Icon and Axe

1. Crescendo

THE REVOLUTIONS of 1917 occurred in the midst of a profound cultural upheaval which Bolshevism had not initiated and did not immediately curtail. Between the late 1890’s and the “great change” (perelom) effected by Stalin during the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), Russian culture continued to sputter and whir through what might be called its electric age.

Like electricity—which spread through Russia during this period— new currents of culture brought new energy and illumination into everyday life. The leading revolutionary rival of Lenin and Trotsky later complained of the “electric charges of will power” that they imparted in 1917; and those leaders in turn sought to move from power to paradise by defining Communism as “Soviet power plus electrification.” Many assumed that the bringing of light and energy to the intellect was equally compatible with Soviet power. Just as amber, long thought to be merely decorative, had revealed the power of electricity to mankind, so the theater was “destined to play the part of amber in revealing to us new secrets of nature.”¹ Just as raw electricity often ran wildly through new metal construction in the rapidly growing cities of early-twentieth-century Russia, so these new artistic currents broke through the insulation of tradition to jolt and shock the growing numbers of those able to read and think. As with electricity, so in culture it was a case of old sources for new power. Man had simply found new ways of unlocking the latent energy within the moving waters and combustible elements of tradition. Thus, the new, dynamic culture of this electric age was, in many ways, more solidly rooted in Russian tradition than the culture of the preceding, aristocratic era.

In poetry, the new symbolism soon gave way to futurism, acmeism, imaginism, and a host of unclassifiable styles. On the stage, the spirited ensemble work of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, the fiery impressionism of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, the “conditionalism” and “bio-mechanical” expressionism of Meierhold’s theater—all demonstrated an accelerating pace of life and exuberance of expression. In music, Stravinsky sounded the death knell of romantic melodic cliché with his cacophonous “Rite of Spring”; and Russia produced a host of new musical forms along with two of the relatively few figures whose pre-eminence in a given area of the musical stage has remained undisputed: the bass Chaliapin and the dancer Nizhinsky. In all phases of creativity there was an exhilarating new concern for form and a concurrent revulsion against the moralistic messages and prosaic styles that had dominated Russian culture for half a century.

Of all the art media, music was perhaps the determining one. Alexander Blok, the greatest poet of the age, spoke of escaping from calendar time to “musical time.”² Vasily Kandinsky, its greatest painter, considered music the most comprehensive of the arts and a model for the others. Chiurlionis, another influential pioneer of abstract painting, called his works “sonatas” and his exhibitions “auditions.”³ The “futurist” Khlebnikov, the most revolutionary of poets and self-proclaimed “chairman of the world,” broke up familiar words just as cubist painters broke up familiar shapes, seeking to create a new and essentially musical “language beyond the mind” (zaumny iazyk). Words, he contended, “are but ghosts hiding the alphabet’s strings.”⁴ The Moscow home of David Burliuk, where futurist poets and painters met, was referred to as “the Nest of Music.”

In prose, a new musical style was evolved and a new form of lyrical tale, “the symphony,” developed by the seminal figure of Andrew Bely.⁵ In the theater Meierhold’s fresh emphasis on the use of gesture and the grotesque was born of his belief that “the body, its lines, its harmonic movements, sings as much as do sounds themselves.”⁶

Even among the most puritanical and visionary of Marxist revolutionaries there was a curious fascination with music. Alexander Bogdanov, theoretician and leader of the remarkable effort to produce an integral “proletarian culture” during the Civil War, believed that oral singing was the first and model form of cultural expression, because it arose from man’s three most basic social relationships: sexual love, physical labor, and tribal combat.⁷ Bogdanov’s friend, Maxim Gorky—the proletarian realist among the aristocratic nightingales—dedicated his anti-religious Confession of 1908 to Chaliapin; and Lenin confided to Gorky that music provided a profoundly disturbing force even in his monolithic world of revolutionary calculation:

I know nothing more beautiful than the “Appassionata,” I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naïveté, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people’s heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal—it is a hellishly hard task.…⁸

The revolutionary events of 1917-18 in which Lenin played such a crucial role have a kind of musical quality about them. Mercier’s characterization of the French Revolution, “Tout est optique,”⁹ might be changed for the Russian Revolution into “Tout est musique.” In France there was a certain “demonic picturesqueness” in the semi-theatrical public execution of the King (on which Mercier was commenting) and in the aristocratic, neo-classical poet, André Chenier, stoically writing his greatest poetry in prison while awaiting execution. In Russia, however, there was no “Latin perfection of form”¹⁰ to the Revolution. The Tsar was brutally shot with his entire family in a provincial basement and their bodies mutilated in a forest, while poets from the old order, like Blok and Bely, wrote half-mystical, half-musical hymns to the Revolution in the capital, seeing in it, to cite Blok, “the spirit of music.”

Symbolic of these chaotic revolutionary years was the extraordinary institution of the Persimfans, an orchestra freed from the authoritarian presence of a conductor.¹¹ In the emigration, there sprung up the so-called “Eurasian movement,” which saw in the Bolshevik Revolution “the subconscious revolt of the Russian masses against the domination of an Europeanized and renegade upper class.” Leading Eurasians hailed the new Soviet order for recognizing that the individual man fulfilled himself only as part of the “higher symphonic personality” of the group; and that “group personalities” could alone build a new “symphonic society.”¹² A kind of icon was provided for artists of this period by the pre-revolutionary painting of the “suprematist” Casimir Malevich, “The Cow and the Violin,” which symbolized the vague hope that the agitated creativity of the violin might somehow replace the bovine contentment of bourgeois Russia.¹³ Even a future fighter for the old order like Nicholas Gumilev wrote a pre-Revolutionary poem bidding the artists of his age “look into the eyes of the monster and seize the magic violin.”¹⁴

Stringed instruments provide, indeed, the background music for this period of violent change: the gypsy violins of Rasputin’s sectarian orgies in imperial palaces, the massed guitars of fashionable aristocratic nightclubs, the unparalleled profusion of virtuoso violinists in Odessa, and the balalaikas which accompanied the popular melodies sung around campfires by both sides throughout the Civil War. The consolidation of Bolshevik power between the coup of November, 1917, and the peace of 1921 provides a kind of feverish crescendo to the music of runaway violins. The sound of “harps and violins” (the title of one of Blok’s collections of poems) began to fade soon thereafter, so that the later, Stalinist, revolution brought silence to the cultural scene from exhaustion as well as repression. The silence was broken only by prescribed ritual, communal chants and the grotesque merriment of collective farmers dancing at pre-arranged state festivals. The role of music in the Stalin era is typified by Alexis Tolstoy’s paean to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony as the “Symphony of Socialism.”

