosophy) rather than any “love of wisdom” (philosophy) that Boehme held out to his followers as an attainable ideal. Boehme’s God was not the finite clockmaker and repairman of the deists, but an infinitely transcendent and, at the same time, omnipresent force. God created the world not out of nothing but out of his own essence. All of man’s intellectual pursuits, sexual longings, and social impulses were expressions of what Jung-Stilling called “homesickness” (Heimweh) for the lost unity between God and man. This thirst for reunion is present in God’s own longing for Sophia, which meant for Boehme and Saint-Martin not merely the Holy Wisdom of the ancient East but also the principle of “eternal femininity.” In his original state of perfect union with God, Adam had been spiritually perfect without sex; and part of man’s return to God would be the attainment of perfect androgyny: union of male and female characteristics.

Sophia, the mystical principle of true wisdom and lost femininity, was the common object of the strivings of both God and man.¹¹ Saint-Martin and Baader followed Boehme in making Sophia a fourth person within the Trinity; and Baader related this concept to the old Pythagorean idea of the world being composed of four parts. He saw “in the number 4 the symbol of creation and the formula which provides the key to the mysteries of nature”;¹² the cross itself was a hidden symbol of the figure four.

Sophia was, to cite the title of one occult manuscript of the Alexandrian period, “the auspicious eternal virgin of Divine Wisdom.”¹³ Labzin, Boehme’s principal translator and popularizer, gave himself the pen name Student of Wisdom (Uchenik Mudrosti), which he often abbreviated as UM, or “mind.”¹⁴ It is not too much to say that Russian thinkers turned to German idealistic philosophy, not for keys to a better critical understanding of the natural world, but rather—to cite the title of a typical occult handbook of the age—for “the key to understanding the divine secrets.” The key appeared as the second volume of “selected readings for lovers of true philosophy,”¹⁵ and the most influential philosophic circle to develop late in the reign of Alexander called itself Lovers of Wisdom (liubomudrye). Thus, philosophy, as the term came to be understood in the Nicholaevan era, was closer to the occult idea of “divine wisdom” than to the understanding of philosophy as rational and analytical investigation in the manner of Descartes, Hume, or Kant.

The lovers of wisdom circle appears in many ways as a continuation of the last great system of higher order Masonry, that of the lodge Astrea, which defined truth as “that original cause which gives movement to the whole of the universe.” Those seeking admission to the lodge were forced to wait in a dark room in the presence of a Bible and a skull, which bore the ominous inscription memento mori: Remember Death.¹⁶ The lovers of wisdom also met in secret, with an inscribed skull greeting them at the door. The language was still Latin, but the message was different: “Dare to Know” (Sapere Aude),¹⁷ and the book on the table was not the Bible but Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. As one of the members explained: “Christian doctrine seemed to us to be good only for the popular masses, but unacceptable for us, lovers of wisdom.”¹⁸

Schelling’s pantheistic teachings about the organic unity of all nature and the presence therein of a dynamic “world soul” commended itself to the Russian imagination. Characteristically ignoring the complexities of Schelling’s later writings and relying partly on vulgarized digests of his ideas,¹⁹ Russians were thrilled by the appearance of a doctrine that purported to account for phenomena which they felt had been artificially excluded from the mechanistic world view of the eighteenth century: the beauty and variety of the organic world, telepathy and mesmerism. They also derived some satisfaction from the doubts of scientists themselves in the early nineteenth century that magnetism and electricity had been adequately accounted for by Newtonian mechanics. The long residence in St. Petersburg from 1757 to 1798 of the German authority on magnetism and electricity, Franz Aepinus, stimulated a dilettantish interest in these phenomena (particularly after he rather than D’Alembert became tutor to the future tsar, Paul) without bringing real understanding (outside of the Academy where he worked and Tartu where he retired and died in 1802) of scientific problems and method.

Schelling appears as a kind of absentee grand master of a new higher order. The most popular university lecturer of the period, Professor Pavlov, was master of initiations, greeting students at the door of his lecture hall with his famous question: “You want to know about nature, but what is nature and what is knowledge?”²⁰ The leading speculative philosopher of the age, Ivan Kireevsky, was iconographer and master of ceremonies, bringing back a bust of Schelling to Russia, after hearing him lecture, presiding over discussions of his philosophy, and insisting that the very word “philosophy” has “something magical about it.”²¹ A philosophic popularizer of the time independently described the creation of a Russian philosophy as “the problem of our time,” professing to find three ascending levels of meaning within the maxim “Know thyself.” The first, or “Delphic,” was knowledge of oneself as an individual person; the second, or “Solonic” level was knowledge of self as a “social-national” being; the third and highest—the Socratic level—was knowledge of oneself as a form of divinity.²² Nadezhdin, the Schellingian professor of art and archeology at Moscow during the 1830’s, captivated his students by treating artifacts of past civilizations as occult symbols, finding “the secret of the ages in an elegant piece of archeology.”²³ He was the first Russian to use the term “nihilist”—in describing the materialism which was the opposite of his own idealism.²⁴ Perhaps he acutely sensed that a world view which finds ideal purposes everywhere in general might end up finding them nowhere in particular. Odoevsky attempted to draw up a “Russian system of theosophic physics” designed to study “the inner substance of physical objects as the basis for studying their external forms.”²⁵ Schelling’s philosophy inspired this and other fanciful ideas. As Odoevsky wrote:

You cannot imagine what an impact it produced in its time, what a jolt it gave to people slumbering before the monotonous humming of Locke’s rhapsody.… He opened to man an unknown part of the world, about which there had previously existed only legendary tales: his soul. Like Christopher Columbus, he did not find what he sought and raised unfulfilled hopes, but he gave new direction to the activity of man. All threw themselves into this miraculous, luxuriant land.²⁶

In this “miraculous land” ideal ends rather than material causes determined life and history. The universe was a work of art, and man, its supreme creation, was uniquely capable of understanding its hidden harmony and advancing its higher purposes.

Practically speaking, the philosophy of Schelling had a double effect in Russia. On the one hand many aristocrats rediscovered through philosophy something they had ceased to find in religion: assurance that there was an ideal, unifying purpose to life and history. In that sense Schelling’s philosophy was one of reassurance and consolation, tending to encourage social and political conservatism. Thus, it is not surprising that a reactionary writer like Pogodin should try to enlist Schelling’s aid in formulating the ideology of “official nationalism”; or that a future radical like Belinsky should find himself reconciled to reality and writing odes to tsardom under the impact of Schelling (and later, of Hegel) in the 1830’s.

At the same time, Schelling’s philosophy was the starting point for revolutionary thought in Russia. Under Schelling’s influence the greatest biologist of Nicholaevan Russia, Karl von Baer, developed an idealistic theory of purposeful evolution which was to influence subsequent radical thinkers like Kropotkin and Mikhailovsky. More important, however, was the intoxicating effect Schelling’s ideas produced on large numbers of thinkers who never acquired more than a confused third-hand knowledge of them. Frustration was drowned in philosophy as men saw themselves promised cosmic redemption, without being tied down to any predetermined scheme of how it would take place. Schelling encouraged men to think that profound changes might be forthcoming from the process of becoming, which was the essence of life itself. The belief grew that the previous generation’s search for hidden keys to the universe, far from being chimerical, was merely immature and unrefined. The search for all-encompassing answers continued; and Schelling stands as a transitional figure from the crude occultism of Boehme and Eckartshausen to the ideological systems of Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Marx.

The Meaning of History

THE MOST WIDELY DEBATED of all the “cursed questions” during Nicholas’ reign was the meaning of history. In the wake of the Napoleonic war, Russians were more than ever anxious to know their place in history. The anti-Enlightenment had insisted that irregular, traditional patterns in history had meanings of their own; and Russians were not less determined to find out what these patterns were than romantic thinkers elsewhere. Their theology had been historically oriented, and their flight to philosophy led them naturally on to the philosophy of history.

The development in the romantic age of a broad, philosophical interest in history was to some extent the work of Baltic Germans who had been stimulated by contact with the Slavic world. Herder’s broodings in Riga helped crystallize his idea that truth lay within history rather than beyond it; and that each culture was destined to grow and flower in its own way in the garden of humanity. Schlözer’s long years of teaching and study in Uppsala and St. Petersburg helped him formulate his original plan for a “universal history.” He pioneered in the use of Old Russian manuscripts for historical purposes, challenging the “Norman school” of Russian history and exciting his many Russian students at Göttingen with the idea that Russia had a unique role to play in the next stage of history. Throughout the Germanophile reign of Nicholas I, Baltic German writers continued to play a leading role in investing the distinctive popular institutions of Russia with a romantic aura of “higher truth”: Haxthausen in his writings about the peasant commune (obshchina) and Hilferding in his “discovery” of the oral epics (byliny) of the Russian north.²⁷

Meanwhile, the Russian interest in history grew rapidly. In 1804, the Society of History and Russian Antiquities was founded under the president of Moscow University. The defeat of Napoleon and the reconstruction of Moscow created a broad, popular interest in history, and Nicholas I contributed to it by encouraging the activities of a large number of patriotic lecturers and historians: Ustrialov, Pogodin, and others.²⁸ Between Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1825) and Glinka’s Life for the Tsar (1836), historical plays and operas dominated the Russian stage. Even in the underdeveloped cultural area of painting there was an abortive tendency toward monumental, patriotic canvases: climaxing in Briullov’s “Fall of Pskov” and in his unfulfilled commission of the late thirties to provide Russian historical frescoes for the Winter Palace.²⁹ Historical novels dominated the literary scene, as vulgar imitators of Walter Scott appeared even in the provinces. M. Zagoskin started the long line of chauvinistic “Russians-and-Poles” novels with his Yury Miloslavsky of 1829, and his subsequent patriotic novels and plays enjoyed a spectacular vogue during the thirties. One scholar has counted 150 long poems on historical themes in the style of Byron and Pushkin written in Russia between 1834 and 1848.³⁰

Schelling’s philosophy lent special intensity to the interest in history, with its insistence that the world was in a perpetual state of “becoming” and that peculiar national patterns were part of its ever-unfolding divine plan. As one “lover of wisdom” put it, Schelling provided “consolation” and kept him from being “stupefied by the atmosphere around me” by “summoning up to me my sacred fatherland.”³¹ Schelling was sought out personally by many Russians, and he assured them that “Russia is fated to have a great destiny; never, until now, has it realized the fullness of its strength.”³²

The man who focused all of this interest of history on the problem of Russia’s destiny was Peter Chaadaev. Chaadaev had gone off to fight Napoleon at the impressionable age of eighteen and had subsequently been subjected to most of the disquieting intellectual influences of the second half of Alexander’s reign. He had known De Maistre, participated in higher order Masonry, and was a leading intellectual light in the restive Semenovsky regiment. As a specially favored adjutant, he carried news of that regiment’s rebellion in 1820 to the Tsar, who was then meeting with the other leaders of the Holy Alliance at Laibach. Shortly thereafter, he resigned his commission and set off for Switzerland to begin a long period of romantic wandering and philosophic introspection, which kept him abroad until after the Decembrist uprising and brought him into contact with Schelling.

Returning for the coronation of Nicholas I in 1826, he began writing eight “philosophical letters” about Russia’s historical development, which were largely completed by 1831. Though widely discussed in the early thirties, the first letter was not published until 1836. It echoed “like a pistol shot in the night,”³³ bringing the wrath of official Russia on him and his editor, Nadezhdin, but serving to open up the unofficial debate over Russia’s destiny that has come to be known as the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy.

Chaadaev’s letter stands as a kind of signpost, pointing toward the radical, Westernizing path that was soon to be advocated for Russia. Written in polemic French and calling Moscow “Necropolis” (the city of the dead), Chaadaev insisted that Russia had so far been a part of geography rather than history, totally dependent on ideas and institutions imposed from without.

Chaadaev’s extreme rejection of the Russian heritage is partly the result of De Maistre’s influence—evident both in his tendency toward bold statement and in his sympathy for Roman Catholicism. More profoundly, however, Chaadaev’s dark portrayal of Russia’s past and present serves to dramatize the brightness of the future. He emphasizes that Russia’s absence from the stage of history may actually be an advantage for its future development. Chaadaev was, in effect, restating in philosophical terms what had been said by Leibniz to Peter the Great, the Encyclopedists to Catherine the Great, and the Pietists to Alexander the Blessed: that Russia was fortunate in being uncommitted to the follies of Europe and was still capable of serving as the savior of European civilization. Unlike all these predecessors, however, Chaadaev was a Russian speaking to Russians inside Russia. Moreover, at a time when tsarist pretensions were at their highest, he was not addressing himself primarily to the Tsar. To the guardians of “official nationality” there was a faintly subversive quality to his contempt for the cultural barrenness and excessive humility of Orthodoxy and to his blunt assertion that “political Christianity … has no more sense in our times,” and must “give way to a purely spiritual Christianity [which will] illuminate the world.”³⁴

Chaadaev’s suggestion that Russia overleap the materialistic West in the interest of all Christian civilization was typical of the Russian Schellingians. Odoevsky had written that there would have to be “a Russian conquest of Europe, but a spiritual conquest, because only Russian thought can unify the chaos of European science.…”³⁵ Thus, belief in a special destiny for Russia did not, to the Russian idealists, imply a lack of interest in Western Europe. Just as the autocratic Karamzin had entitled his journal the Herald of Europe, so did the leaders of early Slavophilism, the Kireevsky brothers, entitle their new journal of 1832 The European. Yet interest in the West did not imply sympathy with secularism or rationalism. Chaadaev, for all his sympathy with Catholicism, was hostile to scholastic philosophy and felt that Russian thought had been corrupted with the intrusion of “the categories of Aristotle.” His editor, Nadezhdin, entertained the idea throughout the thirties of visiting all of the shrines of the Orthodox East in order to write a great history of the Eastern Church.

