Icon and Axe

ON TO NEW SHORES

The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

THE SEARCH for new forms of art and life in the midst of social dislocation, industrial development, and urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth century. The symbol of a ship at sea in search of another shore. The gradual turn to social thought during the late years of Nicholas I’s reign; the influence of moralistic French socialism; the Petrashevsky circle of the 1840’s; the transfer of hopes to Russia by Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and Michael Bakunin (1814-76) after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in the West. Railroads as a bearer of change and symbol of apocalypse in the countryside.

The ironic growth of revolutionary radicalism during the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II (1855-81). The spread of iconoclastic materialism among the younger generation, or “new men,” during the early 1860’s—the very period in which Alexander liberated the serfs and instituted trial by jury and a measure of provincial self-government. The turn toward prophetic extremism in the 1870’s: the rise in Moscow of reactionary Pan-Slavism based on Darwinistic ideas of struggle for survival; and in St. Petersburg the rise of revolutionary populism based on a Proudhonist idealization of “the people” and a Comtian religion of humanity.

The peculiar genius of art in the age of Alexander II, seeking both the remorseless realism of the materialistic sixties and the idealization of the Russian people of the visionary seventies. The painting of “the wanderers,” the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88); the music of the Russian national school, particularly the great historical operas of Modest Musorgsky (1839-81); and the psychological novels of Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-81) with their dramatic penetration “from the real to the more real” and their ideological efforts to overcome the schisms in Russian life and consciousness.

Chekhovian despair of the period of “small deeds” during the reign of Alexander III (1881-94). The inability of either the reactionary Orthodoxy of Alexander’s tutor, Constantine Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), or of the unorthodox anarchism of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) to provide effective leadership in late imperial Russia. The emergence amidst the accelerating tempo of life in the 1890’s of three new perspectives that broke with the prevailing atmosphere of subjectivism and despondency as well as with the parochialism of previous ideologies. Constitutional liberalism at last took root in Russia, producing an articulate spokesman in Paul Miliukov (1859-1943) and a Constitutional Democratic Party. Dialectical materialism commanded attention through the writings of George Plekhanov (1856-1918), the increased intellectual interest in problems of economic development, and the formation of a Marxist, Social Democratic Party. Mystical idealism received from Vladimir Solov’ev (1853-1900) a brilliant new apologia, which provided the basis for a revival of Russian poetry and a long-delayed development of formal philosophical study within Russia.

WITH THE DEATH of Nicholas I, defeat in the Crimean War, and the preparations for peasant emancipation, the realization rapidly grew in the late 1850’s that Russia was heading for profound changes. The English and French ships which brought troops to Russian soil during the Crimean War did not disrupt Russian culture nearly so much as the new techniques and ideas that streamed in peacefully after the Treaty of Paris. For the reign of Alexander II saw not just another case of cautious contact with “guile from beyond the seas” but the beginnings of a massive, irreversible process of modernization. With the freeing of the serfs, the new incentives for foreign investment, and the beginnings of industrialization, Alexander II cut Russia off forever from its static, agrarian past. But neither he nor anyone else was able to determine exactly what form of society and culture the modernizing empire would adopt.

The dividing line that falls across Russian history in the mid-nineteenth century is distinct from all the many others which set off periods of insularity from those of Westernization in Russian history. For the innovations that began seriously in Alexander’s reign involved the entire nation and not merely selected regions and groups. Industrialization and urbanization—however fitful and uneven in development—altered the physical surroundings and social relations of the Russian people in a profoundly disturbing manner. Up until this, the last century of Russian history, all developments in thought and culture were concentrated in a small minority. The peasant masses had suffered on in silence and been heard from only in military campaigns, peasant insurrections, and sectarian movements.

The final conquest and colonization of all of southern Russia in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century had swollen the ranks of the peasant population; and the image of the steppe began to replace the more northerly image of the forest in the Russian imagination. There were two major forms that life took on the steppe; and both forms were reflected in the brutalized earthbound life of the average peasant. There was vegetable life, free from striving, passively accepting whatever nature sends. There was also the life of the predators—the insects, rodents, ponies from Mongolia, and grain collectors from the cities. Passive, vegetable existence was in many ways the peasant ideal; but many of the Russian peasants transformed themselves into predators through one of those metamorphoses in which peasant folklore abounds. Nothing was more brutal than the peasant who had become a landowner or state official. For he was a new and particularly hungry predator who knew the secrets of the vegetable kingdom: where the deep roots of the plants were kept, and how the silent vegetables managed to survive endless attacks from avaricious nomads. Many peasants secretly aspired to join the ranks of the predators; and when authority weakened or a prophet appeared, many seemingly happy vegetables suddenly turned into rabid animals. Many peasants went through the more peaceful form of metamorphosis which changed him into a wealthy peasant who came to be designated by the Russian word for “fist,” kulak.