It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an accelerando corresponds to the subway system; the Allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the Union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and enthusiasm of the masses.¹⁵

The pendulum of history had swung back from the freedom and experimentalism of the electric age to the authoritarianism of the candle-lit past. Indeed, “the silence of Soviet culture”¹⁶ was all the more terrifying for its simulacra of sound.

The remarkable brief interlude of freedom that preceded a quarter century of Stalinist totalitarianism was dominated by three general attitudes: Prometheanism, sensualism, apocalypticism. These were preoccupations rather than fixed ideologies: recurring leitmotivs amidst the cacophony of the age, helping to distinguish it from the period immediately before or after. Each of these three concerns had been central to the thought of Solov’ev; each was developed to excess in the years following his death in 1900; each became suspect as Russia plunged back into a new “iron age” under Stalin.

Prometheanism

PARTICULARLY PERVASIVE was Prometheanism: the belief that man—when fully aware of his true powers—is capable of totally transforming the world in which he lives. The figure of Prometheus, the Greek Titan chained to a mountain by Zeus for giving fire and the arts to mankind, had long held a certain fascination for radical romantics. Marx had idealized this legendary figure; and Goethe, Byron, and Shelley had elaborated the legend in their writings. Now the Russians, as they plunged more deeply into the mythological world of antiquity, also turned admiring eyes to Prometheus. Merezhkovsky translated Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound; others read Prometheus und Epimetheus of the Swiss Nietzschean, Carl Spitteler, or La scommessa di Prometeo of Leopardi. Ivanov wrote a Prometheus of his own in 1918, and objects as far afield as a leading publishing house and a key musical composition of Scriabin bore the name Prometheus. Revolutionary admirers of Beethoven in Russia as elsewhere saw themselves as “creatures of Prometheus” and hailed the Prometheus theme in the last movement of their hero’s Eroica Symphony, in which Beethoven was thought to defy Christian doctrine about man by shouting “in a voice of thunder: ‘No, thou art not dust, but indeed the Master of the Earth.’”¹⁷

Russians of this period sought like Prometheus to bring fire and the arts to humanity. Thus, their interest in questions of form and technique did not, for the most part, create indifference to social questions, but rather excitement over the possibility of solving them with the alchemy of art. Moreover, increased interest in contemporary European culture did not imply indifference to Russian tradition. On the contrary, the amassing in Russia of unparalleled collections of contemporary French art and the popularization of a wide variety of contemporary Western art on the shimmering pages of The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) coincided with the rediscovery, restoration, and reproduction of icons and the development of a new, more spiritualized form of religious art by figures like Michael Nestorov.

The diversity of Russian culture in the late imperial period is exemplified by the three most widely discussed events in Russian culture during the last year before the outbreak of World War I: the first performance of Stravinsky’s ultra-modern, neo-pagan “Rite of Spring,” the opening of the first large exhibit of fully restored ancient icons and the “futurist tour” of a group of avant-garde poets and painters. The first event took place in Paris, the second in Moscow, and the third in seventeen provincial cities. But there was little sense of conflict. As in the golden age of Pushkin, Russians of the silver age sought answers that would be equally applicable for all mankind. The preceding age of Alexander II and III and the succeeding age of Stalin were far more parochial. Populists and Pan-Slavs under the Alexanders were interested mainly in the peculiar possibilities of Russia: just as Stalinists concentrated on “socialism in one country.” Populists, Pan-Slavs, and Stalinists all looked to the West primarily to learn from its natural scientists and social theorists. But Russian thinkers in this period looked at the full spectrum of Western artistic and spiritual experience.

With the enthusiasm of fresh converts, Russian artists saw in the newly discovered world of art something to be enjoyed for its own sake and exalted for the sake of all mankind. The term “Russian Renaissance,” which is sometimes used to describe the cultural activity of the early twentieth century, is appropriate in suggesting a similarity with the love of art and exaltation of human creative powers of the Italian Renaissance. Art offered Promethean possibilities for linking Russia with the West, man with man, and even this world with the next.

The exciting possibilities of creative art tended to lure many away from democratic socialism or liberalism which should perhaps have commanded the allegiance of the educated anti-authoritarian intellectuals. Nicholas Berdiaev, who had been interested in social democracy in the 1890’s, reflected the new indifference to piecemeal reformism when he said almost derisively of the representative Duma of 1906: “These Russian Girondists will not save Russia, for something great and important is necessary to accomplish such a salvation.”¹⁸ Creativity, he argued, was the only way in which the human spirit can free itself from “the prison” of ordinary life:

The idea behind every creative art is the creation of another way of life … the breaking through from “this world” … the chaos laden, distorted world to the free and beautiful cosmos.¹⁹

The “free and beautiful cosmos” of art seemed to offer new possibilities for harmonizing the discords of an increasingly disturbed world. The romantic idea so prevalent in the age of Pushkin that different art forms were all expressive of a common spiritual truth was revived and intensified.

The Ballet Russe represented a harmonious fusion of the scenic designs of Benois, Bakst, and Roerich, the music of Stravinsky, the dancing of Nizhinsky, the choreography of Fokin, and the guiding genius of Diaghilev. One artistic medium tended to flow into another. Futurism, the most bold and revolutionary of the new artistic schools, began in painting before moving into poetry.²⁰ The painter Vrubel drew much of his inspiration from poets; and his florid colors, in turn, inspired other poets. Briusov praised the “peacock sheen of outstretched wings” that Vrubel raised over the “desert” of contemporary life;²¹ and Blok, at Vrubel’s funeral, waxed lyrical over the color of his sunset:

As through a broken dam, the blue-lilac twilight of the world bursts in, to the lacerating accompaniment of violins and tunes reminiscent of gypsy songs.²²

Poetry in turn burst into song, most notably in the work of Blok. Before the Revolution, he had written a cycle of poems to tell “What the Wind Sings About”; and just after the coup of November he suggested in his famous “Twelve” that it was singing about the Revolution. Powerful, gustlike lines bring a Revolutionary band of twelve into wintry St. Petersburg. Then, the poet introduces the Revolutionary song traditionally played to the accompaniment of throbbing balalaikas:

No sound is heard from the city,

There is silence in the Nevsky tower,

And on the bayonet of the sentry

Glistens the midnight moon.²³

In Blok’s version, the last two lines are changed to suggest liberation rather than confinement:

And there are no more policemen—

Rejoice, lads, without need of wine!²⁴

Yet the unheard melody is still that of lamenting strings; and Blok came to look on his own poetic tribute to revolution with irony before his early death in 1921.

Blok loved painting and music, wrote plays, studied philology, discoursed with philosophers, and married the daughter of Russia’s greatest scientist, Mendeleev. As the greatest poet of a poetic age, he is, ex officio, one of its key cultural figures. But because Blok himself felt that music was closer than poetry to the spirit of the age, it is perhaps appropriate to use Alexander Scriabin, one of the greatest pianists and the most original composer of the age, as the main illustration of Russian Prometheanism.