The idealists of early Nicholaevan Russia agreed that their land must play a significant role in the solution of the common problems of Christian civilization. But what are the real problems? they began to ask. What is the nature of Russia vis-à-vis the West? and what should its role in history be? In response to such questions Russian thinkers produced a remarkable rash of analyses and prophecies in the twenties and thirties.

There was general agreement that the absence of a classical heritage was responsible for much of the difference between Russia and the West. The extravagant praise of Pushkin’s poetry and Glinka’s music was partly produced by the desire to overcome this deficiency. There was deep resentment of Nicholas’ policy of downgrading the classical emphases that Alexander had introduced into Russian education. Chaadaev’s editor, Nadezhdin, was expelled from theological seminary in 1826 for his interests in classical writers, and his widely hailed Latin thesis of 1830, De Poesi Romantica, argued that Russia should fuse classicism and romanticism in order to play a role in “the great drama of the fate of man.”³⁶

Nadezhdin’s conception of the classical age was itself romantic. Schelling was the new Plotinus, Napoleon the new Caesar, Schiller the new Virgil; and the implication was clear that the Russians were the new Christians. Nadezhdin had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in his lectures at Moscow University in the early thirties, he likened Russia to a new band of barbaric hordes swarming over the collapsing West. Gogol wrote a historical essay on the barbarian conquest of Rome and lectured on the fall of Rome during his brief period as history lecturer at St. Petersburg University. Briullov’s “The Last Days of Pompeii” was thought to be fraught with contemporary meaning by Russian critics after its first showing in 1836.

The young idealists also agreed that the woes of contemporary Europe followed from the materialism and scepticism of the eighteenth century which led to the French Revolution. Though influenced by De Maistre, Saint-Martin, and the entire anti-Enlightenment tradition, they were particularly indebted to German romantic thought for their conception of the deeper, historical causes of Western decline. Kireevsky argued that the defeat of Pascal and Fénelon by the Jesuits was a critical turning point in the loss of Western spirituality; Khomiakov blamed it on the annexation of the Western church by lawyers and logicians in the twelfth century; Odoevsky on Richelieu’s philosophy of raison d’état, which made war between nations inevitable by “taking away the thin lining of paper which had kept the porcelain vases apart.”³⁷

The young idealists all viewed Russia’s suffering and humiliation by Europe during the early modern period as a purifying process guaranteeing Russia a redemptive role in the new era that is coming into being. German pietist preachers and their philosophic heirs, Baader and Schelling, encouraged Russians to believe that the evangelical ideal of the Holy Alliance must be kept alive; that Russia must remain a new supra-political force dedicated to healing the spiritual wounds of Europe. An even more vivid conception of the nation as suffering messiah was developed by the leaders of suppressed nationalist movements within the Russian empire: Poles like Mickiewicz and the Ukrainians of the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.³⁸

The idealists generally agreed that (in the words of Pogodin’s inaugural lecture as professor of history at Moscow in 1832) a “grandiose and almost infinite future”³⁹ lies before Russia, and with the literary critic Shevyrev’s declaration in the same year: “We all have one task: to set forth thought that is all-encompassing, universal, all-human, and Christian in the Russian vernacular of today.”⁴⁰

Yet the idealists rejected the social and political conservatism of Pogodin and Shevyrev as well as the example of the bourgeois West. Their despair over all existing alternatives gave an increasingly prophetic and revolutionary cast to their writings. Much attention was paid to a pessimistic look into the future cast in 1840 by Philarète Chasles, a relatively obscure French journalist. Even more emphatically than Tocqueville, Chasles wrote that the future belonged to Russia and America, “two young actors seeking to be applauded, both ardently patriotic and expansive.” He spoke of a coming time when men will “discover twelve thousand new acids … direct aerial machines by electricity … imagine ways of killing sixty thousand men in one second.”⁴¹ He could well have been describing his admirer, Chaadaev, as he depicts the prophetic philosopher looking down at this picture of destruction,

… from the heights of his solitary observatory, gliding over the obscure expanse and howling waves of the future and past … burdened down with sounding the hours of history … forced to repeat the lugubrious cry: Europe is dying.⁴²

The most remarkable and original historical prophecy of the age may well be that of Prince Odoevsky, the original “lover of wisdom” and one of the leading musical and literary critics of the period. In a series of dialogues written during the thirties and published together in 1844 as Russian Nights, Odoevsky wrote that “the West is perishing,” that “the nineteenth century belongs to Russia,” and that “the sixth part of the world designated by Providence for a great deed (podvig)… will save not only the body but the soul of Europe as well.”⁴³ He was well aware of the West and its accomplishments, writing learnedly on Bach and Shakespeare as well as contemporary figures; but he felt that “in Russia many things are bad, but everything together is good; in Europe many things are good, but everything together is bad.”⁴⁴ He was particularly haunted by the writings of Malthus and wrote a sketch, “The Last Suicide,” showing humanity lighting a fire to relieve overpopulation, then trying in vain to check it in order to save some vestige of life on earth.⁴⁵

Much of his thought was devoted in the thirties to an historical trilogy designed to set forth the nature and destiny of Russia. He thought of writing on the impact of Asia on Russia but soon decided on a more ambitious conception. He planned to write one volume on the past, one on the present, and one on the future of Russia; and his attention was soon focused on the tantalizing third volume.

He published first in 1835 and then, more fully, in 1839 his picture of the future in a remarkable fantasy, The Year 4338. Appearing under the pseudonym “the voiceless one,” the story purports to be a series of letters written from Russia by a visiting Chinese student from “the chief school in Peking” in “the year 4338.” The world has been divided between Russia and China. The historical calendar is now divided into three parts: from the creation of the world to the birth of Christ, from thence to the division of the world between these two powers, and from that time till the present. Little is even remembered of other countries or of history preceding the Russo-Chinese era. No one can read the few surviving lines of Goethe. The English long ago went bankrupt, and saw their island sold to Russia at a public auction.

Russia is the cultural center of the world. Great new cities have been built, the weather transformed throughout the north, special aerial platforms, aerial hotels, and balloons fill the sky. The supreme sovereign of Russia is now a poet, who is aided by a “minister of reconciliation” and “philosophers of the first and second rank.” Artificial lights are made from electricity; hostile impulses are deadened by “magnetic baths,” in the course of which all secrets are revealed; communication is by magnetic telegraph; and marvelous, pliable synthetic products have been devised to provide every possible form of physical comfort. Love of humanity has become so great that all tragedy has been eliminated from literature. A month is set aside for rest and relaxation at the beginning and middle of each year. There is a “continuous congress of the learned” to aid artists and scientists, and the capital is full of museums and gardens containing extinct curiosities, such as paper and animals. China is not quite so advanced but is busy learning from Russia and has progressed rapidly in the five hundred years since “the great Khun-Gin awoke China at last from its long slumber, or rather, deathly stagnation.” Without his leadership, China

would have been made over by now in the likeness of those unsociable Americans, who for the lack of other speculative ventures, sell their cities on the public market, then come to us to expropriate. [They are] the only people in the whole world against whom we must maintain troops.⁴⁶

The only drawback to the picture as presented is that the subsidized scientists of this super-state have calculated that Halley’s comet is about to hit the earth; and although people have already begun to move to the moon to help relieve overpopulation, no one seems able to devise a means of preventing this catastrophe.

This blend of science fiction with utopian prophecies of future comfort and Russian pre-eminence went largely unnoticed in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Far more attention was paid to the famous historical debate of the 1840’s between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Each of these grew out of the romantic idealism of the day; each was opposed to both Nicholaevan bureaucrats and Western entrepreneurs; each sought to borrow Western ideas without Western practices, so that Russia could assume leadership in the revival of European civilization.

The Slavophile view of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism. All of history was a contest between spiritual and carnal forces. The poet Tiutchev saw it as a struggle between cosmos, the organic unity of all nature, and chaos, the basic principle of the material world. Russia was, of course, on the side of cosmos; and in his famous verse he warned that

With the mind alone Russia cannot be understood,

No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness:

She stands alone, unique—

In Russia one can only believe.⁴⁷

Tiutchev’s fellow poet and Schellingian, Alexis Khomiakov, set forth an even more ingenious dualism in his ambitious but never-finished Sketches of Universal History.⁴⁸ The opposing forces throughout all history became for Khomiakov the spirit of Kush and of Iran. The former comes from the oppressive Ethiopians in the Old Testament who believed in material force and worshipped either stone (physical construction) or the serpent (sensual desire). The Iranian spirit was one of belief in God, inner freedom, and love of music and speech. The victory of the Roman legions over Greek philosophy had been a triumph of Kush, as was the more recent imposition of Byzantine formalism on happy Slavic spontaneity. The Jews had been the original bearers of the Iranian spirit, which had now passed on to the unspoiled Slavs. The spirit of Iran had penetrated particularly deeply into the life and art of the Russian people, whose strong family sense, communal institutions, and oral folklore had kept alive the principle of harmony and unity. Khomiakov assumes that the Iranian spirit will triumph, thus assuring a glorious future to Russia once it throws off the Kushite shackles of Byzantine formalism and Prussian militarism.

Khomiakov is best understood as a perpetuator of the pietistic ideal of a universal, inner church. He was widely traveled in the West and viewed his Lutheran, Anglican, and Bavarian Catholic friends as allies in the “Iranian” camp. His two contending principles are reminiscent of Schlegel’s “spirit of Seth” and “spirit of Cain.”⁴⁹ But Khomiakov is less romantic in his attitude toward the East than Schlegel and many other Western romantics. He decisively rejects the glorification of Asian ways which Magnitsky had made fashionable. The major Kushite worshippers of “the stone” were those who built pyramids in Egypt and temples in Asia; the worst followers of “the serpent” are the Indian disciples of Shiva.

Khomiakov illustrates his theory in two plays of the 1830’s, Dmitry the Self-Proclaimed and Ermak. The first play pictures the False Dmitry being first welcomed by the Russian people, then rejected when he is converted to the Latin ideal of earthly power. The later work shows the Cossack conqueror of Siberia struggling with the power-worshiping philosophies of his pagan domain. Ermak refuses to accept the Kushite beliefs of the Siberians and, indeed, renounces power altogether to seek forgiveness for earlier misdeeds from his father and his original home community.⁵⁰

Quite different from the Slavophile view, with its pietistic glorification of inner regeneration, family harmony, and a new universal church, was the view of the radical Westernizers. They looked to French more than German thought, Catholic more than Protestant sources for ideas.

De Maistre was generally the starting point for Russians who took a more jaded view of the Russian past and Russian institutions. But he was soon supplanted by Lamennais, the real point of transition in French thought between Catholicism and socialism. Beginning as a standard counter-revolutionary Catholic with his famous call for a revival of faith in his Essay on Indifference in 1817, Lamennais had dreamt of a new “congregation of St. Peter” to replace the Jesuit Order and lead Europe into a glorious new era. Shortly after founding a journal, The Future, in 1830, Lamennais despaired of the Catholic Church and turned to Christian socialism and a passionate belief in the spirituality of the downtrodden masses. His writings, like those of De Maistre, were permeated with a kind of prophetic pessimism. As he wrote to the Savoyard:

… Everything in the world is being readied for the great and final catastrophe … all now is extreme, there is no longer any middle position.⁵¹

Russian converts to Catholicism during the Nicholaevan era were generally converted à la Lamennais, to a life of mendicant communion with the suffering masses. Pecherin, who served as Catholic chaplain in a Dublin hospital, saw in Lamennais “the new faith” for our times and felt convinced that the oppressed outer regions of Europe were the only hope for the decaying center. “Russia together with the United States is beginning a new cycle in history.”⁵² Chaadaev was also influenced by Lamennais; and he generally served Russians as a guide in moving from an early infatuation with Catholicism to a later interest in socialism. From a Russian point of view, Catholicism and socialism did not seem as incompatible as they did in the West. Both forces seemed to offer the possibility of introducing social discipline and sense of purpose into a passive and unorganized Russia.

Saint-Simon, whose theory of history eventually became the credo of the young Westernizers, had himself been influenced by De Maistre’s deep fear of anarchy and revolution and admired the ordering function which the Catholic Church had fulfilled in medieval society. In his call for a “new Christianity” that was to be purely ethical and a new hierarchy that was to be purely managerial, Saint-Simon and his disciple Auguste Comte were proponents of what has been called “Catholicism without Christianity.” Whereas Saint-Simon’s theories of industrial organization and class tensions interested his Western followers, it was “the breadth and grandioseness of his historical-philosophical views” which excited the Russians.⁵³

Saint-Simon’s first Russian disciple was the Decembrist Lunin, who actively propagated Saint-Simon’s ideas from exile after 1825 and was silenced only by imprisonment in 1841. Paralleling his career as a prophet of socialism was a religious life that brought him eventually into the Roman Catholic fold. A romantic student-soldier during the Napoleonic wars, Lunin felt alienated from his native land after becoming acquainted with Paris and Saint-Simon in 1814-16. Like Saint-Simon, Lunin was neither an advocate of revolution nor an admirer of the West as it actually was. “In your superficiality,” he told a French friend, “you need only the light and playful. But we, inhabitants of the north, love all that which moves the soul and forces us to plunge into thought.”⁵⁴

Saint-Simon made one of his infrequent visits to a fashionable Parisian soirée expressly for the purpose of bidding Lunin farewell in 1816.