The century since emancipation has seen this long-silent class slowly and reluctantly stream into the cities, and be transformed by modern culture. Behind this seething human drama looms, however, a nagging question which can again be expressed in terms of the older peasant folklore. Have the masses been lifted up from their previous animal and vegetable state? Or have these lower forms of life simply come to prevail over a higher, human culture that was, or might have been?

As more and more Russians became infected with the aristocratic spirit of inquiry, they turned to the question of how Russia might lift itself from the animal and vegetable life of the steppe to some loftier type of reality. In their anguished discussion, Russians of all persuasions tended to turn their metaphorical imagination to the image of a ship at sea. Just as the very coldness of the north had created a fascination with heat and fire; so the vastness and monotony of their land created a certain fascination with the water and those who voyage upon it.

Unlike Gogol’s enigmatic image of Russia as a flying troika, the popular image of Russia as a ship had clear roots in early Christian symbolism. The overwhelming majority of Russians in the mid-nineteenth century still felt secure in the “second ark” of the Russian Church, which reminded them that

just as a boat under the guidance of a pilot leads man across the stormy sea to the safe harbor, so does the Church guided by Christ save man from drowning in the depths of sin, and leads him to the heavenly kingdom.¹

The book of law and direction for the Church was known as the “Pilot Book”; and most major monasteries were located on islands or peninsulas, like Athos, best reached by boat. Most pilgrimages ended with sailor-priests piloting the faithful across bodies of water separating them from their shrine. The journey was sometimes dangerous—particularly the increasingly popular route on the pilot ships Faith and Hope across the stormy and ice-clogged White Sea to Solovetsk. In the years after the Crimean War, pilots on these ships were fond of telling pilgrims how the English warships had been unable to harm the monastery with artillery fire because God had miraculously sent flocks of seagulls into the path of their shells.² Old Believers derived new hope from Russian explorations across the northern Pacific, contending that a surviving remnant of Christ’s uncorrupted Church might be found on some island beyond the reach of Antichrist in the Pacific.³ Just as Avvakum’s first religious calling came to him in a youthful dream that God offered him a ship to pilot,⁴ so the flagellant sectarians spoke of their itinerant prophetic groups as “boats” led by “pilots” in search of converts whose robes of initiation were known as “white sails.”

Secular images of ships as symbols of hope blended with, and sometimes replaced, the religious image of the Church as ark of salvation. In the Russian north, legends arose about the mythical origins and special personalities of ships, which were often launched with songs of invocation:

Water-maiden

All-providing river!

… Here is thy gift:

A white-sailed bark!⁵

In the south, ships along the Volga were associated with the free life of the Cossacks; and the favorite form of popular variety show was known as lodka, or the bark. Many of its songs and traditions were absorbed into popular folklore about the Volga, and the popular productions of the naval theater.⁶

For the troubled aristocracy the image of Russia as a ship had long ceased to be a comforting one. Magnitsky likened the Russia of Alexander I to “a ship without a rudder, moved about by every gust of wind”;⁷ and Alexander’s former tutor, La Harpe, darkly warned that “we are passengers in the boat of revolution. We must either reach the shore or sink.”⁸ Not long before committing suicide, Radishchev likened the old order to “a ship hurled on the reef,” and helped turn the aristocratic imagination away from the image of the ship to that of the sea itself. History, he declared, is moving into “a wild watery abyss … into an ocean where neither boundaries nor banks can be seen.”⁹ Lunin later likened his thoughts to “storms at sea”;¹⁰ and Turgenev compared the romantic flight abroad under Nicholas to the original search of the Eastern Slavs “for leaders among the Varangians from across the seas.” Alienated from Russian soil, “I flung myself head first into the ‘German sea’ which was destined to cleanse and renew me.”¹¹

With the revolution of 1848, the “German sea” became a “maddening tumult of waves” for the poet Tiutchev, whose haunted counter-revolutionary writings likened Russia to “a giant granite cliff” providing Europe with its last “solitary rock of refuge” against engulfment by revolution.¹² At the other end of the political spectrum, Herzen looked not back to this rock but on to “the other shore” that lay beyond the tides of 1848. His famous post-mortem on the events of that year, “From the Other Shore,” began with a plea to his son not to remain “on this shore”:

Modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus, only builds a bridge—it will be for the unknown man of the future to pass over it.¹³

Herzen hoped with his friend Proudhon that a new world might be found in which all past suffering would “appear like a magic bridge cast in the river of forgetfulness”;¹⁴ but he was haunted by the fear that any bridge to the future could only be built—like those of St. Petersburg itself—out of human suffering.