Scriabin’s creative activity was inspired by Solov’ev’s mystical faith in divine wisdom and also by the international theosophic movement which had been launched by Mme Blavatsky, the teacher of Solov’ev’s elder brother and self-styled bearer of the hidden secrets of universal brotherhood and communion with the dead. The anniversary of her death, May 8, 1891, became known to her followers as White Lotus Day; and it was—among the intellectuals of the silver age—at least as well known as the socialist festival of May Day, which had been established by the Second International exactly a week before her passing.

Solov’ev and the symbolists saw in sophia a mystic union of the divine wisdom and the eternal feminine; and Scriabin sought to possess sophia in both senses through his art. “Would that I could possess the world as I possess a woman,”²⁵ he wrote, reverting to the obscure, but seductive language of Boehme so familiar to Russian mystics:

The world is in impulse toward God.… I am the world, I am the search for God, because I am only that which I seek.²⁶

Christ Dethroned

PLATES XVI-XVII

The nineteenth century’s increasing preoccupation with the purely human aspects of Christ’s personality manifested itself in Russian art in a particularly dramatic fashion.

Traditional iconography had displayed a serene but powerful Christ enthroned in triumph—resolving, as it were, the trace of anguish still noticeable in the face of his “precursor,” John the Baptist, who is reverently inclined toward him from the left-hand side of the central tryptich of the icon screen. In Ivanov’s long-labored “Appearance of Christ to the People” (Plate XVI), John the Baptist is the dominant, central figure; and the timid Christ is less noticeable than the worldly figures in the foreground.

By the end of the century, the somewhat artificial links that Ivanov and aristocratic Russia had sought to forge with the classical world of Rome (where he painted) and Raphael (whom he emulated) had given way to harsh, plebeian realism. Thus, the crucifixion of 1891 by Nicholas Ge (Plate XVII) is a bleak, purely human scene. This painting, which moved Ge’s friend Leo Tolstoy to tears, shows a wretched, wasted Christ, no longer capable of resurrection, let alone enthronement. To the left is no longer the iconographic John the Baptist pointing to the coming glory of God’s world, but only a thief whose frightened look suggests the self-centered pathos of a new, godless world.

Worse was yet to come in the twentieth century. Repin, in exile from Bolshevism in 1922, painted a crucifixion which showed only the two thieves, with Christ’s cross lowered and a wolf-like dog licking the blood of an altogether vanished saviour.

PLATE XVI

PLATE XVII

PLATE XVIII

PLATE XIX

Vrubel and the Devil

PLATES XVIII-XIX

The influence of Michael Vrubel (1856-1910) in late imperial Russia was almost as great on poets and composers as on experimental painters, for whom he had an impact that Naum Gabo likens to that of Cézanne on modern Western artists. Apprenticed in the restoration of church frescoes and mosaics, he soon turned from traditional religious subjects to the mystery of earthly beauty. From his early painting of “Hamlet and Ophelia” to his powerful illustration of Pushkin’s “Prophet,” Vrubel displayed his greatest power in portraying those figures from the pantheon of romanticism who in some way incarnated the proud beauty of his ultimate hero: the devil.

Beginning with a first sketch in 1885 and stimulated by a commission to illustrate a commemorative edition of Lermontov’s “The Demon” in 1890-1, Vrubel painted the devil in a variety of forms, and increasingly referred to “seances” with Satan himself. The two illustrations on the left show his first and last major efforts to depict Satan through a monumental oil canvas. “The Demon Seated” (1890; Plate XVIII) broke sharply with the prevailing artistic realism and provided the Silver Age with a brooding hero: the newly seated prince of this world replacing, as it were, the traditional “Christ enthroned” of the next. “The Demon Prostrate” (1902; Plate XIX, central part only) was completed in the year of Vrubel’s mental breakdown. The artist succeeds in suggesting the devil’s own mental anguish by distending the figure in a manner somewhat reminiscent of some Russian variants of icons of “Our Lady of Tenderness.” The swirling background reveals the influence of art nouveau and expressionism, and contrasts with the more controlled, semi-cubist backgrounds of the earlier “Demon.”

Scriabin appears as the consummate romantic, a kind of cosmic Novalis, conceiving of his art as “the last great act of fulfillment, the act of union between the male creator-spirit and the woman-world.”²⁷ His mysticism of endless desire flows, thus, with a certain logic out of the Iush Chopin- and Liszt-like melodies of his early piano works. Yet the complex orchestral works to which he soon turned show both technical inventiveness and a unique ability to express the inner aspirations of the age. There were essentially four musical stages in his late artistic-spiritual development: “The Divine Poem” of 1903, his third and last symphony; “The Poem of Ecstasy” of 1908; “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” of 1909-10; and his “Mystery,” which he had only begun at the time of his sudden death in 1915.

The “Divine Poem” depicted the ascent of humanity to divinity: the first movement represented the struggles, the second the sensual delights, and the last the “divine play” of the spirit liberating itself from matter. While composing the “Poem of Ecstasy” abroad, he met many socialists and proposed at one point to use the famous line from The International (“Arise ye wretched of the earth”) as the epigraph to his work.²⁸ Deliverance was to come, however, not from a revolutionary leader, but from a messiah who would unify the arts and provide mankind with a “new gospel” to replace the outmoded New Testament. Scriabin apparently viewed himself as a new Christ preaching from a boat in Lake Geneva and establishing close links with a radical Swiss fisherman named Otto: his St. Peter.²⁹

The language of his new gospel was to be even more unconventional than the iridescent “Poem of Ecstasy,” which still bore some musical resemblance to the tonal sheen of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner’s “music of the future” was enjoying great popularity in Russia at the turn of the century; and the new musical world of Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” has been described by one leading Russian critic as

a continuation and development of the grandiose, inspiring finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.… But … Wagner’s fire brings destruction. Scriabin’s, rebirth … the creation of that new world which opens up in the presence of man’s spiritual ecstasy.… His fundamental condition is ecstasy, flight. His element is fire.… Fire, fire, fire; everywhere fire. And accompanying it, the sounding of alarm bells and the ringing of invisible chimes. Awesome expectation grows. Before the eyes rises up a mountain breathing fire. “The Magic Fire” of the Wagnerian Valkyries is childish amusement, a cluster of glow-worms in comparison with the “consecrating flame” of Scriabin.…³⁰