Through you, I would like to establish links with a young people not yet withered up with scepticism. The soil is fertile there for the reception of the new teaching.…

Superstition considers that the golden age was some time in the distant past, whereas it is still to come. Then again giants will be born; but they will be great not in body but in spirit. Machines will work then in place of people … another Napoleon will stand at the head of an army of workers.…

If you forget me, do not at least forget the proverb: “by running for two hares, one catches neither.” From the time of Peter the Great you have been ever widening your borders; do not become lost in endless space. Rome was destroyed by its victories; the teaching of Christ entered into a soil fertilized with blood. War supports slavery; peaceful work prepares the basis for freedom which is the inalienable right of each.⁵⁵

Saint-Simon did not see his ideas take hold during his lifetime. His pleas to Alexander I for the adoption of his new Christianity by the Holy Alliance were no more heeded than his disciple Comte’s later appeal to Nicholas I to adopt his new “system of positive politics.”⁵⁶ But these theologians of progress were perceptive in addressing their grandiose theories to a nation “not yet withered up with scepticism” or (in Comte’s words) “retrograde empiricism.” Neglected by the tsars, their new theories of history were taken up by the Westernizing aristocracy. “Spiritually we lived in France,” explained one of the Westernizers of Nicholas’ reign. “We in studying turned to France. Not, of course, to the France of Louis Philippe and Guizot, but to the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, Louis Blanc, and particularly George Sand. From there, came to us a belief in humanity; from there, certainty burst upon us that ‘the golden age’ lay not behind, but before us.”⁵⁷ Pecherin heard in Saint-Simon “the giant steps of the approaching future.”⁵⁸ Most important of all, the young figure of Alexander Herzen, who had sworn to avenge the Decembrists and continue their Westernizing traditions, carried around Saint-Simon’s works “like the Koran.” His Moscow circle of the 1830’s began to lead the opposition to Schellingian philosophy and the turn to social problems which became characteristic of the new radical Westernizers.

After Saint-Simon’s death in 1825, Prospère Enfantin, one of his French followers who had begun his study of philosophy and economics in Russia, established a new Saint-Simonian religion. One of its adepts linked himself with Moses, Zoroaster, and Mohammed and darkly hinted that he might even be a reincarnation of Christ in modern dress. The Russians were fascinated by this strange, semi-sectarian movement and read its journal, The Globe, with great interest. Herzen’s early followers can be considered a kind of splinter group within this “new Christianity”; for, although they were neither industrialists nor cultists in the manner of Enfantin’s group, they were inspired by the Saint-Simonian view of history. By 1833 Herzen subscribed to the view that history moves in a three-stage progression from medieval Catholicism to philosophic Protestantism to the “new Christianity.” This last phase was the “truly human” phase, a “renovation” rather than a revolution of society, designed to abolish poverty and war by the systematic application of scientific method to social and economic problems.⁵⁹ A new elite of social managers and organizers must give man a modern, practical form of Christianity. The three-stage theory of history of Saint-Simon’s protégé Auguste Comte enjoyed even greater popularity among the radical Westernizers in Russia after being introduced by Valerian Maikov in the forties. Comte’s idea that everything must progress from a theological through a metaphysical into a “positive” or scientific stage became the reigning theory of history among populist intellectuals.⁶⁰

At first the difference between Westernizers and Slavophiles was not great. Both believed in some new form of Christianized society and were opposed to revolution and egalitarian excess. The tendency to idealize the peasant commune and narodnost’, or “spirit of the people,” as a regenerative life force in history was particularly characteristic of Slavophilism but also to be found among Polish revolutionaries and radical Westernizers. Narodnost’ for all of these visionary reformers meant neither nationality as it did for Uvarov nor popularity in the Western electoral sense. It meant the unspoiled wisdom of the noble savage as revealed in the newly collected popular proverbs of Vladimir Dal or the folk songs and poems of Alexis Kol’tsov. Almost all the great social theorists had philological or ethnographic interests and rejoiced that a writer of their generation had written a History of the Russian People in answer to Karamzin’s History of the Russian State.⁶¹

The man who dispelled the euphoria of friendly agreement and romantic fancy from Russian historical thinking was Georg Hegel, the last of the German idealistic philosophers to cast his spell over Russia. More than any other single man, he changed the course of Russian intellectual history during the “remarkable decade” from 1838 to 1848. He offered the Russians a seemingly rational and all-encompassing philosophy of history and led the restless Westernizers—for the first time—to entertain serious thoughts of revolution.

The introduction of Hegelian thought into Russia followed a pattern that had become virtually institutionalized. The seed was planted in a new philosophic circle formed around a suitably handsome and brooding figure (Stankevich) with some intense younger members (Belinsky and Bakunin) and a new foreign center for pilgrimage and study (Berlin). The new prophet was hailed as “the Columbus of philosophy and humanity” and became identified with a new intellectual generation. Stankevich, Belinsky, Bakunin, and Herzen—unlike Chaadaev, Odoevsky, and Khomiakov—had no memories of the war against Napoleon and the mystical hopes of the Alexandrian era. They were nurtured on the frustrations of Nicholas’ reign, and Hegelian philosophy became their weapon of revenge.

As with the preceding Schellingian generation, the young Hegelians were inspired by a series of new professors: Redkin in law with his constant reminder that “you are priests of truth”; Rul’e in zoology, tracing Hegel’s dialectic in the animal world; and above all, Granovsky in history. Like earlier circles, Stankevich’s followers called one another “brother” and engaged in group readings and group confessions.

As with previous Western thinkers, Hegel was known as much through Western discussions of his work as through original texts—Stankevich discovering him through a French translation, Herzen through a Polish disciple. But Hegel’s basic conviction that history makes sense shone through even the most superficial reading of Hegel and appealed to the young generation. Hegel’s famous declaration that “the real is rational and the rational is real” offered reassurance to a generation overcome by a feeling of isolation and subjective depression. Stankevich wrote from Berlin that “there is only one salvation from madness—history.”⁶² Hegel made it possible to find meaning in history—even in the oppressive chapter being written under Nicholas. “Reality, thou art wise and all-wise,”⁶³ Belinsky exclaimed, applying the adjectives of higher order Masonry, mudra i premudra, to the real world. One need no longer run away to find truth in a lodge or circle. Objective truth can be found in the everyday world by the “critically thinking” individual who is informed by Hegelian teachings. “As a result of them,” said Belinsky in the condescending tone of the converted Hegelian, “I am able to get along with practical people. In each of them I study with interest the species and type, not the individual.… Every day I notice something.…”⁶⁴ Coming at a time when depression, wanderings, and even suicide were taking an increasing toll among the romantic idealists, Hegel seemed to say that all purely personal and subjective feelings are irrelevant. Everything depends on objective necessity. “My personal I has been killed for ever,” wrote Bakunin after his conversion; “it no longer seeks anything for itself; its life will henceforth be life in the Absolute; but in essence my personal I has gained more than it has lost.… My life is now a truthful life.”⁶⁵

Whether Slavophile or Westernizer, the older generation found this philosophy repellent. In comparison with Schelling, Hegel stood in the tradition of those who “placed the root of intimate human convictions … outside the sphere of aesthetic and moral sense.”⁶⁶

Many of the Hegelians who contributed to building the modern German state were excited by the Hegelian idea that the state was the supreme expression of the World Spirit in history. In Russia, too, Hegel found some disciples principally concerned with increasing rationality and civic discipline through the state; but they tended to be (like Hegel himself) relatively moderate figures mainly concerned with political reform: the so-called Rechtsstaat liberals like the historian Granovsky and Chicherin, the mayor of Moscow.

However, Hegel convinced many more Russians that the dialectic requires not the apotheosis of the present state but its total destruction. Seemingly impossible changes suddenly became possible by considering the fact that history proceeded through contradictions. Even more than the Hegelian left in Germany, the Russian Hegelians found in his theory of history a call to revolution: to the destruction of “God and the State,” “the Knouto-Germanic Empire.”⁶⁷

Ostensibly, Belinsky turned revolutionary by rejecting Hegel:

All the talk in Hegel about morality is pure nonsense, for in the kingdom of objective thought there is no morality any more than in objective religion.… The fate of the subject, the individual, the personality is more important than the fate of the whole world and the health of the Emperor of China (i.e. the Hegelian Allgemeinheit).… All my respects, Igor Fedorovich, I bow before your philosophic nightcap, but … even if I should succeed in lifting myself to the highest rung on the ladder of development I should demand an accounting for all the victims of circumstance in life and history … of the inquisition, of Philip II.…⁶⁸

This passage was often cited by radical reformers (and provided the inspiration for Ivan Karamazov’s famous rejection of his “ticket of admission” to heaven). But it did not mark the end of Hegel’s influence on Belinsky or on Russian radicalism. Although Belinsky came to look to French socialists for leadership in the coming transformation of European society, he still expected the change to occur in a Hegelian manner. History remained “a necessary and reasonable development of ideas” moving toward a realization of the world spirit on earth, when “Father-Reason shall reign” and the criminal “will pray for his own punishment and none will punish him.”⁶⁹ The final “synthesis” on earth will be a time in which the realm of necessity gives way to the realm of freedom. The present, seemingly victorious, “thesis,” the rule of kings and businessmen in Europe, will be destroyed by its radical “antithesis.” This “negation of negation” will make room for the new millennium.

Bakunin was the most truly “possessed” and revolutionary of all the Hegelians with his ideological commitment to destruction. He spent almost all of the “remarkable decade” in Western Europe and was a major catalyst in the “revolution of the intellectuals” in 1848. Only the hint of final liberation contained in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was to be saved from the coming conflagration. Bakunin’s Hegelian conviction that total destruction must precede total freedom had an immense influence on European revolutionary thought— particularly in Southern Europe—and had only just begun to wane at the time of his death in 1876. Even his ideological rival for influence within the populist movement, the evolutionary Peter Lavrov, used Hegelian appeals in his famous “Historical Letters” of the late sixties by urging men to renounce their purely personal lives in order to be “conscious knowing agents” of the historical process.⁷⁰

It is perhaps more correct to speak of the vulgarization of Hegelian concepts than the influence of Hegel’s ideas in Russia. In either case, the impact was great—and, on the whole, disastrous. The strident presentation of Hegelian philosophy as an antidote to occult mysticism was rather like offering typhoid-infected water to a man thirsty with fever. Koyré provocatively says of Belinsky’s rejection of Hegel that it did not represent a real change of philosophy but “the cry of revolt of a sick man whom the Hegelian medicine has not cured.”⁷¹ One might almost say that the Hegelian medicine turned the Russian taste for all-encompassing philosophic systems into an addiction. Those who managed to recover from the intoxication with Hegel were left with a kind of philosophic hangover. They tended to reject philosophy altogether but were left with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction with moderate positions and tentative compromises. The “ex-Hegelians” Belinsky and Herzen were no less extreme than the permanently intoxicated Bakunin in their hatred of posredstvennost’ (“mediocrity”), meshchanstvo (“bourgeois philistinism”), and juste-milieu.

The Hegelian idea that history proceeds through necessary contradictions also lent a new quality of acrimony to the previously mild debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. Hegelianism seemed to demonstrate the “power of negative thinking.” It is difficult to find any positive statement of belief in the late writings of the “furious” Belinsky. Yet, because of the passionate sincerity of his personality, negative thinking was made to appear a virtue and became a kind of tradition in the new literary criticism which he largely introduced into Russia. Herzen too—for all his literacy and concern for individual liberties—was at his best in attacking the attackers of freedom. He became convinced that revolutionary change was coming and left Russia forever in 1847 to greet the coming stage of history in Paris. After the failure of 1848, he decided—along with Bakunin—that revolutionary change was to come from Russia after all. Suddenly in 1849-50 Herzen and Bakunin both turned to the ideal of the peasant commune and a free federation of Slavic peoples⁷²—not primarily because they were morally or spiritually desirable as they had been for the Slavophiles and were soon to be for the populists, but because they represented the “negation of negation”: an historical battering ram for upsetting the philistinism of bourgeois Europe.

The necessity of a coming final synthesis in history, a revolutionary deliverance from oppression and mediocrity, was a belief common to all Hegelians of the left from Marx to Proudhon, the most influential Western revolutionaries after 1848. Herzen and Bakunin shared the conviction and sided more with their common friend Proudhon than with Marx in looking for revolution through an heroic elite rather than economic forces. Bakunin embraced the coming revolution unreservedly, Herzen with deep reservations; but both believed it to be inevitable.

Hegel had given them an “algebra of revolution” without any equivalents for the formula. Thus, the Russian disciples differed widely in their understanding of who was the agent of the absolute at the present stage of history. Bakunin looked by turns to Western urban revolutionaries, East European peasants, Nicholas I, the anarchist movement in Switzerland and Latin Europe, and finally to conspiratorial terrorists in Russia. Herzen looked to Paris, to the Russian countryside, and to Alexander II before losing both his influence and his faith in the 1860’s. Although Herzen never participated in revolutionary activity in the Bakunin manner, he was hypnotized by it. “Better to perish with the revolution than live on in the alms house of reaction,”⁷³ he had advised his son in 1849; and in his late years one detects a certain elegant nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe in absolute liberation as he wrote his pessimistic “letters to an old comrade,” Bakunin.⁷⁴

There were perhaps only two constant elements in the troubled careers of these, the two most interesting figures of the “remarkable decade.” First was their romantic attachment to the image of a better society probably derived not so much from socialist blueprints as from nostalgic reminiscences of childhood and literary portrayals of fraternal heroism and happiness. Second was their essentially Hegelian conviction that a revolutionary repudiation of the existing order of things was historically inevitable.