Only in the next student generation after Herzen’s, among the “new men” of the early years of Alexander II’s reign, were Russians willing to cut themselves loose from traditional moorings and familiar landmarks. Modest Musorgsky, the greatest musician of the age, sounded the call:

To unknown shores, must be our cry, fearless through the storms, on, past all the shallows.… On to new shores, there is no turning back.¹⁵

Populist revolutionaries journeyed “down by mother Volga” hoping to summon up the insurrectionary tradition of Razin with such chants as:

Our bark has run aground.

The Tsar, our white helmsman, is drunk.

He has led us straight upon the shoals.

… Let us speed it on its way,

And throw the masters into the water.¹⁶

At its purest, the quest of young Russia was that of Dante, who had used the same metaphor at the beginning of his Purgatorio:

The frail bark of my ingenuity lifts its sail

In order to course over better waters

And leave behind so cruel a sea.¹⁷

The Russians plunged on oblivious of the prophetic warning that Dante placed at the beginning of his Paradiso:

O you, who sit within a frail bark …

Turn back to gaze upon your native shores:

Do not set out upon the deep:

Lest, in losing me, you should be altogether lost.

The waters that I take were never sailed before.¹⁸

At its simplest, the image of plunging out into the deep was only a reflection of the fact that Russia had at last become in the early nineteenth century a thoroughly sea-conscious empire. The Pacific Ocean and the Black Sea offered a host of new outlets for oceanic trade and travel; regular steamship service was opened into St. Petersburg in the 1830’s; and Goncharov’s famous account of a sea voyage to Japan in the 1850’s, Frigate Pallada, opened up a new genre of sea adventures to the Russian reader.¹⁹

Uncertain of where they were going, anxious to find out who they really were, the increasingly uprooted intellectuals of the late imperial period came to discover many levels of meaning in the sea. It was for some a symbol of purity and renewal: Keats’ “moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.” For others, the ocean was the symbol of romantic liberation: Byron’s “glad waters of the dark blue sea” in which thoughts were “boundless” and souls were “free.”²⁰

An increasingly important symbolic meaning for the sea in late-nineteenth-century Russia was that of the “silent stranger,” the faceless peasant masses: the narod. The relatively privileged intellectuals looked fearfully upon the peasantry as a “churned-up sea,” the title of Pisemsky’s widely read novel of 1863; and upon themselves in the way Herzen had described the Winter Palace, as

a ship floating on the surface of the ocean [having] no real connection with the inhabitants of the deep, beyond that of eating them.²¹

The populist movement represented a self-denying, penitential effort to establish some other connection. Aristocratic leaders of the movement cried forth their desire to reject “the Divine Raphael” and “immerse themselves in the ocean of real life,”²² “to drown in that grey, rough mass of the people, to dissolve irrevocably.…”²³ Young activists went almost eagerly to prison or death for the futile populist cause, less in the manner of modern revolutionary technicians than of brooding romantic heroes.

Imperceptibly the image of the sea became that of self-annihilation: the death wish for the “German sea,” the harmony beyond death in Wagner’s Tristan; the beckoning abyss of Novalis’ Hymns to the Night, in which “Memory dissolves in the cool shadow-waves.”²⁴ This romantic longing for self-annihilation was related to an older, Oriental ideal of finding the peace of Nirvana by the annihilation of will, by losing oneself like a drop in the ocean. Schopenhauer, the most profound apostle of the futility of striving and the wisdom of suicide, drew inspiration from the Orient, as did Tolstoy, one of his many Russian admirers. Russia’s other novelists of the Alexandrian period also give many literary reflections of Schopenhauer’s gloomy teaching. There is the death-wish figure of Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the heroic, ideological suicide of Kirillov in The Possessed. There is the suicidal double drowning which ends Leskov’s powerful novella of 1865: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Turgenev’s works abound in suicides;²⁵ and the influence of Schopenhauer is woven in with the image of the sea in such passages as the darkly prophetic dream of his revolutionary heroine, Elena, just before the hero dies in On the Eve. This novel, which was finished in the same year as Wagner’s Tristan and its strange, symbolic Liebestod, begins with Elena imagining herself drifting across a lake

in a boat with some people that she did not know. They were silent and sat quite still. No one was rowing the boat, which moved of its own accord. Elena was not feeling frightened, but she was bored; she wanted to know who these people were and why she was with them.