The “consecrating flame” of Prometheus is provided by a totally new harmonic system. Among other features, Scriabin introduced the mystic chords of the flagellants into his music, just as Blok had ended his “Twelve” with the flagellant image of a returning “Christ” at the head of a “boat” of twelve apostolic followers. He also devised a correlation between the musical scale and the color spectrum, writing into the score chords of color to be projected through the symphony hall by a “keyboard of light,” a giant reflecting machine to be played like a toneless piano. Fascination with color was a particular feature of an age anxious to compensate for the grayness of early industrialization. Rimsky-Korsakov had independently conceived of correlating sound and color; and the rediscovery of the pure colors of the newly restored icons encouraged a new generation of painters to see in color itself many of the miraculous powers originally attributed to the icons. Vasily Kandinsky, who exhibited the first of his pioneering, non-representational paintings in 1910, the year of Scriabin’s “Prometheus,” insisted that “color is in a painting what enthusiasm is in life,”³¹ and that each color should start a “corresponding vibration of the human soul,”³² ranging from the total restfulness of heavenly blue to the “harsh trumpet blast” of earthly yellow.³³

In the last year of his life, Scriabin turned to the great work he hoped would unify the arts and lift man to the level of the gods. In the score for “Prometheus,” he had already insisted that the chorus wear white robes to emphasize the sacramental nature of the occasion. Now he began sketching out plans for a “Mystery” that was to involve two thousand performers in a fantastic fusion of mystery play, music, dance, and oratory. It was to be a “ritual” rather than music, with no spectators, only performers; the emission of perfumes was written into the score, along with sounds and colors, to provide a kind of multi-sensory polyphony; and the action was to begin in Tibet and end in England.³⁴ The fact that this “Mystery” could not be staged—or even clearly written out by Scriabin—was not held against him by artists of the silver age, most of whom agreed with Kandinsky that art is “the expression of mystery in terms of mystery.”³⁵ Humanity was not yet spiritually prepared for anything but mystery. A great cataclysm was needed to prepare humanity for the sublime ritual that would unify the good, true, and beautiful. The cataclysm came with the beginning of World War I, shortly after Scriabin had set forth the first plan (“initial act” he called it) for his “Mystery.” Scriabin died just a few months later.

The purpose of art was not to depict but to transform the real world for most artists of the age. In their desire to bring the most advanced art directly into life, they staged innumerable exhibits, concerts, and cultural tours throughout provincial Russia. A highlight perhaps occurred in the summer of 1910, when Scriabin’s complex tonal patterns were played on a boat floating down the Volga under the direction of young Serge Koussevitzky, wafting music out across the unresponsive and uncomprehending countryside.

This Promethean aristocratic art helped spur on a simultaneous revival of popular art, which in turn provided fresh stimulus for the restless avantgarde. The aristocracy developed fresh interest in ceramics, woodcarving, weaving, and embroidery as industrialization began to threaten them. Cottage industries and peasant crafts were given new encouragement by the provincial zemstvos; and a totally new form of musical folk poem, the harmonically complex chastushka, arose as a kind of grass roots equivalent to the new and more musical poetry of the symbolists.³⁶

Thus, it seems appropriate that much of the initial impulse toward creating a new experimental Russian art in Russia should come from the collective attempt of a small circle of artists to rediscover and recreate the artistic forms and craft techniques of Old Russia near Moscow on the estate of a wealthy railroad baron, Savva Mamontov.³⁷ In 1882 they began by designing, building, and decorating a small church in the early Novgorod style, and then turned to fashioning stagings for the first private opera company in Russian history, which Mamontov established in Moscow the following year.

Mamontov’s activities helped move the center of artistic gravity from St. Petersburg back to Moscow in the 1890’s. Even painters like Surikov and Repin, who had been trained in the dominant St. Petersburg traditions of realism and social significance drifted to Moscow and the Mamontov estate, portraying in their masterpieces of the late eighties and nineties early Russian historical subjects on a vast fresco scale and with a richness of color that became characteristic of Muscovite painting. In 1892 a wealthy merchant, P. M. Tret’iakov, donated his vast collection of Russian art to the city of Moscow, where a gallery bearing his name was established—the first ever devoted exclusively to Russian painting. Two other Moscow merchants, Serge Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, subsequently brought to Russia more than 350 French impressionist and postimpressionist paintings: the greatest collection of Western art since Catherine the Great’s massive importation of Rembrandts. Moscow became the major center inside Russia for experimental modern artists like Kandinsky, who made the city the subject of a number of his paintings.

Among the young painters in Moscow stimulated to fresh experimentation by the Shchukin and Morozov collections was Casimir Malevich, an artist in many respects even more revolutionary than Kandinsky. Like so many of the avant-garde, Malevich was influenced by a curious combination of primitive Russian art and the newest, most sophisticated art of the West. His development through a bewildering variety of approaches in search of the basic elements of painting illustrates the peculiar Promethean passion that became characteristic of experimental modern art in Russia. Like Kandinsky, Malevich soon left the world of recognizable people and objects for the fresh start of his “black square on a white ground” followed by his famous “white on white” series of 1918.

As Malevich’s art became more radical in form, it became more Promethean in purpose; for he sought to free the visual arts from “the tyranny of easel painting” and impose his new ideal forms on the wallpaper, the buildings, the plates—even the coffins—of the future. In what he called “my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of the objective world,” he and his followers attempted to found in the year of Scriabin’s death, 1915, an “art of pure sensation,”³⁸ which he called Suprematism and later “the art of the fifth dimension.”³⁹ The latter phrase, used at a time when Einstein’s fourth dimension was still known only to specialists, was no mere figure of speech. As he put it in one typical passage:

… man’s path lies through space. Suprematism is the semaphore of color.… The blue color of clouds is overcome in the Suprematist system, is ruptured and enters white, as the true, real representation of infinity, and is therefore freed from the colored background of the sky.⁴⁰

Thus even line and color, the last links which Kandinsky’s art enjoyed with the real world, are severed in Malevich’s doctrine. A reviewer described him as “a rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence”;⁴¹ and he himself insisted in a manifesto of 1922 that man

is preparing on the earth to throw his body into infinity—from legs to aeroplanes, further and further into the limits of the atmosphere, and then further to his new orbit, joining up with the rings of movement towards the absolute.⁴²

Malevich stands as a kind of artistic prophet of the space age, practical preparations for which were already being undertaken by Constantine Tsiolkovsky, a sickly, self-taught genius from the Russian interior. As early as 1892, he had written about the scientific feasibility of a journey to the moon, and in 1903 he began a long series of amateur cosmic probes with his own small-scale, jet-propelled ballistic appliances. “This planet,” he wrote, “is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend all one’s life in a cradle.”⁴³