The fascination with Hegel led many Russians to believe in a coming liberation without deepening their understanding of liberty. Hegelianism revived in a secular form the prophetic hopes of the Muscovite ideology and provided a philosophy of history that was no less absolute and metaphysical (though considerably less clear). The idea that negation was merely a stage in the preparation for the final realization of the absolute was a kind of depersonalized, philosophical version of the Christian conception that the reign of the Antichrist would precede the second coming of Christ. It is a tribute to the depth of Hegel’s influence on Russian thought that even those who subsequently rejected his philosophy still felt the need for a philosophy of history: Comte’s positivism, social Darwinism, or Marxist materialism. Hegel encouraged Russian secular thinkers to base their ideas on a prophetic philosophy of history rather than a practical program of reform, to urge action in the name of historical necessity rather than moral imperatives.

The Prophetic Role of Art

IF THERE WAS ANY supreme authority for the emancipated men of the “remarkable decade,” it was not a philosopher or historian but a literary critic like Belinsky or a creative artist like Gogol. The extraordinary prestige of those connected with art followed logically from romantic philosophy. For the creative artist was in many ways the prophet; and the critic, the priest, of romanticism.

The Enlightenment had found truth in objective laws, physical and moral, which were assumed to be uniformly valid throughout the natural world. They could be discovered by study and explained rationally by the natural philosopher. In romantic thought, however, truth was organic and aesthetic; its hidden meaning was best perceived intuitively and communicated poetically. Since different cultures were an important expression of the variety and hidden patterns of history, the romantic artist bore a special responsibility to find the meaning of national identity.

The contrast between pure and propagandistic art, which became so important to a subsequent generation, did not concern the idealistic romantics of Nicholaevan Russia. All art was pure in the sense that it expressed little direct concern over social and political problems, yet strongly propagandistic in the sense that it conceived of artistic ideas as a force capable of transforming the world. It was called “monastic” by Khomiakov;⁷⁵ Saint-Martin, “the unknown philosopher” of the anti-Enlightenment, spoke of it as “prophetic.” It was indeed infused with prophecy in the Biblical sense of purporting to represent the word of God to man. It can also be characterized with the less familiar Greek term theurgic used by Saint-Martin to describe the spiritualist’s act of establishing contact with other worlds, and by Berdiaev to suggest that art was viewed as divine work and not merely divine words.⁷⁶

The idea that art was divine activity was particularly rooted for Russians in Schelling’s philosophy. He defined philosophy as “higher poetry” and sought to relate philosophic speculation to artistic rather than scientific pursuits. Inspired by Schelling, the Russians were quick to conclude that new progress in philosophy required the development of new art forms. The Schellingian Nadezhdin accordingly drew up the first of many calls for new prophetic art beyond either classicism or romanticism in his writings and lectures as professor of art and archeology at Moscow. As early as 1818 he defined the poet’s calling:

To teach people the good is the duty of the poet.

He is the true herald, the dread teacher of the world,

His task is to strike down and unmask vice,

To teach and guide people onto the true path.

A Christian poet is the organ of eternal truths.⁷⁷

Belinsky served his journalistic apprenticeship under Nadezhdin in the thirties, and, for all his philosophic convolutions, remained faithful to his teacher’s belief in the high calling of the artist: “Art is the direct intuition of truth, i.e. thought in the form of images.”⁷⁸ These images of truth had—for the awakening imagination of Nicholaevan Russia—a uniquely national configuration. As Glinka was reputed to have said, “nations create music, composers only arrange it.” The artist thus became “the nerve end of the great people,” who “like a priest or judge should not belong to any party” and must never substitute “earthly reason for the heavenly mind.”⁷⁹ Literary criticism became a kind of exegesis of sacred texts, the chief critic of any major “thick journal” a high priest, and his desk “the altar on which he performs his holy rites.”⁸⁰ Through Kireevsky, Nadezhdin, and Belinsky literary criticism became the major medium for discussing philosophical and social questions. Far from being mere reviewers, the critics of this period acquired a key place in the development of intellectual life. Belinsky, in particular, acquired a unique moral authority through his uncompromising moral fanaticism. His mantle was passed on in a kind of apostolic succession to Chernyshevsky in the sixties and Mikhailovsky in the seventies. Problems and ideas raised in his writings found their way back into the literary milieu from which they had come and reached a new level of intensity in the ideological novels of Dostoevsky.

The first proclamation of the new exalted conception of the artist was made by the Schellingian Prince Odoevsky in a new journal he founded in 1824 (with the Decembrist poet Küchelbecker) to help create “a truly Russian poetry.” Enjoying the collaboration of Pushkin and many of the leading poets of the age, the journal was appropriately called Mnemosyne (the mother of the muses). “Sculpture, Painting, and Music,” a story by the young poet Venevitinov, illustrates the general feeling that the arts were all divinely inspired. The three arts are depicted as three celestial virgins with a common mother, Poetry, of whom the whole world is an expressive creation. In a similar vein stands Odoevsky’s idea that “poetry is the number, music the measure and painting the weight” of a common truth.⁸¹ Similarly, the story “Three Artists” by Stankevich, the philosopher-artist who dominated the philosophical life of the thirties as much as Odoevsky had the twenties, told of three brothers trying to capture “the eternal beauty of mother nature” in different media, each inspiring the other until at last “the three lives flowed into one life, the three arts into beauty … and an invisible force was in their midst.”⁸²

This sense of divine interdependence of all art media was of great importance for the creative artists of Nicholaevan Russia. Artists in one medium generally knew those working in others. It was customary for poets to draw pictures and for artists to write poems in the notebooks that they kept and exchanged. The Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko began his career as a painter, and Lermontov left behind almost as many paintings and sketches as poems.⁸³ His Demon later inspired Rubinstein’s opera of the same name (one of the most popular of the many Russian operas that remain virtually unknown abroad), and many of the best canvases of Vrubel (one of the best of the many painters who also remain little known outside of Russia). Briullov’s painting, “The Last Days of Pompeii,” was inspired by an opera, and in turn inspired the novel of Bulwer-Lytton. Odoevsky as a music critic and Botkin as an art critic acquired positions of general influence almost as great as those of the literary critics (and were themselves creative writers).

Poetry was viewed, at least until the late thirties, as the first and greatest of the art forms: “the first-born daughter of the deathless spirit, the holy hand-maiden of eternal elegance, nothing less than the most perfect harmony.”⁸⁴ Such flowery tributes seem not altogether inappropriate; for the 1820’s and 1830’s were the golden age of Russian verse. In the quantity of good poetry and the quality of its best, Russia drew equal to any other nation of Europe and far ahead of anything in its own past. The greatest of all, Alexander Pushkin, represents in poetry what his ill-fated Decembrist friends represented in politics: the final flowering of eighteenth-century aristocratic aspiration. But, whereas the Decembrists came to an inglorious end and had little impact on subsequent political thought, Pushkin was lionized even in his lifetime, and sounded forth many of the themes that were to dominate a rich literary culture in the late imperial period. His extraordinary success helped attract gifted Russians to art as a kind of alternative to politics during the reactionary period that followed the crushing of the Decembrists.

From a background of privilege and a largely French, neo-classical education at the newly founded imperial lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin grew continually in the range and depth of his interests. Within his relatively brief life of thirty-eight years, he wrote plays, stories, and poems with equal facility about a wide variety of times and places. His most influential work was the “novel in verse” Eugene Onegin. Its portrayal of provincial aristocratic life and its muted tale of unfulfillment made it “the real ancestor of the main line of Russian fiction,” while “superfluous” Onegin and the lovely Tatiana became “the authentic Adam and Eve of the Mankind that inhabits Russian fiction.”⁸⁵ One of his last poems, The Bronze Horseman, is probably the greatest ever written in the Russian language. A much shorter and more intense work than Onegin, The Bronze Horseman struck a resonant chord in the Russian apocalyptical mentality with its central image of a flood descending on St. Petersburg without any ark of salvation. Drawing on his own memories of the flood in 1824, Pushkin transforms Falconet’s bronze statue of Peter the Great into an ambiguous symbol of imperial majesty and inhuman power. The clerk Eugene, in whose final delirium the statue comes to life, became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction—pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone control.

Pushkin remains the outstanding illustration of Russian aristocratic culture. In his hands, Russian poetry came close to Nadezhdin’s ideal synthesis of classical and romantic elements; the Russian language attained an elegance and precision that was at last devoid of affectation; and the famous “broad Russian nature” was combined with the classical virtues of clarity and disciplined moderation. For all his breadth of interest and subject matter, Pushkin was a different temperament from the Shakespeare with whom Russians often compare him. His was not the “golden uncontrolled enfranchisement” of the Elizabethans but rather the fulfillment of the oftmaligned aristocratic ideal: disinterested curiosity freed from dilettantism; ranging sympathies freed from condescension; and honest self-awareness freed from morbid introspection.

For a poet with natural musicality, it seems appropriate that Pushkin wrote about music and musicians and had so much of his own work adapted for the musical stage.⁸⁶ There is a kind of compatibility between the grace of his verse and that of the imperial ballet, which by the 1820’s had surpassed all others in Europe. During thirty of Pushkin’s thirty-eight years the ballet was directed by Charles Didelot, the first of the great Russian impresario-choreographers. He admired Pushkin’s work, and Pushkin found fresh inspiration for his poetry in one of Didelot’s greatest ballerinas, Istomina.⁸⁷ The verses of Pushkin and the movements of Istomina gave Russians a new confidence that they were capable of surpassing the West not only in primitive combat but also in sophisticated cultural accomplishment.

For all his genius and symbolic importance, however, Pushkin did not affect the path of Russian cultural development as much as many lesser writers.

He exerted, it is true, a vast influence on Russian literature, but almost none on the history of Russian thought, of Russian spiritual culture. In the nineteenth century and generally into our own times, Russian thought and spiritual culture has followed another, non-Pushkinian path.⁸⁸

Pushkin was a relatively unpolemical writer, a man of shifting interests, tantalizing fragments, and elusive opinions. Yet he gradually developed an outlook that can be characterized as conservative in social and political matters and liberal in the realm of spiritual and creative culture. After a youth of many love affairs and close contact with Decembrists and other romantic reformers, he became a supporter of autocracy in the 1820’s and a half-domesticated paterfamilias in the 1830’s. He had always shared the aristocratic distaste for the vulgarity and capriciousness of the common horde. He was skeptical about the possibilities of democracy in America, and tended to praise great men—Peter the Great, Lomonosov, and even at times Napoleon—who had disregarded majority opinion in order to lift standards and advance culture. Always a monarchist, he hailed Nicholas I in more cordial terms than he had Alexander I; praised Peter and derided his Ukrainian foe Mazeppa in his Poltava of 1829; and endorsed the crushing of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Increasingly, he felt reverence for continuity and tradition. Violent change of any sort, he came to feel, would bring forth an inescapable revenge of fate—just as uncontrolled excess in poetry produces an imbalance that destroys true art. Pushkin was horrified by the terror of the French Revolution, and inveighed against the unleashed fury of the mob in his own major historical work of the early 1830’s, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.

Yet insofar as revolutionary figures become distinct personalities rather than mere weapons of the impersonal war on tradition, Pushkin treats them with the same relative detachment that is accorded to princes, gypsies, and all humanity in his work. Pugachev as an individual is sympathetic and understandable in Pushkin’s History and an idealized figure in his fictional Captain’s Daughter. Poles are portrayed objectively in Boris Godunov, as are Crimean Tatars in “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.” The crushing of the Decembrists saddened him not because of his sympathy for their programs but because of the foreshortening of imaginative vistas implied in the loss to Russia of gifted poets like Ryleev and Küchelbecker. In the very year of the Decembrist rebellion, Pushkin identified himself with the neo-classical French poet André Chenier, who was guillotined during the terror of the French Revolution. Pushkin’s Chenier “sings to freedom at the habitual popular festival of execution, unchanging to the end,” and exclaims just before his death:

thou, sacred Freedom,

Immaculate Goddess, thou art not guilty.⁸⁹

Individual creative freedom must be preserved if human life is to have any dignity. “Pushkin defends the viewpoint of a true conservatism, based on the primacy of culture and the spiritual independence of the individual personality and society,”⁹⁰ Even in the relative security from mob rule and commercial pressures provided by Nicholas I, Pushkin felt “the primacy of culture” challenged by petty bureaucrats and stifling censorship. The flood and madness which engulfs the poor clerk in “The Bronze Horseman” are the revenge of fate for the precipitous reforms of Peter, just as the calamities and death which overtake Boris Godunov are revenge for the presumed crimes of an otherwise sympathetic Boris. The optimism of Pushkin’s early lyrics becomes more obscured in his later works by a deepening sense of human loneliness amidst an essentially unfeeling nature, and a growing consciousness of the irrational chaotic depths within man himself. His late years were characterized by attempts to deepen his hitherto perfunctory understanding of Christianity, a nostalgia for his youth, and a general movement away from poetry to prose. “I am,” he said, “an atheist of happiness. I do not belive in it.”⁹¹ He died early in 1837 as a result of wounds incurred in a senseless duel.