Out of this boredom and confusion comes a revolutionary upheaval:

She looked around and as she did so, the lake grew wider, the banks disappeared; and now it was no longer a lake, but a heaving sea; Elena’s unknown companions jumped up, shouting and waving their arms.… Elena recognized their faces now; her father was among them. Then a sort of white hurricane burst upon the waters.

Thus, the aristocracy itself was being consumed. In an effort to chart the course that lay beyond, Turgenev turns the water into “endless snow,” moves Elena from a boat to a sleigh, and gives her a new companion: “Katya, the little beggar-girl she had known years ago.” Katya is, of course, a prototype of the new populist saint: a “humiliated and insulted” figure who retains nonetheless inherent nobility and imparts to the aristocratic Elena the ideal of running away from established society to “live in God’s free world.”

“Katya, where are we going?” Elena asks; but Katya, like Gogol’s troika and Pushkin’s bronze horseman, does not answer. Instead, traditional symbols of messianic deliverance race before her eyes in the last sequence of the dream:

She looked along the road and saw in the distance, through the blown snow, the outlines of a city with tall white towers and silver-gleaming cupolas. “Katya, Katya, is that Moscow? But no,” she thought, “that’s not Moscow, that is the Solovetsk monastery”; and she knew that in there, in one of its innumerable narrow cells, stuffy and crowded together like the cells of a beehive—in there Dmitry was locked up. “I must free him.”

Liberation comes, however, only in death; and, at this very moment, “a yawning, grey abyss suddenly opened up in front of her.” The sleigh plunged into it, and Katya’s last distant cry of “Elena” proved in reality the voice of her Bulgarian lover, Insarov, the “true Tsar” of the new Russia, its would-be revolutionary deliverer, saying “Elena, I am dying.”²⁶

In the metaphysics of late romanticism, death offers a kind of liberation; and the sea appears more as a place for obliteration than purification. Suggestions of such thinking are present even in Christian thinking. The Spanish martyr and mystic Raymond Lully (one of the most popular of medieval Western writers among Russians) had proclaimed “I want to die in an ocean of love”;²⁷ and Dante’s Paradiso had likened the peace of God to “that sea toward which all things move.”²⁸

In Chekhov’s “Lights,” the night lights of a half-finished railroad by the sea are likened to “the thoughts of man … scattered in disorder, stretching in a straight line toward some goal in the midst of darkness” leading the narrator to look down from a cliff at the “majestic, infinite, and forbidding” sea:

Far below me, behind a veil of thick darkness, the sea kept up a low angry growl.… And it seemed to me that the whole world consisted only of the thoughts straying through my head … and of an unseen power murmuring monotonously somewhere below. Afterwards, as I sank into a doze, it began to seem that it was not the sea murmuring, but my thoughts, and that the whole world consisted in nothing but me. Concentrating the whole world in myself in this way, I … abandoned myself to the sensation I was so fond of: the sensation of fearful isolation, when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. It is a proud, demonic sensation, only possible to Russians, whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as their plains, their forests, and their snow.²⁹

An artist rather than a metaphysician, Chekhov looks in the end to “the expression on the face” of the thinker rather than to the logical conclusion of his thoughts. The hero of “Lights” contemplates rather than commits suicide; just as Chekhov himself moves from the melodramatic suicide at the end of his first great play, The Sea Gull, through an unsuccessful suicide in Uncle Vanya, to the elegiac beauty of his last play, The Cherry Orchard, in which there is no attempt at suicide—or any other form of escape from the lingering sadness of late Imperial Russia. Nonetheless, Chekhov’s fascination with what he was the first to call “the Hamlet question” helped keep thoughts of suicide before his audiences.

To some extent drowning was a romantic imitation of Ophelia in Hamlet or of the real-life Byron. But drowning had also been an important form of ritual execution in Old Russia. Pre-Christian beliefs had survived about the need to propitiate jealous water spirits. Perhaps the missing madonna was really a rusalka, one of those transformed figures of drowned women who became a kind of enchanted Rhine maiden in the florid pagan mythology of Russian romanticism. Perhaps also somewhere at the bottom of a lake lay a purer existence than existed on land—perhaps the “shining city of Kitezh” which was said to have descended uncorrupted to the bottom of a trans-Volga lake at the time of the first Mongol invasion.