Space tended to replace for twentieth-century Russia the symbol of the sea with all its symbolic overtones of purification, deliverance from the ordinary, and annihilation of self. The Russian Prometheans spoke no more of an ark of faith or a ship at sea, but of a new craft that would take them into outer space. After his “white on white” series of 1918, Malevich did not paint again for nearly a decade, producing instead a series of sketches for what he called an “idealized architecture”: future dwelling places for humanity bearing the name planity, from the Russian word for “airplane.” Malevich’s only serious rival for dominance of the artistic avant-garde in the 1920’s, Vladimir Tatlin, was ostensibly far more down to earth with his doctrine of utilitarian “constructivism” and his demand for a new living art of “real materials in real space.” But he too reflected this Promethean urge to move out and master that space. Increasingly, his three-dimensional constructions acquired an upward, winged thrust that seems to be tugging at the wires connecting them to earth. Tatlin spent most of the last thirty years of his life designing a bizarre new glider that looked like a giant insect and was called a Letatlin—a fusion of the Russian word “to fly” and his own name.⁴⁴

The first thirty years of the twentieth century in Russia was a period in which traditional terms of reference seemed largely irrelevant. As Leo Shestov, the philosopher and future Russian popularizer of Kierkegaard, proclaimed in his Apotheosis of Groundlessness in 1905: “Only one assertion has or can have objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible.”⁴⁵ Men believed in an earthly “world without end,” to cite the title of a Futurist anthology of 1912.⁴⁶ Followers of Fedorov continued to believe that the resurrection of the dead was now scientifically possible; Mechnikov argued that life could be prolonged indefinitely by a diet centered on yoghurt; and a strange novel of 1933, Youth Restored, by the most popular writer of the 1920’s, Michael Zoshchenko, offered a final Promethean reprise on the Faust legend by portraying an old professor who believes that he can restore his youth merely through the exercise of his will.⁴⁷

Beyond the five dimensions of Malevich’s art lay the seven dimensions offered by the philosopher, psychologist, and Oriental traveler P. D. Uspensky. Beginning with his Fourth Dimension of 1909, he provided new vistas for self-transformation: a completely internal “fourth way” which lies beyond the three past ways to godliness of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. He offered—in the words of two of his later book titles—“a key to the enigmas of the world” and “a new model for the universe.”⁴⁸ He insisted that man was capable of a higher inner knowledge that would take him into “six-dimensional space.” There are three dimensions in time, which are a continuation of the three dimensions of space, and which lead in turn to a “seventh dimension” of the pure imagination.⁴⁹

In St. Petersburg, Prometheanism found its most extreme—and historically important—expression in the movement known as “God-building” (Bogostroitel’stvo). St. Petersburg intellectuals were, predictably, more concerned with social questions than their Moscow counterparts; and, amidst the agitation of the first decade of the new century, a group of Marxist intellectuals struck upon the Promethean idea of simply transferring to the urban proletariat the attributes of God. “God-building” developed partly in reaction to “God-seeking,” an earlier movement of St. Petersburg intellectuals who followed Merezhkovsky in turning from aesthetic to religious questions. Their return to philosophic idealism (and in many cases Orthodox Christianity) was celebrated in a variety of publications from the periodicals New Road (1903-4) and Questions of Life (1905-6) to the famous symposium of 1909, Landmarks (Vekhi), which offered an impressive philosophic challenge to the positivist and Marxist categories which had long dominated the philosophic thinking of the urban intelligentsia. A musical landmark in this return to religious mysticism was the primarily choral opera The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which was finished amidst the revolutionary turmoil of 1905-6 and first produced early in 1907 by the last survivor of the “mighty handful,” Rimsky-Korsakov.

God-building developed somewhat later than God-seeking, and sought to harness the religious anguish of the intellectuals not to traditional faith but to the coming revolution. During the dark days of reaction that followed the failure of the Revolution of 1905, a group of intellectuals sought to supplement Marx with a more inclusive and inspiring vision of the coming revolution. Led by Maxim Gorky, the rough-hewn writer and future high priest of Soviet literature, and Anatol Lunacharsky, the widely traveled critic who became the first commissar of education in the new Soviet state, the God-builders considered themselves to be merely elaborating the famous Marxist statement that philosophers should change rather than merely explain the world. Traditional religion was always linked with intellectual confusion and social conservatism, and the “God-seekers” were only rebuilding the tower of Babel rather than moving on to the New Jerusalem.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, religious conviction had been the greatest force for change in history, Lunacharsky contended, and Marxists should, therefore, conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God. Gorky concluded his long Confession of 1908 with a prayer to “the almighty, immortal people!”

Thou art my God and the creator of all gods, which thou hast fashioned from the beauties of the spirit in the toil and struggle of thy searchings!

And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!

Thus do I believe and confess!⁵¹

Some contemporary critics referred to Gorky’s position as “demotheism” or “people-worship,”⁵² and there are many resemblances to the more extreme forms of populism. But Gorky spoke in the more universal language of the silver age. He referred to all men, not merely Russians; to the conquest of death, not merely of hunger. In the final sentence of the Confession, Gorky holds out the image of “the fusion of all peoples for the sake of the great task of universal God-creation.”⁵³

An anonymous Marxist pamphlet published in 1906 and subsequently reissued by the Soviet regime bluntly declared that man is destined to “take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal.”⁵⁴

Death is only a temporary setback, Lunacharsky affirmed as early as 1903:

Man moves toward the radiant sun; he stumbles and falls into the grave. But … in the ringing clatter of the grave-diggers’ spades he hears creative labor, the great technology of man whose beginning and symbol is fire. Mankind will carry out his plans … realize his desired ideal.⁵⁵

His Faust and the City declares that the idea of an immortal God is only an anticipatory “vision of what the might of men shall be,”⁵⁶ and ends ecstatically with the people crying over the dead body of Faust “he lives in us! … Our sovereign city roused in might.”⁵⁷

After the Revolution, Lunacharsky turned to an undertaking that had attracted many past Russian artists: the composition of a trilogy which would provide a new redemptive message for mankind. Like Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Brothers, and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Lunacharsky’s trilogy was never finished. In keeping with the spirit of the silver age, the first part, Vasilisa the Wise, was fantastic in form and cosmic in pretensions. The second part, “a dramatic poem,” Mitra the Saviour, was never published, and the final part, The Last Hero, was apparently never written. The last lines we have of the trilogy is the paean at the end of the mythological Vasilisa to the coming of “man’s divinity on earth.”⁵⁸ Such talk was clearly dangerous in a society bent on camouflaging its own myths and absolutes with scientific terminology.

The figure who best portrayed the Promethean vision of the early God-builders was Alexander Malinovsky, a brilliant theorist who has suffered the relative oblivion of those who neither joined the emigration nor rose to high authority in the new Soviet state. Shortly after taking his first regular position as a journalistic critic in 1895 at the age of twenty-two, Malinovsky assumed a new name which remained with him and accurately conveys the image he had of his own high calling: Bogdanov, or “God-gifted.” He soon became active in the Social Democratic movement, siding immediately with the Bolsheviks after the split of 1903, and helping edit their theoretical journal New Life, where he began his friendship with Gorky.