The posthumous veneration for Pushkin was, and has remained, extraordinary. His papers were immediately impounded as state property; and Lermontov wrote a poem which vigorously attacked Pushkin’s censors and critics, signalizing the transfer of the mantle of poetic pre-eminence to another who was to die unnecessarily and prematurely just four years later. Lermontov was a more brooding and introspective figure than Pushkin. With him, the floodgates of emotionalism were opened and the heroes of European romanticism—Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goethe—came to dominate a poetic culture they had previously only influenced. Goethe’s Faust was particularly influential. It was translated by Venevitinov, the original poetic Wunderkind of the twenties, and again in the thirties by Eugene Guber, a Saratov pietist who was a friend both of Pushkin and of Fesler, the occultist of the Alexandrian era.⁹² Odoevsky calls the hero of his highly romantic and widely read Russian Nights “the Russian Faust.” The romantic longings and metaphysical preoccupations that were already marked in Lermontov are even further developed in the work of Fedor Tiutchev, who outlived Lermontov by many years, to become the last great survivor of the golden age of Russian poetry. Beginning with translations from Goethe’s Faust in a deliberately archaic Russian, Tiutchev turned to a world of private fantasy and nocturnal themes that is reminiscent of early, world-weary romantics like Novalis and Tieck.⁹³

This drift toward emotionalism, metaphysics, and obscurity signified the waning of the Pushkinian tradition and a general decline in the popularity of poetry. Growing impatience with the more disciplined and classical art forms of poetry and architecture did not diminish the enthusiasm for art itself, which was still believed to contain the answers to the great questions of life. The idea of art as prophecy can again be traced to Pushkin, whose magnificent poem of 1826, “The Prophet,” describes how the angel of the Lord came to him when he was weary and lost in the wilderness “and my prophetic eyes were awakened like those of a startled eagle.” The angel took away his idle inclinations, placed a living coal of fire where once his “trembling heart” had been, and bade him arise and speak the word of God to burn “the hearts of people.”⁹⁴

The generation of artists that succeeded Pushkin tried to do just that. The way in which philosophic concerns created a new prophetic art is illustrated in the interlocked careers of two towering personalities of the “marvelous decade”: the writer Nicholas Gogol and the painter Alexander Ivanov. The former dramatizes the transition from poetry to prose in Russian letters; the latter the change from architecture to painting in the visual arts. Though they labored in different art forms and Gogol was far more successful, they shared deep common concerns, and forged the first of the many close links that were to develop between prose writers and painters: Tolstoy and Ge, Garshin and Vereshchagin, Chekhov and Levitan.⁹⁵

The active lives of Gogol and Ivanov cover almost exactly the same space of time—roughly the reign of Nicholas I—and illustrate in many ways the inner discontent of that age. Both left St. Petersburg dissatisfied in the 1830’s to seek a new source of inspiration for their art and to spend most of their remaining years abroad.

Pilgrimages to foreign shrines were typical of the Nicholaevan era. A steady stream of Russians was visiting the residences of Schiller and Goethe. Zhukovsky, the father of Russian romantic poetry, spent many of his last years in Germany; the Munich of Schelling attracted Kireevsky, Shevyrev, and Tiutchev; the Berlin of the Hegelians drew Bakunin and Stankevich. Glinka and Botkin went to Spain, Khomiakov to Oxford, Herzen to Paris. The exotic regions of the Caucasus beckoned to Russians through the poetry of Baratynsky, Pushkin, and above all Lermontov. Romantic Auswanderung was so characteristic of the day that Stankevich suggested— in a caricature of Pushkin’s Prisoner of the Caucasus—that the Russian intellectual secretly wished to become “a prisoner of the Kalmyks.”⁹⁶

Behind some of this travel lay the homesickness of the romantic imagination for the lost beauty of classical antiquity: “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.” The search for links with this world was particularly anguished in Russia, which had no roots in classical tradition and little familiarity with the forms of art and life that had grown out of it in the Mediterranean world. The best that Russia could do was to “discover” the Crimea: the exotically beautiful peninsula in the Black Sea, which had been the site of a former Greek colony where Iphigenia had found asylum, and Mithradates, exile and death.

The Crimea had increasingly attracted aristocratic visitors in the years since Catherine incorporated it into the empire in 1783 and compared the region to “a fairy tale from the 1001 nights” after a visit four years later.⁹⁷ The embellished account of a journey through the Crimea in 1820 by the tutor in classical languages to the future Tsar Nicholas I and the Grand Duke Constantine lent a glow of classical and pseudo-classical glory to what Pushkin was moved to call the “enchanted periphery” of the Russian empire.⁹⁸ Though known in this period by the classical name of Taurida (Tauris), the more familiar, Tatar-derived name of Crimea also came into use—a reminder that this was the land of a recently vanquished Moslem people. Legends of Moslem magnificence began to mingle with memories of classical antiquity in the Russian romantic imagination. Pushkin’s glittering pseudo-historical poem “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai” became one of his most popular works and immortalized the Tatar capital.

Pushkin’s “Fountain,” as distinct from Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets (or Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time), has a balanced structure and a plot free from morbidity or melodrama. His picture of the captive Polish maiden at the court of the Tatar khan in Bakhchisarai inspired one of the most popular ballets of the Stalin era, and became, through the magic of Galina Ulanova’s characterization, a suggestive symbol of a European heritage in bondage to despotic, quasi-Oriental rule.

Pushkin remained essentially a classical European even while staying inside Russia and visiting no more than the periphery of the classical world. Gogol and Ivanov, on the other hand, became profoundly and selfconsciously Russian even while leaving their native land and journeying to the very heart of classical culture: to Rome, the artistic and religious capital of the Western world. A Russian colony had assembled there around Zinaida Volkonsky. She had brought with her a rich art collection and memories of her intimate friendship with Alexander I and the poet Venevitinov. She seems to have viewed herself as a kind of Russian Joan of Arc—having written, and sung the title role in, an opera of that name.⁹⁹ It was in Rome, in the shadow of the Volkonsky villa, that Gogol and Ivanov were to create their greatest masterpieces.

The two artists brought to their new home a profound conviction that their work must in some way exemplify Russia’s redemptive spiritual mission in the world. They sought, as it were, to provide the artistic guides and weapons for the “spiritual conquest of Europe” that the prophets of the thirties were predicting for Russia. Gogol had a special sense of responsibility born of the feeling that he had succeeded Pushkin as the first man of Russian letters. Ivanov felt a similar sense of special responsibility as the son of the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

Each man devoted his life to one great work which was never really completed. Each became more politically conservative toward the end of his life (as did many of the Slavophiles), believing that Nicholas I and the existing powers could alone bring about a new order. Most important—and fateful for the subsequent history of Russian creative art—each came to believe that aesthetic problems should be subordinated to moral and religious ones. Each remained unmarried and apparently unmoved by women. Each life ended in strange wanderings, partial mental derangement, and a death that was unnecessary and—like that of Venevitinov, Pushkin, and Lermontov before them—brought on by their own actions. Unlike these earlier poets, however, the new prophetic artists included in their wanderings the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and ascetic self-mortification.

Their work was—as they had wished it to be—uniquely Russian and quite unlike anything else in the world of art. By commanding the fascinated attention of Russia in their last years, they helped excite others with their blend of stark realism and aesthetic moralism. They swept aside not only the conventions of classicism but the sentimentality of romanticism as well. Despite their final conservatism, these two figures were idolized by radical and disaffected intellectuals who helped invest their anguish with an aura of holiness that had previously been confined to saints and princes.

The main point about Gogol’s advent into Russia is that Russia was, or at least appeared to be, a “monumental,” “majestic,” “great power,” yet Gogol walked over these real or imaginary “monuments” with his thin weak feet and crushed them all, so that not a trace of them remained.¹⁰⁰

Gogol was the first of those original Russian prose writers whose work requires analysis from a religious and psychological as well as a literary point of view. He shared the sense of loneliness and introspection that had been characteristic of many fellow Ukrainians from Skovoroda to Shevchenko. Yet both the form and content of his work is deeply Russian. His early career is at least superficially typical of the romanticism of the twenties and thirties: beginning with weak, sentimental poetry on German pastoral themes, followed by an abortive attempt to flee to America, vivid stories about his native Ukraine (Mirgorod), Hoffmannesque sketches about St. Petersburg and the meaning of art (Arabesques), and a brief career as teacher and writer of history. His early career culminated in 1836 in the satirical play the Inspector General; and his last great work, Dead Souls, appeared six years later in the familiar romantic form of observations during a voyage through the countryside.

The triumphal appearance of the Inspector General in the same year as that of Glinka’s Life for the Tsar and Briullov’s “Last Days of Pompeii” marks a kind of watershed in the history of Russian art. The three works were hailed as harbingers of a new national art capable of engaging dramatically a broader audience than that of any previous Russian art. Yet Gogol’s work with its “laughter through invisible tears” at the bureaucratic pretense of Nicholaevan Russia was far different in tone from the heroic theatricality of the other two. The contrast is made even more striking by the divergent pattern of Gogol’s subsequent personal career. For, whereas Briullov accepted imperial patronage and Glinka became Kappelmeister to Nicholas I, Gogol left Russia altogether in the wake of his great success. He was driven by a strange inner compulsion to pronounce through art what others were expressing through philosophy and history: a new word of redemptive hope for Russia and all humanity.

After visiting Paris, which he found even more vulgar and venal than St. Petersburg, Gogol settled in Rome and set forth on his effort to rise above the negativism of the Inspector General with a trilogy to serve as a Russian Divine Comedy. His sense of mission was intensified by the death of Pushkin in 1837, and his fame increased by the successful appearance in 1842 of The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, the first part of his great work. Yet in the remaining ten years of his life, Gogol was unable to make further progress on his project. Dead Souls remains, like Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina, the glorious first part of an uncompleted trilogy. Other Slavic exiles in Italy were also trying to write a new Divine Comedy. Juliusz Slowacki’s Poem of Piast Dantyszek about Hell was a Polish Inferno; but whereas Slowacki went on to provide a Paradiso in a poetic “rhapsody” King Spirit, and Krasiński finished his Undivine Comedy, Gogol’s terrifying honesty never permitted him to go beyond the Inferno of Dead Souls. Unlike his Polish contemporaries—and indeed most popular patriotic literature of the day—Gogol was not seduced by idealistic and nationalistic appeals. He could only sweep the stage clean without providing any positive answers.

In Dead Souls (as in another of his unforgettable pictures of provincial pettiness, “How the Two Ivans Quarreled”) Gogol borrowed in part from an earlier picaresque writer from the same section of the Ukraine, Vasily Narezhny. The satirical style and vivid tableaux of Dead Souls are often reminiscent of Narezhny’s Russian Gil Bias. But just as Gogol distorts the name of Narezhny’s hero (Chistiakov) in the direction of caricature (Chichikov), so he transforms the image of a picaresque hero from a boisterous adventurer to an enigmatic wanderer, moving through the distorted world of the living in search of his claims on the dead. Narezhny was able to move on to provide Russia with a valedictory message in his posthumously published Dark Year, or the Mountain Princes,¹⁰¹ which criticized Russian rule in Transcaucasia and anticipated in some ways both the novel of social reform and the separatist propaganda of the late imperial period. Gogol, on the other hand, could offer no simple message or hopeful conclusions; he could find no guiding road except one which led to destruction—first of his later works and then of the frail body that had linked him with the world.

The caricatured figures of Dead Souls, the surviving first part of his trilogy, reveal Gogol’s fascination with human disfigurement together with an unvoiced, but passionate concern for wholeness and perfection. But there is no bearer of salvation, nothing as compelling as the images of evil and blight. He concluded that one had to be perfect in order to write about perfection. He failed to create positive heroes because

you cannot invent them out of your head. Until you become like them yourself, until you acquire a few good qualities by your perseverance and strength of character, everything you produce by your pen will be nothing but carrion, and you will be as far from the truth as earth is from heaven.¹⁰²

Driven by this quest for moral perfection, Gogol felt impelled to burn most of the second part of Dead Souls, his Purgatorio, and turn away from art altogether at the end, dying at the age of forty-three. From the artistic perfection of the Inspector General (perhaps the greatest play in the Russian language)¹⁰³ Gogol moved within a decade to a plea for a total subservience to the established Church in his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. His voluntary renunciation of art was to have echoes in the careers of Leo Tolstoy and others. The call of morality was beginning to claim precedence over that of art, and Belinsky, who rejected Gogol’s religious appeal, nonetheless contrasted Gogol’s moral concern with the “idea-lessness” of Griboedov’s work. The prophet of the sixties, Nicholas Chernyshevsky, was to draw an even more extreme contrast between “Pushkinian” disciples of pure art and “Gogolian” concern for the injustice of humanity.

It was not until the Orthodox revival of the early twentieth century that Gogol’s final plea for a return to the Church would receive serious attention; but other enigmatic hints at a way out of the inferno acquired a haunting symbolism for subsequent nineteenth-century thinkers. The final image in Dead Souls, Chichikov’s troika heading off across the steppe to an unknown destination, came to epitomize the enigma of Russia’s future. The ending of The Greatcoat, his most famous short story, written between the Inspector General and Dead Souls, left an even more spectral message. In it Gogol transforms a drawing-room story that others had found humorous concerning a man’s excessive grief over the loss of his rifle into a tale of great pathos and meaning. The hero is a poor and insignificant clerk in St. Petersburg, a passive figure whose pitiable life finds focus only in saving money for a new greatcoat. He finally gets it, but is robbed of it in a dark street and dies. Then, in a strange final sequence, he returns to reclaim his coat and cause his superiors to fear for their own. The clerk is not at all noble or heroic in Gogol’s story. Thus, his final victory over Nicholaevan St. Petersburg seems all the more fantastic. By making it seem, however, both unavoidable and convincing, Gogol creates not only one of his greatest artistic effects but perhaps also the positive prophecy he was unable to offer in Dead Souls. For not only does the strange victory of the little man represent the best example of Gogol’s “thin, weak feet” crushing the “real or imaginary monuments” of Nicholaevan Russia; it may also—as one close student of Soviet literature has contended—provide some hope to those who must live with the greater monumentalism of the Soviet era.¹⁰⁴

Gogol’s imagination was so vivid and pictorial that it sometimes requires the language of painting to discuss it. His writings lent themselves readily to pictorial representation, just as Pushkin’s lent themselves to music in the same period. Gogol was, indeed, as interested in pictorial art as Pushkin was in music; the subject matter of Gogol’s Portrait came as naturally to him as did that of Mozart and Salieri to Pushkin. Painting held for Gogol not only a special interest but a unique advantage over sculpture and all other forms of plastic art:

It deals not just with one man, its borders are wider: it includes in itself the whole world; all the beautiful phenomena surrounding man are within its power; all the secret harmony and the linking of man with nature are found in it alone.¹⁰⁵

Thus, it is not surprising that, when Gogol’s own faith in the possibility of pronouncing words of artistic deliverance to Russia weakened, he focused many of his last hopes on the work of a painter, for whose labors he arduously solicited support during the last years of his life. The painter was, of course, Alexander Ivanov, a friend of many years standing, who had often painted Gogol in Rome and who kept pasted within his album for new sketches a letter Gogol had sent him:

God grant you His aid in your labours, do not lose heart, be of good courage, God’s blessing be on your brush and may your picture be gloriously completed. That at any rate is what I wish you from the bottom of my heart.¹⁰⁶

The painting of which Gogol spoke was Ivanov’s “Appearance of Christ to the People,” on which he worked for twenty-five years, drawing up more than six hundred sketches amidst one of the most extraordinary and anguished artistic searches of modern times. Ivanov’s work illustrates far better than that of the more successful and uniquely gifted Gogol the profoundly disquieting effects of this search for a new prophetic message on accepted forms of art and thought.