A final symbol increasingly connected with the sea in the late imperial period was that of the coming apocalypse. Belief in a past or coming flood is one of the oldest and most universal ways in which man’s poetic imagination has expressed his fear of divine judgment and retribution.³⁰ There may be traces of the Eastern myth of “an insatiable sea” seeking to inundate all humanity in the belief among Old Believers in the Urals that a great flood was coming and that God’s people must flee to the mountains, where alone they could be rescued by God.³¹

Fear of the sea was perhaps to be expected among an earthbound people whose discovery of the sea coincided with their traumatic discovery of the outside world. The fact that the westward-looking capital of St. Petersburg was built on land reclaimed from—and periodically threatened by—the sea gave special vividness to the Biblical imagery of the flood. The occurrence of the first important flood of the city in 1725, the very year of Peter’s death, encouraged those who had resisted Peter’s innovations to speak of a “second flood” and the coming end of the world. Belief that these calamities represented the wrathful judgment of God was encouraged by the curious fact that two of the greatest subsequent floods of the city occurred almost exactly one hundred and two hundred years later, at the very times when two other imperial innovators had just died: Alexander I and Lenin respectively. In both subsequent cases, the death and flood occurred at the end of periods of hopeful expectation and brought more prosaic, repressive forces into power: Nicholas I and Stalin. Thus, the rich historical imagination of Russia found portentous omens lurking behind these strange coincidences.

Particularly after Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman,” the image of a flood consuming St. Petersburg recurs frequently in the literature of the late imperial period. Whereas fire was the enduring fear and symbol of judgment in the wooden world of Moscow, the sea provided such a symbol for the city on the Neva.

The man who perhaps did most to bring Russia both visually and imaginatively in contact with the sea in the late nineteenth century was the gifted and prolific painter Ivan Aivazovsky. Born by the sea in the Crimea in 1817, Aivazovsky was fascinated by the sea and ships throughout the eighty-three years of his life. As a favored painter for the St. Petersburg academy, he traveled widely during the Nicholaevan era, and became a personal friend of its most gifted creative figures: Glinka and Briullov, Ivanov and Gogol. While visiting the latter two in Rome during the early 1840’s, he sold one of his early canvases to the Vatican—on the appropriately romantic subject “Primitive Chaos.” He followed one of Ivanov’s early leads by painting numerous scenes of the idealized Italian sea coast and has been credited with introducing sea painting to Italy and influencing the work of Joseph Turner.

Almost all of his more than five thousand paintings were scenes of the sea, and, particularly after his return to Russia, the majority showed either violent storms or battles. Following the tradition of Briullov and Ivanov, Aivazovsky painted his major works on a gigantic scale, many of them well over fifty feet in width. The sheer size of the sea in his canvases creates a sense of human insignificance both for the figures tossed upon it in the picture and for those looking at it in the gallery. His most influential paintings were his largest and most dramatic: “The Storm,” which shows a ship sinking and a lifeboat bobbing in the midst of a vast panorama of contrasting light and darkness; and “The Ninth Wave,” which lends a kind of incandescent glory to the last wave of the final flood predicted in the Book of Revelation.

Despite continuing success and popularity Aivazovsky remained consumed by romantic wanderlust throughout his life. In his last months he was contemplating another sea journey in search of new inspiration; but he died in 1900 while working on his last canvas, “Destruction of a Turkish Warship.” Just as poets had often sought to express themselves in painting during the age of Lermontov, so did this last leaf on the tree of Russian romanticism sometimes turn to poetry to express his feelings:

The great ocean heaves beneath me.

I see the distant shore,

The magic regions of a sunlit land:

With agitation and longing, thither do I strive.³²

In his later years Aivazovsky, like so many romantics, became intensely nationalistic. He dreamed of a glorious series of Russian naval victories, which he hoped to record on canvas—just as Briullov had once envisaged designing murals of Russian military victories. Russian victories in the new century were, of course, to lie in other directions; and Soviet strategists were to transform the Russian navy from a somewhat futile surface fleet to a somber submarine flotilla within half a century of Aivazovsky’s death. Yet in the folklore of the new regime, two surface ships lived on as symbols of the revolutionary hopes of the new order: the battleship Potemkin, which mutinied briefly against tsarist authority during the Revolution of 1905, and the Cruiser Aurora, which provided perfunctory support fire for the Bolshevik insurrection of 1917. Thus, two ships became symbols of deliverance in the new Soviet ideology.³³ The symbol of creative culture in the Soviet period was, however, provided by a persecuted poet, Osip Mandel’shtam, who likened his verse to a message cast out in a bottle on the high seas by a drowning man in the hope of reaching some unknown distant reader.³⁴ Before setting out on those waters and scanning the new horizons of Soviet Russia, one must chart the course which Russian creativity followed across the troubled seas of the late imperial period.