Bogdanov believed that the ultimate key to the future lay not in the economic relationships and class struggles that were characteristic of past history, but in the technological and ideological culture of the future that was already being created by the proletariat. Marx’s fascination with dialectical struggle was an unfortunate holdover from his youthful Hegelianism. In the manner of Saint-Simon rather than Marx, Bogdanov argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without a positive new religion: that the unifying role once played in society by a central temple of worship and religious faith must now be played by the living temple of the proletariat and a pragmatic, socially oriented philosophy of “empiriomonism.”

In a long series of studies, beginning with his Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature in 1899, Bogdanov developed the idea that the revolutionary movement would lift man beyond the level of economics, and nature beyond all previous laws of material determinism. The key to this program of cultural regeneration within the revolutionary movement was presented in a long work published in installments throughout the decade 1913-22 under the title The Universal Organizational Science (Tectology). This new super-science of “tectology” was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual culture and the physical experience of the “working collective,” in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture reworked.⁵⁹

Bogdanov felt that the creation of a new proletarian culture should precede the political annexation of power by the Bolsheviks. His concept of God-building through tectology was designed—like Sorel’s concurrent call for a new heroic myth—to kindle enthusiasm and assure the revolutionary movement of success not only in gaining power but also in transforming society. Like Sorel, Bogdanov was enthusiastic over the initial Bolshevik annexation of power; and he rushed into print with a series of writings designed to spell out the God-building possibilities of the new society: the second part of his Tectology (1917) and two utopian novels, Red Star (1918) and Engineer Menni (1919). Though originally published in 1908, Red Star produced its greatest impact when it appeared in the second, 1918 edition.⁶⁰ Its image of an earth dweller suddenly transported to another planet which was in a feverish ecstasy of socialist construction seemed to many the image of a new socialist society into which Russia might suddenly leap. The novel was reprinted several times; and Bogdanov’s organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) enjoyed nationwide popularity throughout the period of Civil War and “war communism”—publishing about twenty journals throughout Russia during those difficult days.

Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult to the Commissariat for Education. Bogdanov’s organization was censured for its claim to have brought about “immediate socialism” in the cultural sphere, a proletarian culture totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. Bogdanov, for his part, in a suppressed pamphlet of 1919, had already expressed the fear that the new rulers were merely a parasitic class of managerial organizers.⁶¹ Proletkult was soon abolished altogether; he and his followers, the so-called Workers’ Truth group, denounced; and his prestige undercut by the time Tectology was completed in 1922. Bogdanov spent his last days in the relatively obscure but appropriately visionary post of director of an institute for “the Struggle for Vital Capacity” (Zhiznesposobnost’). He died in 1928, apparently from a dangerous experiment involving transfusions of his own blood—a front-line casualty, as it were, in his undaunted efforts to take harmony and immortality away from imaginary gods and put them into the real life of men.

The most extreme Prometheanism of the age was found in the so-called Cosmist movement, an offshoot of the God-building movement that flourished in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years of 1918-21. The Cosmists and the closely related Blacksmith (Kuznitsa) group of Moscow poets spoke with a kind of frenzied hyperbole about the imminent transformation of the entire cosmos. Under the leadership of Alexis Kuz’min, who took the appropriate pen name Extreme (Kraisky) and entitled his first fantastic book of poems The Smiles of the Sun,⁶² the Cosmists burst forth with expletives: “We shall arrange the stars in rows and put reins on the moon” and “We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the palace of World Freedom.”⁶³

One important feature of Revolutionary Prometheanism was its attractiveness to long-submerged minority groups of the Russian Empire. At a time when a groping and desperate Tsar was increasingly relying on repression and Russification, minority peoples looked increasingly to the new worlds being opened up in the cosmopolitan culture of the silver age. Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and Lazar Lissitzky played a key role in the experimental painting of the day; and the Lithuanian painter-musician-writer, Michael Chiurlionis, anticipated much of the most revolutionary art of the day and exerted a shadowy influence over much of the Russian avantgarde. Among the Revolutionaries the role of minority people was no less conspicuous; and it seems appropriate to conclude with two of the most visionary, brilliant, and universal-minded of all Russian Revolutionaries: the Pole, Waclaw Machajski, and the Jew, Leon Trotsky. The silencing of their voices in the course of the twenties was a measure of the retreat of the new regime from the great expectations of the earlier period.

Machajski, who wrote under the pseudonym A. Vol’sky, believed even more passionately than Bogdanov in the need for a totally new type of culture. One must move beyond the culture not only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also of the newest and most insidiously oppressive social class, the intellectuals. Beginning with his Evolution of Social Democracy in 1898, the illegally published first part of his magnum opus, The Intellectual Worker, Machajski warned that articulate intellectuals will inevitably find their way to the head of the revolutionary movement and become the controlling oligarchy within any future revolutionary regime. In order to protect the interests of the inarticulate manual workers he called for a world-wide “workers’ conspiracy” dedicated to gaining enough economic improvement to permit the workers to raise their level of literacy and culture. Only in this manner could the advantage that the intellectual enjoyed over the worker be neutralized, and the working class assured that a genuine proletarian culture rather than a mythic culture of the intellectuals be built after the revolutionary attainment of power.

Machajski’s position resembles the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel, with its belief in “direct action” in the economic sphere and the development prior to any bid for power of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian working class culture. His form of social analysis is also reminiscent of Pareto’s theory of the “circulation of elites,” Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” and Burnham’s subsequent theory of a purely “managerial revolution.” But unlike all these figures Machajski remained an unreconstructed optimist, confident that the workers’ conspiracy could save the Revolution and develop fully the Promethean possibilities of the proletariat. Machajski’s ideas, which were particularly popular in Siberia, were anathemized by the Bolshevik leadership with particular venom long before his death in 1926.⁶⁴

Even more dramatic was the gradual fall from grace in the 1920’s of Leib Bronstein, known as Trotsky, the passionate and prophetic co-author of the Bolshevik coup. From his early days as a populist and a renegade Jew, Trotsky had seen in the coming revolution the possibilities for a total reshaping of human life. Change was to come about not so much through the staged, dialectical progressions that Marx had outlined as through an uninterrupted or “permanent” revolution, through a “growing over” (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution, of the Russian Revolution into an international revolution, and of a social revolution into a cultural transformation of mankind.

Thus, although Trotsky professed dissatisfaction with the mysticism of the God-builders and Cosmists, he leaves no doubt in his abundant writings on cultural matters about his own “limitless creative faith in the future.” In the last lines of his famous collection, Literature and Revolution, written in 1925, when his own authority was already on the wane, he expresses confidence in man’s ability

to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.

… Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.⁶⁵

Even above these peaks rose the sky-borne hope of transforming the cosmos expressed in “The Chains of Blue,” the longest poem ever written by Khlebnikov in his “alphabet of stars.” But at the end of a long “blue chain” of images, the poet gives us a prophetic glimpse into a future that was to devour its futurists. He suddenly introduces the familiar figure of Prometheus. But it is a distorted image in which we see only his liver being devoured by eagles.⁶⁶

Sensualism

ALONG WITH THE EFFORT to storm the heavens went a simultaneous impulse to plunge into the depths. Cosmic Prometheanism was accompanied by a counter-current of personal sensualism; boundless public optimism, by morbid private pessimism. Indeed, the early years of the twentieth century brought about a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.

In part, the new sensualism was a reaction against the long-dominant moralism and ascetic puritanism of the radical tradition which had been carried to extremes in the late Tolstoy. The new generation of writers delighted in the knowledge that their main source of inspiration, Vladimir Solov’ev, had used the sage of Yasnaya Polyana as the model for his portrayal of the Antichrist. They longed to rediscover the delights of sex and artistic indulgence which Tolstoy had denied himself no less systematically than had Pobedonostsev.

Exaltation of the flesh was to some extent caused by the rapid advent of a mass, urban culture. The lonely, atomized man of the city found in sex one of his few surviving links with the vital, natural world dimly remembered from his rural boyhood. The provincial, rural elements that increasingly flooded the ranks of art and literature also tended to bring with them elements of earthy folklore, of a popular culture previously suppressed by the official, Orthodox culture of the Empire. The novels of bleak realism that had previously concentrated on characteristic sufferings of the countryside—starvation and exploitation—now turned in the first decade of the new century to the peculiar shame of the cities—sexual degradation. From Leonid Andreev’s picture of syphilis and suicide in The Abyss and In the Fog to Alexander Kuprin’s panorama of urban prostitution in The Pit, the Russian reading public was subjected to vivid portrayals of sordid sexuality.

To a large extent, however, the increasing preoccupation with sexual matters was a logical development of the romantic preoccupation with the will that had become characteristic of the emancipated aristocratic intelligentsia. Having tried to discover the will of the historical process in the early nineteenth century and the will of the people in the late century, the intellectuals now turned to discovering the inner recesses of their own wills. They now sought to discover not just “the other shore,” the new society dreamed of in the nineteenth century, but also “the other side” of human personality. It is significant that both phrases came from German—the language of romantic longing. The original title of Herzen’s call for Russia to fulfill the revolutionary hopes that had been betrayed in the West by the failure of 1848 was Vom andern Ufer; and Die andere Seite was the title of a widely studied German treatise in psychology calling for a new “psychographic” art.⁶⁷

In part, the new sensualism was a Nietzschean effort to find “bloody truths” capable of supplanting the lifeless truisms of a society just entering into a phase of bourgeoisation and national delusions, such as that which Germany had experienced in Nietzsche’s lifetime. But Russian sensualism was more than an aristocratic program for replacing Christ with Dionysus in the manner of Nietzsche or Stefan George. It was also at times a confused plebeian effort to revitalize the image of Christ with the flesh that had been taken away from him by the official churchmen in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky’s Schilleresque praise of the earthy and spontaneous, his allusion to “the indecent thoughts in the minds of decent people … which a man is afraid to tell even to himself”⁶⁸ was taken as a signpost pointing to a new world of experience. Ivan Karamazov’s dictum that, in the absence of God, “all things are permissible” became a kind of invitation to sexual adventure for a new generation.

The final repeal of the censorship in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 led to an increasingly candid public discussion of sex. A feverish climax was reached in 1907 with the appearance of Viacheslav Ivanov’s semi-mystical exaltation of sex in his collection of poems, Eros; his celebration of the varieties of the sexual act in Veneris Figurae; and an apologia for homosexuality in the story Wings, by Michael Kuzmin, who suddenly became one of the favorite authors of the age.⁶⁹ The most remarkable literary events of this time of titillation were the two best-selling novels of 1907, Sanine by Michael Artsybashev and The Petty Demon by Fedor Sologub.⁷⁰

Sanine, read today, appears as a bad imitation—even a caricature—of the cheap sexual novel. The scene is continually being prepared for seductions in stereotyped nocturnal surroundings to the accompaniment of pretentious monologues on the artificiality of everything but sex, with names like Lida used for added metaphorical suggestion. The reason for the extraordinary impact of Sanine was simply that Russian readers saw in it a new philosophy of life. Its philosophical asides (sometimes referred to as “mental ejaculations”) ridicule Tolstoy and other moralists, urging men to be true to their sensual desires in the realization that life is senseless and death the only ultimate reality. The novel reaches a climax with three suicides; and self-inflicted death becomes the main theme of many of Artsybashev’s subsequent works, such as At the Brink in 1911-12. But the preoccupation with sex as the only source of meaning in life was all the public remembered about Artsybashev.

Turgenev’s novels had offered to the tired liberals of the 1840’s the Schopenhauerian consolation that sexual love provided man with a “focus for willing,” “the kernel of the will to live,” and suicide a means of overcoming the meaningless monotony of life.⁷¹ In like manner, Artsybashevshchina—the most tongue-twisting of all isms of the late imperial period—rehabilitated for a large segment of the disillusioned and apolitical aristocracy the cult of sex and suicide.

Far greater than Sanine was The Petty Demon, on which a little-known St. Petersburg schoolteacher, Fedor Teternikov (Sologub), had been quietly working for ten years. The book puts on display a Freudian treasure chest of perversions with subtlety and credibility. The name of the novel’s hero, Peredonov, became a symbol of calculating concupiscence for an entire generation. The name literally means “a Don done over,” and may refer to the hero of Don Quixote, Sologub’s favorite book from childhood.⁷² His Don, however, seeks not the ideal world but the world of petty venality and sensualism, poshlost’. He torments his students, derives erotic satisfaction from watching them kneel to pray, and systematically befouls his apartment before leaving it as part of his generalized spite against the universe. The sexual perversion that underlies his hallucinations and paranoia is underscored by a secondary plot featuring a love affair between the youthful Sasha and Ludmilla, which has undertones of voyeurism, transvestism, and—above all—homosexuality.

The theme of voluptuous corruption even in “innocent youth” is a constant feature of Sologub’s eerie short stories—and of many written in imitation of him. It seems appropriate that this theme should be presented to the mass audience of the West most dramatically and effectively through the work of a transplanted Russian, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Yet Sologub’s world of perversion is far more subtle and profound, suggesting more universal involvement in the all-consuming world of poshlost’. Peredonov, far from being the source of vulgar depravity in the novel, is merely the heightened expression of the general condition of man. The petty demons are everywhere; and no one can be sure where fantasies end and perversions begin, because one man’s dream is another man’s act and men and women are involved even in one another’s gender.