Ivanov was born into the artistic world with every possible advantage as the gifted aristocratic son of the leading academic painter in St. Petersburg. Despite his privileged position, excellent training and prize-winning early compositions in the prevailing classical style, the young Ivanov became infected with the restlessness of the times. In 1830 he left St. Petersburg proclaiming: “A Russian artist cannot remain in a city like Petersburg which has no character. The academy of fine arts is a survival of a past century.”¹⁰⁷ In Rome he embarked on a vigorous search for a new, more meaningful style. He began a lifelong, first-hand study of classical and Renaissance art. In his own work he moved from mythological subjects in oil to somber sketches and chiaroscuro water colors of Roman street scenes and the semi-impressionistic color studies of the Italian countryside. His quest for authenticity in rendering the human form took him away from Rome to Perugia and other cities where the nude body could be studied at length in the public baths.

Throughout this early period of experimentation, Ivanov was driven by the conviction that he was living on the threshold of a new era. The solemn coronation of Nicholas I had made a profound religious and aesthetic impression on him as a youth of twenty, and he felt that a new “golden age of Russian art” was dawning.¹⁰⁸ The responsibility of the artist was in a sense even greater than that of the political leader; for “all the aesthetic life of humanity, and, as a result, the very happiness of its future” depends on “the development of the artist’s capabilities.”¹⁰⁹

After this initial period of intensive technical preparation, Ivanov turned his attention to the creation of a canvas which would serve as a kind of monumental icon for the new age: a transposition into painting of the heroic sculptural and architectural style of the early nineteenth century. The subject matter that he chose for his first efforts in this direction was invariably Biblical: Samson and Delilah, David before Saul, Joseph’s brothers, and—much the best—“Christ with Mary Magdalen.” Finally, in the late thirties he began to turn all his attention to the preparation of his “Appearance of Christ to the People.” In contrast to Briullov’s canvas of 1836, which conveyed the negative message of the fall of Rome in an artistically sloppy and sentimental manner, Ivanov’s painting was to carry a positive message in a technically perfect manner. The subject was to be the decisive moment in history when the agitated and uncertain followers of John the Baptist first caught sight of Christ. The style was to be that of Raphael, with the composition based partly on Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

Throughout his long labors on this painting, he was driven by a concern for authenticity that astonished all who came in contact with him. He spent long hours in synagogues studying Jewish faces, made trips to the courtrooms of Rome to study the expressions of despair on the face of condemned criminals, and invited peasants into his otherwise impenetrable study to tell them jokes and then sketch their spontaneous expressions of happiness and enjoyment. He was particularly haunted by the problem of depicting Christ in art. He sought, up until the very eve of his death, to find the oldest and most authentic representation of Christ’s earthly form— studying in museums, Byzantine frescoes, and finally embarking on a trip to Jerusalem and the Near East. At the same time, his sketches for the Christ of his painting reveal a desire to incorporate the beauty of classical statuary into the representation of Christ’s visage.

Slowly but inexorably, driven by some dark inner force which bears the mark either of sainthood or demonic pride, Ivanov became obsessed with the idea that he must in fact be Christ in order to be worthy of depicting him. The “golden age of all-humanity” which his canvas was to announce now required “perfection in morality as well as art.” He immersed himself in reading the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. When Turgenev tried to show him some humorous drawings in the early forties, Ivanov suppressed his mirth and stared at them for a long time before suddenly lowering his head and repeating softly, “Christ never smiled.”¹¹⁰

The course of Ivanov’s subsequent religious quest brought a frenzied climax to the century-long search for direct new links with God. At the same time it gives a hint of the new paths into which prophetic impulses and messianic longings were shortly to be channeled. For, although he spoke longingly in 1845 of a need for links with a Christian Church linked to the apostolic age “when religion was not a corpse,”¹¹¹ he turned neither to the Orthodox Church that had attracted Gogol nor to the Roman Catholic Church that had won the allegiance of other Russians in Rome. Nor did he seek solace in some new form of inner devotion following the sectarian or pietistic tradition, as one might think from the title of his 1846 manuscript, Thoughts upon Reading the Bible. He turned instead to messianic patriotism, a position that had been implied in the general assumption that Russia was to provide spiritual salvation for all mankind. Ivanov was profoundly moved by a visit to the artist’s studio in December, 1845, which was made by Nicholas I during his trip to Rome. Ivanov became lost in a kind of fantastic eschatological chauvinism. Russia became “the last of the peoples of the planet.… The Messiah whom the Jews await and in whose second coming symbolic Christians believe is the Russian Tsar, the Tsar of the last people.”¹¹²

He borrows the language of occult masonry in speaking of “symbolic Christians,” the “elect (élu) of providence” and “all-wise rule” (premudroe tsarstvovanie). Humanity is about to enjoy “the eternal peace, which will be given to it by the great and final people.” Truth is to be “the basis of everything”; the artist, who is “the priest (zhrets) of the future of humanity,” will soon be superfluous, because there will be no conflict—or even any difference between the sexes. The Tsar will become “entirely equal to Christ in his high authority and belief in God” and will establish his authority “over the Slavic races” and

… then shall the prophecy be fulfilled that there shall be one kingdom and one pastor, for all surviving kings will ask his counsel in order to bring order to their governments in a manner befitting each separate nationality.

The Russian artist of today must speak

… in the Asian spirit, in the spirit of prophecy … like musicians going before a regiment all aflame, lifting men up and away from worry and grief to the finest moments of life through marvelous sounds.¹¹³

Thus, the theme of consecrated combat, so central to later militant Pan-Slavism, was given an early and exalted formulation. Like his friend, the poet Tiutchev, who had also seen messianic portents in Nicholas’ visit to Rome, Ivanov saw apocalyptical implications in the revolution of 1848 and hailed Nicholas’ stern repressive moves.

Deeply impressed that “the parabola of the bombs has missed my studio,” Ivanov set forth on a frenzied secret project to found a new academy for a consecrated army of “public artists.” Their shrine was to be a temple to “the golden age of all humanity,” which was to be built in Moscow “on that very spot where the fate of Russia was resolved by the speech of Abraham Palitsyn.”¹¹⁴ The temple, in turn, was to be dominated by a vast fresco, one half of which was to show the Holy Lands as they appeared in Christ’s lifetime, the other to show the Holy Lands as they now appeared, with Nicholas I in the center as the form taken by the Messiah in His second coming.¹¹⁵ Apparently believing that his project would gain the approval of the Tsar, he made some 250 sketches for murals and icons, including events from secular history and mythology along with sacred subjects.

If the idea of the temple represents a final flight of fantasy, the murals themselves show a deep relation to the problem that had haunted him since beginning his “Appearance of Christ to the People”: how can one depict the perfection of Christ in the world of imperfect men? All the murals were to be built around a monumental series portraying the earthly life of Christ. Under the influence of David Strauss’ Life of Christ, which he first read in French translation in 1851, he began to conceive of Christ primarily as a human being, whose story of heroism and suffering had been needlessly complicated and etherealized by the historic churches. Abjuring all traditional models for representing the life of Christ, Ivanov’s starkly original sketches show a lonely figure passing through real suffering, cruelty, and indifference. There is no trace of sentimentality or artificial adornment. Christ emerges as an almost totally passive figure surrounded by mobs of people and phalanxes of pharisees, with the scourging and crucifixion treated in particular detail. In only two of the 120 scenes in the published version of the series is there any real animation on the face of Christ. In the wilderness, when he is being tempted by the devil, Christ is seated facing straight ahead in the manner of Christ enthroned on the icons, but he is looking nervously at Satan out of the corner of his eye. In the last picture, which shows Christ on the cross, he is looking straight ahead at the viewer with a weird and piercing look that bespeaks less physical suffering than some terrible unspoken doubt about himself.¹¹⁶

Ivanov recognized that he was plunging on to something entirely new. He insisted that the murals did not belong in any existing church and disavowed all links with the pre-Raphaelites, with whom he is often erroneously compared. He was, he insisted in 1857, the year of his visit to Strauss in Tübingen, attempting to “unite the techniques of Raphael with the ideas of the new civilization.”¹¹⁷ He wrote to Herzen (who like Gogol before him and Chernyshevsky after him was attempting to enlist support for his efforts) that he was “trying to create a new path for my art in the sketches,” and later confessed that “I am, as it were, leaving the old mode of art without having any bedrock for the new.”¹¹⁸ In 1858 he set off, after twenty-eight years of absence, for St. Petersburg to exhibit at last his “Appearance of Christ to the People” and to solicit the support of the new Tsar for his temple. Disappointed by public indifference upon arrival and exhausted morally and physically by his strange quest, Ivanov died only a few days after the first showing of his work in St. Petersburg.

Ivanov’s “Appearance of the Messiah” must be judged as a failure by almost any standard. The corrupt figures in the foreground dominate the picture and seem totally indifferent to the distant figure of Christ, who seems strangely insignificant and almost unrelated to the picture. The much-labored face of Christ lacks any clearly defined characteristics and conveys an expression of weakness and even embarrassment.

It is perhaps fitting that this final artistic legacy of a monumental and prophetic age should be dominated by the figure of John the Baptist, who stands at the center of the canvas as its most majestic personality. The day of John the Baptist had been the most elaborate official holiday of Russian higher masonry. Chaadaev had encouraged Russians to believe that “great things have come from the desert” and had written on the title page of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that “I am not the savior, but he who announces his coming.”¹¹⁹ Ivanov had tried first to create and then to become Christ, but he had left behind only sketches of human suffering and a noble failure dominated by the ascetic prophet who can do no more than announce that someone mightier is coming.

John the Baptist was known in Russia as “the forerunner” (predtecha), a designation that seems particularly appropriate for Ivanov. His vision of universal Russian rule aided by “public artists” and adorned with “temples of humanity” seems at times like an anticipation of Soviet ideology. His initial stylistic experimentation anticipates the emancipated search for new art forms in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. His final realism and preoccupation with suffering helped usher in the bleak, semi-photographic style that was to dominate painting until the 1890’s. Nonetheless, for all his qualities as a prophet and precursor, Ivanov stands at the end rather than the beginning of an age. His life and work represent a final heroic effort to attain a kind of moralistic self-transformation into the likeness of Christ.

Ivanov’s failure to find a new religious philosophy—or a philosophical religion—represents the frustration of a pursuit that had begun in higher order Masonry. Higher order Masonry was known to its adepts as the “royal art”;¹²⁰ and the prophetic artists of the Nicholaevan era had sought to find the art forms for the new kingdom. But no one was yet sure what kind of a kingdom it would be, and artists tended to become either haunted by the God they had lost or driven to madness in pursuit of His inner secrets. Ivanov’s failure only posed in more dramatic terms the nagging question that Herzen had asked as early as 1835:

Where is our Christ? Are we students without a teacher, apostles without a Messiah?¹²¹

In their anguish, thinkers of the late Nicholaevan era looked for a messiah almost everywhere: in the person of Nicholas I (Ivanov), the holy wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, suffering Poland (Mickiewicz), the Ukrainian peasantry (Shevchenko), or among the ascetic elders of the Optyna Pustyn (Kireevsky). The religious works of Gogol and Ivanov made Christ no longer appear to be a source of deliverance or tenderness. Ivanov’s picture of Christ as a lonely, suffering, and uncertain man was reflected and magnified in subsequent nineteenth century paintings: suffering predominating in the work of Ge, brooding loneliness in that of Kramskoy. The seductive thought that the aristocratic reformer himself might prove to be the messiah was suggested by Pleshcheev, the prophetic “first poet” of the Petrashevsky circle in the late forties, who exhorted that confused circle of reformers to “believe that thou shalt meet, like the Savior, disciples along the way.”¹²²

As if to clear the stage for new and less narrowly aristocratic movements, the brief period from 1852 to 1858 claimed the lives of a host of gifted figures of the Nicholaevan age: Nadezhdin, Chaadaev, Granovsky, Gogol, Ivanov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky. None of these were old men; but they had burnt themselves out like those who had died even earlier and at much younger ages: Venevitinov, Pushkin, Stankevich, Lermontov, and Belinsky. Out of their collective effort had come an art that was truly national and rich in prophetic overtones. Khomiakov, who was himself to die in 1860, wrote the epitaph for this chapter of Russian culture in a letter of 1858 on the occasion of Ivanov’s death:

He was in painting what Gogol was in writing and Kireevsky in philosophy. Such people do not live long, and that is not accidental. To explain their death it is not enough to say that the air of the Neva hangs heavy or that cholera enjoys honorary citizenship in Petersburg … another cause leads these laborers prematurely to the grave. Their work is not mere personal labor.… These are powerful and rich personalities who lie ill not just for themselves; but in whom we Russians, all of us, are compressed by the burden of our strange historical development.¹²³

The Missing Madonna

THE WANING of classical form in art and life was one of the many fateful results of the reign of Nicholas I. His official ideologists—Uvarov and Pletnev—had found the literary heritage of classical antiquity largely incompatible with the new doctrine of official nationality. The continued loyalty of the aristocratic intellectuals to the distant world of classical antiquity and the neo-classical Renaissance became a sign of their estrangement from official ideology.

The most gifted creative figures of the late Nicholaevan period— Gogol, Ivanov, and Tiutchev—had gone to Rome in hopes of forging some kind of link between the awakening culture of Russia and classical antiquity. Slavophiles sought these links no less than Westernizers; Shevyrev’s lectures did much to introduce Russia to the wonders of classical literature. Herzen called his oath to avenge the Decembrists “Hanniballic.” Catherine was the “Semiramis” and St. Petersburg the “Palmyra of the North.” Most masonic lodges bore names from classical mythology, and there was an abundance of classical statuary, Latin and Greek anthologies, and classical captions and titles. A century of aristocratic poetry was in a sense framed by the figure of Homer. The first poem to enjoy real popularity was Fénelon’s continuation of the Odyssey, Télémaque, and the first important Russian epic poet, Kheraskov, was known as “the Russian Homer.” The most eagerly awaited poetic accomplishment in the late years of Nicholas’ reign (after the death of Pushkin and Lermontov) was Zhukovsky’s translation of the Odyssey. Both Skovoroda and Kireevsky were called “the Russian Socrates” by their followers.

Closely identified with classical antiquity in Russian eyes was the neo-classical Renaissance, which Russians also idealized. Belinsky’s sobriquet “furious Vissarion” was a conscious adoption of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Batiushkov built up a cult of the Italian Renaissance. Many lyric poets compared themselves to Petrarch, and “universal men” like Venevitinov likened themselves to Pico della Mirandola. The literary circles of the age looked for inspiration to the Neoplatonic mysticism of Ficino’s Academy.

The nostalgia which Russians began to feel even during this period for the measured form of Pushkin’s poetry and the broader vistas of Russian life under Catherine and Alexander bears tribute to the sense of lost opportunity which Russians were later to feel about this age. This was to remain the golden age of Russian letters, in which classical forms and Renaissance exuberance first struck real roots in Russian soil.

Perhaps the finest legacy of this vanishing neo-classicism was the rich supply of palaces, parks, and public buildings that had been built in most of the cities and many of the estates of Russia. There was a last flurry of building in this grand ensemble manner during the early years of Nicholas’ reign: the triumphal gate over the Tver entrance to Moscow from the St. Petersburg road; the Bolshoi Theater and Square in Moscow; the imposing complex around the Synod and senate building in one part of St. Petersburg (and around the library, theater, and university buildings in another); and the stately ring of library, cathedral, and government buildings around the great square in Helsinki, the new capital of Russian-occupied Finland. The building of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the refashioning of the surrounding square in St. Petersburg were the last of these monumental efforts. Henceforth the style was to be more eclectic and utilitarian, the architectural development of the great cities more piecemeal and haphazard.

The forty years of work on St. Isaac’s finally came to an end in 1858, the year in which Ivanov returned to die in St. Petersburg with his long-labored canvas. Ivanov’s painting and sketches failed to inspire painters to remain faithful to the “technique of Raphael” just as decisively as St. Isaac’s failed to encourage continued architectural allegiance to the neo-classical style of the past.¹²⁴

The highest symbol of the classical culture that the Russians longed to share and the quintessence of ideal beauty to their romantic imagination was Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. On exhibit in Dresden—an accustomed stopover point for Russians traveling by land to Western Europe—the painting inspired Russians to sigh for a world of “beauty and freedom! … the madonna of Raphael and the primitive chaos of mountain heights.”¹²⁵ Zhukovsky made frequent pilgrimages to the painting and wrote of it in the true romantic spirit:

Ah, not in our world dwells

The genius of pure beauty:

Only for a time it visits us

From the heights of heaven.¹²⁶

The painting became a kind of icon of Russian romanticism. A Russian visitor of the fifties wrote that after looking at the painting he was “deprived of all capability for thinking or talking about anything else.”¹²⁷ By that time, the painting had become an object of heated controversy as well as extreme veneration. Lunin cited it as a principal factor in his conversion to Catholicism;¹²⁸ Belinsky, moving in the opposite direction, felt obliged to condemn it as a mere aristocratic portrait:

She looks at us, the distant plebeians, with cold benevolence, fearful at one and the same time either of being dirtied by our looks or of bringing grief to us.¹²⁹

Herzen contended that the face of Mary revealed an inner realization that the child she held was not her own. Uvarov spoke of “the Virgin of Dresden” as if Dresden itself had been the site of new miracles.¹³⁰ Dostoevsky kept a large print of the painting over his writing desk as a symbol of the combination of faith and beauty which he hoped would save the world.

But the feeling was growing in the fifties that beauty in truth “dwells not in our world.” If men of Gogol’s and Ivanov’s talent could succeed only in depicting earthly suffering, perhaps there were no other worlds—or at least no other worlds that could be reached through art. Chernyshevsky, whose admiration for Gogol and Ivanov had helped lead him out of the seminary, began to cast doubt on the intrinsic merit of art in his Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality in 1855. It was only a short stride to Pisarev’s declaration that a cook in St. Petersburg had done more for humanity than Raphael; to the slogan “boots rather than Raphael” (or in some versions, Shakespeare); and to the popular revolutionary legend that Bakunin had urged that the Sistine Madonna be pitched onto the barricades to keep the slavish soldiers of the old order from firing on his revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849.

The passion for ideas and the development of psychological complexes about certain names and concepts, though generally characteristic of European romanticism, was carried to extremes in Russia. Bakunin’s alleged fury at Raphael—like Belinsky’s earlier rage at Hegel—is more understandable in terms of passion than of intellect. There was an unhealthy compulsion about some of the Russian attachment to classical antiquity and an element of sublimated sexuality in the creative activity of the period. The prodigious and original careers of Bakunin and Gogol both seem to have been developed partially as a compensation for sexual impotence. There is, in general, little room for women in the egocentric world of Russian romanticism. Lonely brooding was relieved primarily by exclusively masculine companionship in the lodge or circle. From Skovoroda to Bakunin there are strong hints of homosexuality, though apparently of the sublimated, Platonic variety. This passion appears closer to the surface in Ivanov’s predilection for painting naked boys, and finds philosophic expression in the fashionable belief that spiritual perfection required androgyny, or a return to the original union of male and female characteristics. Ivanov in his preliminary sketches of the all-important head of Christ in his “Appearance” used as many feminine as masculine models. Gogol in his strange essay Woman compared the artist’s effort to “transform his immortal idea into crude matter” with the effort to “embody woman in man.”¹³¹

Women in romantic literature were often distant, idealized creatures, such as Schiller’s Maid of Orleans or his Queen in Don Carlos. In the relatively rare cases in Russian literature of this period where a woman was simple and believable—like Tatiana in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin—she tended to be venerated almost as a saint. Zinaida Volkonsky was a kind of mother figure to Gogol and Ivanov in Rome; and the suffering, faithful wives of the exiled Decembrists became a favorite subject for fanciful and idealized poems.

The aristocratic intellectual whose outlook was still primarily heterosexual was often just as deeply unhappy in his personal life. Just as he tended to be experimental and inconstant in his attachment to ideas, so he was in his relations with the opposite sex. Indeed, frustration in love was at times relieved by infatuation with an idea (and vice versa). Always the egocentric lover, he embraced both women and ideas with a mixture of passion and fantasy that made a sustained relationship almost impossible. Whether the object was a woman or an idea, the embrace tended to be total and intercourse almost immediate. Then came a fleeting period of euphoria after which the aristocratic intellectual resumed his restless search to find somewhere else the ecstasy that eluded him. His dreamy idealism was transferred en bloc to some new object of ravishment; and all that was venal or ungratifying was associated with the former partner. Thus, ideological attachments were often an extension of personal ones, and neither area of life can be fully understood without some understanding of the other.

But it would be irreverent and inaccurate to concentrate too narrowly on physiological factors. The Russian romantics of the period liked to express their plight in terms of Schiller’s Resignation. There were, according to the story, two flowers in the garden of life, the flower of hope and that of pleasure; and one cannot hope to pluck them both.¹³² The Russian aristocrats had no hesitation in choosing hope. Inconstant in faith and love—the other qualities that St. Paul had commended to the young church of Corinth —the anguished Russians held fast to hope. An implausible, impassioned sense of expectation was the most important single legacy of the aristocratic century to the century that lay ahead. Frustrated both personally and ideologically, the thinking elite of Russia sought with increasing intensity to find a prophetic message in history and art.

At the base of their plight lay not just a world-weary desire to “return to the womb” but also perhaps a subconscious nostalgia for the “other Russia” on which the aristocracy as a class had turned its back. They seemed almost to be feeling their way back to the dimly perceived, half-remembered world of Muscovy where belief was unquestioning and where truth was pronounced by the original prophetic historian and artist: the monastic chronicler and iconographer.

The missing Madonna was perhaps not that of Raphael, which they had never really known, but rather the Orthodox icon of the Mother of God. This icon stands at the center of a prophetic dream for which Tolstoy later sought an explanation from the elders of Optyna Pustyn. In the dream a single candle is burning in a dark cave before a solitary icon of the Mother of God. The cave is full of faceless people praying with lamentation that the time of the Antichrist has come; while Metropolitan Philaret and Gogol’s fanatical spiritual guide, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, stand trembling outside, unable to enter. The “fear and trembling” which Kierkegaard found missing from the complacent Christendom of nineteenth-century Europe is literally present in this dream—as it is in the ugly, shivering, naked old men that John the Baptist is trying to lead into the river Jordan in one of Ivanov’s best sketches,¹³³ and in the trembling, skeletal figure of Gogol being forcibly bled by leeches as he lay uncovered and trembling on his deathbed underneath an icon of the Virgin.

Father Ambrose explained to Tolstoy that the dream illustrates the plight of Christian Russia which “looks with lively feeling, sadness, and even fear on the sad state of our present faith and morality, but will not approach the queen of heaven and pray to her for intercession like those in the cave.”

When a trickle of intellectuals began to return to the Church in the late imperial period, one of the converts likened the process to an exchange of the Sistine Madonna for the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.¹³⁴ In both cases the missing God was feminine—linked not only to the Christian image of the Virgin but also perhaps to the “damp mother earth” of pre-Christian Russia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci of European romanticism.

The “Hamlet Question”

ALTHOUGH none of the “cursed questions” were fully answered in the “remarkable decade,” the debate now tended to take place within the framework of certain basic assumptions. Truth was to be found within rather than beyond history. Russia had some special destiny to realize in the coming redemption of humanity. A new, prophetic art was to announce and guide men to this destiny. The golden age “lay not behind us but ahead”: in a time when man’s Promethean labors will end and he will come to rest both physically and spiritually in eternal and ecstatic union with the elusive feminine principles of truth and beauty.

Within this vague romantic cosmology, however, the Russians pressed on relentlessly, seeking more complete answers. What was this truth, this destiny? Where was this feminine principle to be found? And, above all, what specific message does prophetic art bring to us?

Thus, however impractical their ideas may seem to the Western mind, the driving force behind Russian thought during this period was an essentially practical impulse to find more specific answers to these psychologically compelling questions. They were not interested in form or logic, which were part of the artificial “pseudo-classicism” of the eighteenth century. They were not afraid to seek truth in fantasies and symbols, though they were no longer fascinated with the occult for its own sake as in the Alexandrian age. The men of the “marvelous decade” wanted answers to the questions that arose inescapably, existentially, along the new path they had chosen. Any kind of inconsistency or idiosyncrasy was permissible as long as a thinker remained dedicated to “intelligence” in the prophetic spiritual sense in which Saint-Martin and Schwarz had understood the word; as long as they remained what their Schellingian and Hegelian professors had commended them to be: “priests of truth.”

In their heated desire to find answers for the “cursed questions,” the aristocratic intellectuals mixed fact, fantasy, and prophecy at every turn. They created a unique fusion of intense sincerity and ideological contradiction, which has been the fascination and despair of almost every serious chronicler of Russian thought. Though not an aristocrat, Belinsky, “the furious Vissarion,” epitomized this combination. The special authority which he—and his chosen ideological medium of literary criticism—came to occupy in the culture of the late imperial period is not understandable without appreciating the sense of human urgency that lay behind the Russian quest for answers. In a famous scene that became part of the developing folklore of the Russian intelligentsia, Belinsky refused to interrupt one particularly heated all-night discussion, professing amazement that his friends could consider stopping for breakfast when they had not yet decided about the question of God’s existence.

Belinsky was not at all embarrassed by his own contradictions and convolutions. He was not trying to transplant the clean, but remote categories of classical thought to the Russian scene—let alone the tidy, confining categories of timid bourgeois thinkers. “For me,” he wrote, “to think, feel, understand, and suffer are one and the same thing.”¹³⁵ Books casually received in the West drove him and his contemporaries into intense personal and spiritual crises. They were pored over by Belinsky and other literary and bibliographical critics for hints of the “new revelation” and prophecy that Schelling and Saint-Martin had taught them to look for in literature.

Belinsky was particularly concerned with discovering among his Russian contemporaries examples of the new prophetic art his teacher Nadezhdin had insisted lay beyond both classicism and romanticism. The great Russian novels of the sixties and seventies can be considered examples of such art, and it is impossible fully to understand the genius of those works without considering how it was influenced by, and responsive to, the traditions of philosophic and critical intensity pioneered by Belinsky.

The Russians looked to literature for prophecy rather than entertainment. There is almost no end to the number of Western literary influences on Russian thought. They range from inescapable ones like Schiller, Hoffmann and George Sand¹³⁶ to all-but-forgotten second-rate figures like Victor-Joseph Jouy, whose depiction of Parisian life was transposed to St. Petersburg and given new intensity by Gogol.¹³⁷ Perhaps the most important of all was Sir Walter Scott, whom Gogol called “the Scottish sorcerer,” and whose works inspired the writing of history as well as of historical novels.¹³⁸ Pseudo-medieval romances helped give an active, historical cast to the “spiritual knighthood” of higher order Masonry. Russians dreamed of being “a knight for an hour,” to cite the title of a famous Nekrasov poem; or of recreating the masculine friendship and implausible heroism of Posa and Don Carlos in opposing the authoritarianism of the Grand Inquisitor and Philip II in Schiller’s Don Carlos. They also identified themselves with the metaphysical quest of such favorite romantic heroes as Byron’s Cain and Don Juan, Goethe’s Faust and Wilhelm Meister.

But there was one literary character who seemed particularly close to the soul of the aristocratic century. He was the favorite stage figure of the “marvelous decade,” the subject of one of Belinsky’s longest articles, and a source of unique fascination for modern Russian thought: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The romantic interest in the melancholy prince began in the eastern Baltic, on the gloomy marshes that divide the German and Slavic worlds. It was in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) that the “magus of the North,” Johann Hamann, first taught the young Herder to regard the works of Shakespeare as a form of revelation equal to the Bible and to use Hamlet as his basic textbook for this new form of symbolic exegesis.¹³⁹ Hamann was an influential pietist preacher, a student of the occult, and a bitter foe of what he felt to be the excessive rationalism of his neighbor and contemporary, Immanual Kant. If Kant’s influence was great, indeed decisive, on the subsequent development of Western philosophy, the immediate influence on ordinary thinking of men like Hamann was far greater, particularly in Eastern Europe. For better or worse, Kant’s critical philosophy never gained a serious hearing in Russia until the late nineteenth century, whereas Hamann’s quasi-theosophic idea of finding symbolic philosophic messages in literary texts became a commonplace of Russian thought.

By the time Herder moved east from Königsberg to Riga, Russia had already welcomed Hamlet as one of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage. Sumarokov started the Russian critical discussion of the tragedy with his immodest claim to have improved on the original by his garbled translation of 1747.¹⁴⁰ Whether or not Herder first imparted his fascination with the original version directly while in Russian-held Riga or only indirectly through his later impact on German romantic thought, Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.

The extraordinary popularity of Hamlet in Russia may have come in part from certain similarities to the popular drama about the evil Tsar Maximilian confronted by his virtuous son. But the principal reason for the sustained interest of the aristocracy lay in the romantic fascination with the character of Hamlet himself. Russian aristocrats felt a strange kinship with this privileged court figure torn between the mission he was called on to perform and his own private world of indecision and poetic brooding. By the early nineteenth century there seemed nothing surprising in a Russian aristocrat’s leaving his boat to make a special pilgrimage to “the Hamlet castle” at Elsinore. Standing on the Danish coast in the straits where the Baltic Sea moves out into the Altantic, this castle loomed up before Russian ships en route to Western Europe like a darkened and deserted lighthouse. Lunin paid a nocturnal visit to it at the beginning of his trip to Western Europe in 1816 that led him onto the path of revolution.¹⁴¹

Particular attention was always paid to the famous monologue “To be or not to be,” which posed for Russia the one “cursed question” that was—quite literally—a matter of life or death. The famous opening phrase was translated in 1775 as “to live or not to live”;¹⁴² and the question of whether or not to take one’s own life subsequently became known in Russian thought as “the Hamlet question.” It was the most deeply personal and metaphysical of all the “cursed questions”; and for many Russians it superseded all the others.

In the spring of 1789, when Europe was standing on the brink of the French Revolution, the restless young aristocrat Nicholas Karamzin was writing the Swiss phrenologist Lavater in search of an answer to the question of why one should go on living. There is, he complained, no real joy in living, no satisfaction in the knowledge of one’s own being. “I am—even my I is for me a riddle which I cannot resolve.”¹⁴³ Three years later, after extended wandering through Europe (including visits to Lavater and to a performance of Hamlet in Drury Lane Theatre),¹⁴⁴ he returned to write a story—not about the social and political turmoil that was convulsing the continent but about “Poor Liza,” who solves the riddle of being by ending her own life. The suicide of sensitivity—in protest to an unfeeling world— became a favorite subject of conversation and contemplation. Visits were frequently made by young aristocrats to the pond where Liza’s Ophelia-like drowning was alleged to have taken place. The lugubrious institution of Russian roulette was apparently created out of sheer boredom by aristocratic guards officers.

Radishchev was perhaps the first to turn special attention to Hamlet’s monologue in his own last work: On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, and resolved the question by taking his own life thereafter, in 1802. The last decade of the eighteenth century had already seen a marked rise in aristocratic suicides. Heroic suicide had been commended by the Roman Stoics, who were in many ways the heroes of classical antiquity for the eighteenth-century aristocrats. Although this “world weariness” was a Europe-wide phenomena and the Russian mirovaia skorb’ is an exact translation of Weltschmerz, the term skorb’ has a more final and unsentimental sound than the German word Schmerz. By the late years of the reign of Alexander I the high incidence of aristocratic suicide was causing the state grave concern and was used as an important argument for tightening censorship and increasing state discipline.¹⁴⁵

The rigid rule of Nicholas I did not, however, relieve Russian thinkers of their compulsive preoccupation with “the Hamlet question.” Indeed, it was this search for the meaning of life—more than ethnographic curiosity or reformist conviction—that inspired the turn to “the people” by Belinsky (and the radical populists after him). Belinsky felt that preoccupation with the cursed questions set his own time apart from that of Lomonosov and the confident, cosmopolitan Enlightenment:

In the time of Lomonosov we did not need people’s poetry; then the great question—to be or not to be—was solved for us not in the spirit of the people (narodnost’), but in Europeanism.¹⁴⁶

To the men of the “remarkable decade”—many of whom courted or committed suicide—Hamlet stood as a kind of mirror of their generation. As with so many attitudes of the period, Hegel was their indirect and unacknowledged guide. Hegel had associated the melancholy and indecision of Hamlet with his subjectivism and individualism—his “absence of any formed view of the world” or “vigorous feeling for life”¹⁴⁷—problems besetting any modern man who stands outside the rational flow of history as a proud and isolated individuum. This pejorative Hegelian term for “individual” was precisely the label that Belinsky adopted in his famous letter to Botkin rejecting Hegel. It is in the context of this strange struggle that Belinsky waged with Hegel—always accepting Hegel’s basic terminology, definitions, and agenda—that one must read Belinsky’s extended portrayal of Hamlet in 1838 as a true idealist dragged down by the venal world about him.¹⁴⁸

Belinsky was captivated not only by the quality of frustrated idealism in Hamlet but also by the intense way in which the part was played by Paul Mochalov. This extraordinary actor played the role of Hamlet repeatedly until his death in 1848, the last year of the “remarkable decade.” So popular did the play become that simplified versions began to be given in the informal theatricals presented by serfs seeking to entertain their landowners; and the term “quaking Hamlet” became a synonym for coward in popular speech.¹⁴⁹

Mochalov was the first in a series of great stage personalities that was to make the Russian theater of the late imperial period unforgettable. The remarkable feature of Mochalov’s acting—like that of Nizhinsky’s dancing and Chaliapin’s singing—was his ability to be the part. Just as later generations found it difficult to conceive of Boris Godunov without Chaliapin, or of The Specter of the Rose without Nizhinsky, so Russians of the forties could not think of Hamlet without Mochalov. The simple peasant, of course, always thought of Christ as he appeared on icons. Popular saints were “very like” the figures on icons, and the aristocratic hero felt impelled to become “very like” the figures on the stage. Stankevich confessed that he came to regard the theater as a “temple” and was deeply influenced in his personal patterns of behavior by watching Mochalov.¹⁵⁰

Turgenev used Hamlet as a symbol of the late-Nicholaevan generation of intellectuals in his famous essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” Having just created one of the most famous Hamlet figures in Russian literature in his first novel, Rudin, Turgenev now spoke of the contrasting but also typical Quixotic type: the uncomplicated enthusiast who loses himself in the service of an ideal, unafraid of the laughter of his contemporaries. Such figures were to become prominent in the Quixotic social movement of subsequent decades, but “Hamletism” remained typical of much of Russian thought. Indeed, many of Turgenev’s subsequent literary creations were to end in suicide.

The conflict of these two types is mirrored in the career of one of the most interesting thinkers of late Nicholaevan Russia: V. S. Pecherin. There seems a kind of poetic justice in the similarity of his name to that of Pechorin, Lermontov’s wandering and brooding “hero of our time.” For this real-life Pecherin was an even more peripatetic and romantic figure. He moved from philology to poetry, from socialism to Catholicism, to an English monastery, and finally to an Irish hospital, where he died in 1885 as a chaplain to the sick—a distant admirer and faint echo of the populist movement in Russia. Yet he was tortured throughout—not so much by the fear that his ideas were utopian as by gnawing uncertainty whether life itself was worth living. He had in his student days been driven to “the Hamlet question” by Max Stirner, whose lectures at Berlin inspired him to embark on one of the many unfinished trilogies of the Russian nineteenth century. The first part of this untitled drama is a weird apotheosis of Stirner’s idea that man can achieve divinity through his own uncaused act of self-assertion: suicide. The leading character (with the heroic Germanic name of Woldemar) not only kills himself but convinces his lover (with the spiritualized name of Sophia) to do likewise. “Sophia,” he tells her, “thy name means Wisdom, Divine Wisdom.… There is but one question: To be or not to be.”¹⁵¹

The second part of the trilogy, entitled The Triumph of Death, elaborates this theme with ghoulish delight, as King Nemesis watches the destruction of the entire world—announced by a storm, a musical chorus, and five falling stars representing the slain Decembrist leaders. The chorus in praise of death echoes some of the dark thoughts of Pushkin’s “Hymn in Praise of the Plague” and draws freely from both apocalyptical and romantic symbolism. Death appears as a youth on a white horse and is hailed as “the God of freedom, the God of striving.” Then the stage is cleared for one last monologue, which ends this second (and last) part of the trilogy. It is a song of the dying poet. “The poet,” says Pecherin, “is Don Quixote … (who) will save the fatherland … find the new world for us.” Then, in an ending that runs off into dots to indicate its incompleteness, the “dying poet” speaks of Russia as the land of “the brightening dawn” and says: “I shall pour forth abundant strength on Russia, and the steeled Russian knife …”¹⁵²

If “the Hamlet question” was never resolved by the aristocratic intellectuals, preoccupation with it nonetheless served to clear away secondary concerns. Indeed, the oft-ridiculed generation of “the fathers,” the romantic, “superfluous” aristocrats of the forties, in some ways did even more to tear Russian thought away from past Russian practices and traditions than the iconoclastic “sons,” the self-proclaimed “new men” of the sixties. The fantasy-laden romanticism of the Nicholaevan age swept away petty thoughts with the same decisiveness with which actors were swept off the stage in the last act of Hamlet or the final scene of The Triumph of Death. The passion for destruction which burst onto Europe in the late forties in the person of Bakunin was only the most extreme illustration of the philosophic desperation produced by the interaction of German ideas, Slavic enthusiasm, and the personal frustrations and boredom of a provincial aristocracy. Bakunin illustrates as well the transfer of the vision of a “brightening dawn,” of “abundant strength,” and “steeled knives” from the lips of a “dying poet” to the life of a living revolutionary. His volcanic career anticipated, and in some degree influenced, the proliferation of quixotic causes and crusades which swept through Russia during the eventful reign of Alexander II. All of these movements—Jacobinism, populism, Pan-Slavism, and variants thereof—elude the usual categories of social and political analysis and can be seen as parts of an implausible yet heroic effort to realize in life that which had been anticipated in prophecy but could not be realized in art: the final act of Pecherin’s play, the Paradiso of Gogol’s Poemà, the new icons for Ivanov’s temple.

One of the powerful if invisible forces driving Russian aristocrats to the “cursed questions” was the oppressive, inescapable boredom of Russian life. To Francophile or Germanophile aristocrats, Russia appeared as the immense and final province of Europe. Life was an unrelieved series of petty incidents in one of those indeterminate towns “in N province,” in which the stories of Gogol generally take place. Pent-up hysteria was released in prophetic utterance. Even in their travels Russians complained with Belinsky: “Boredom is my inseparable companion.”¹⁵³ They were impelled onward to question the value of life itself by the feeling expressed in the world-weary last lines of Gogol’s tragicomic “How the Two Ivans Quarreled”: “Life is boring on this earth, gentlemen.”

When a revolutionary social transformation finally came to Russia in the twentieth century, Stalin’s “new Soviet intelligentsia” sought to ridicule Hamlet as a symbol of the brooding and indecisive old intelligentsia. A production of Hamlet during the period of the first five-year plan portrayed the Danish prince as a fat and decadent coward who recites “To be or not to be” half-drunk in a bar.¹⁵⁴ A critic of that period went so far as to claim that the real hero of the play was Fortinbras. He alone had a positive goal; and the fact that he came from victory in battle to pronounce the final words of the play symbolized rational, militant modernity triumphing over the “feudal morality” of pointless bloodletting that had dominated the last act prior to his arrival.¹⁵⁵

Modernization under Stalin was to be far from a rational process, however; and the Russian stage was not to be dominated entirely by faceless Fortinbras figures. The aristocratic century left a legacy of unresolved anguish and unanswered questions that continued to agitate the more complex culture that emerged in the following century of economic growth and social upheaval.