After the extraordinary success of his Petty Demon, Sologub turned to the writing of a trilogy designed to satisfy his own Quixotic desire to redeem man from the world of sensuality and mediocrity. Unlike Gogol, Sologub was able to finish his attempt at a Divina Commedia; but the Purgatorio and Paradiso of his poetic imagination tend to offer only more subtle forms of the same preoccupation with sex that had characterized the Petty Demon.

Written between 1907 and 1911, the trilogy bears the title Legend in the Making, although its original title was Charms of the Dead. It begins with the famous declaration that although life is “vulgar … stagnant in darkness, dull and ordinary,” the poet “creates from it a sweet legend … my legend of the enchanting and beautiful.”⁷³

In the first part, Drops of Blood, we are in the same town that provided the site for The Petty Demon; but attention is now focused on the mysterious poet Trirodov, who has taken up residence there. Perversion is projected onto the phallic towers and subterranean passageways of his country estate, where he presides over a weird colony of “silent children” but ventures forth to take part in revolutionary agitation. The second part of the trilogy, Queen Ortruda, takes one to an imaginary kingdom of lithesome virgins and naked boys on a Mediterranean island, where a volcano is continually preparing for a final eruption, which kills the queen and serves as a mixed symbol of sexual orgasm, political revolution, and death. In the last section, Smoke and Ash, Trirodov leaves Russia to take over the vacant throne of the burned-out Mediterranean kingdom. Thus, the poet-magician reaches a kind of Nirvana by fleeing the real world of the Peredonovs and petty demons to the non-being of an imaginary kingdom—beyond good and evil, beyond male and female (as his name “three genders” suggests), beyond the different reincarnations of his personality (also suggested by the variant reading of his name as “three types”), perhaps beyond life itself.

In one of his late stories, “The Future,” Sologub speaks of “a place where the future gleams through an azure veil of desire … where those as yet unborn rest in peace.”⁷⁴ Four souls in this happy place suddenly conceive the desire to be born into the world, each expressing a special fondness for one of the primal elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Sologub goes on to tell how the first became a miner and was buried alive, the second was drowned, the third burned alive, and the fourth hanged. He concludes by asking:

Oh, why did Will lead them forth from the happy place of non-existence!⁷⁵

In one of his late short stories, “The Kiss of the Unborn,” he lends a certain lyric beauty to this gloomy view of the world. The story begins with the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy, who had become discouraged by reading in the works of Tolstoy and other Russian intellectuals that truth could not be found in life. The boy’s unmarried aunt sets off to console her sister, the boy’s mother, but soon turns to thinking about her own unborn son: the purely imaginary fruit of an unrequited early love. Suddenly, in the midst of her lonely weeping before the door of her sister, the unborn son appears to her, gives her a kiss, and thanks her for sparing him the agony of being born into the world. She goes in then to see her sister “full of calm and happiness,” suddenly armed with “power to strengthen and console.”⁷⁶

The happiness of those who are never born was preached most eloquently by Vasily Rozanov, the high priest of the new cult of sex who likened himself to a fetus in the womb asking not to be born “because I am warm enough here.”⁷⁷ Through Rozanov, the Dostoevskian origins of the new sensualism can be most dramatically traced. Rozanov gave a kind of physical immediacy to this link by seeking out and marrying Dostoevsky’s former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova, and launched the new philosophic interest in Dostoevsky with his lengthy essay of 1890, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

For Rozanov, Dostoevsky appeared as the harbinger of a new suprarational freedom: a liberation first hinted at in the Notes from the Underground and finally developed in the Legend. Rozanov insists that Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidian mathematics (which were being reproduced in a variety of new editions in the 1880’s) demonstrated the tentativeness of scientific truths,⁷⁸ and that Dostoevsky’s works showed the falsity of any scientific attempt to organize society. Neither God nor reality can be apprehended by reason alone. The only way to rediscover both is through sexual experience. The cult of the immediate, which had been a precarious way back to traditional Christianity in Dostoevsky, became for Rozanov the way back to a God who is not Christ but Dionysius. Rozanov’s “sexual transcendentalism”⁷⁹ exalts the religion of the early Hebrews and primitive fertility cults over the ascetic and unnatural traditions of Christianity, which by sterilizing the idea of God have prepared the way for atheism: the inevitable attitude of thought devoid of sex.

Rozanov agreed with the general preference for the earthy, anguished Dostoevsky over the aristocratic, moralistic Tolstoy expressed in Merezhkovsky’s famous series on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But he dissented from Merezhkovsky’s view that Dostoevsky was a kind of Christian seer. This tendency to view Dostoevsky as the prophet of a renovated Christianity and The Brothers Karamazov as (to cite Gorky’s phrase) “a fifth gospel,” predominated in the Religio-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg from the time of its dedication “to the memory of Vladimir Solov’ev” in 1907 until its dissolution in 1912. The view was perpetuated in the brilliant critical works on Dostoevsky written by two of the society’s most famous members: Viacheslav Ivanov and Nicholas Berdiaev.

Although Berdiaev has subsequently become better known in the West, Ivanov was in many ways the more seminal thinker. A student of Mommsen in Berlin who had become converted to the Nietzschean idea that “a new organic era” was at hand, Ivanov bade his associates join him in plunging “from the real to the more real”; to leave behind the prosaic realities of the present for a future that will bring with it a new tragic sense. Ivanov insisted that he longed not for the unattainable but simply “for that which has not yet been attained.”⁸⁰ “Viacheslav the Magnificent” was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh-floor apartment “The Tower,” overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full swing until after supper had been served at 2 A.M.

Nietzsche was in a sense the guiding spirit, for Ivanov looked nostalgically to the lost world of classical antiquity through the eyes of Nietzsche’s own academic discipline—philology—and worshipped at the shrine of the vitalistic Dionysus: the god of fertility and wine and patron of drama and choral song. But from the time of his early studies of 1904-5, “Nietzsche and Dionysus,” “The Religion of Dionysus,” and “The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God,” to his scholarly dissertation on Dionysus defended at Baku in 1921,⁸¹ Ivanov tended to see in the Dionysian cult a prefiguration of Christianity; and he became after his exile in 1925 a resident of Rome and convert to Catholicism. Berdiaev, who later became an émigré apologist for Christianity within the Orthodox fold, was in pre-Revolutionary days closer to Nietzsche in such books as The Meaning of the Creative Act of 1916.

Rozanov went much further, insisting that there was a basic conflict between Dionysus and Christ. In a famous speech to the Religio-Philosophical Society, Rozanov attacked Jesus as a figure who never laughed or married, and pleaded for a new religion of uninhibited creativity and sensuality.⁸² Rozanov’s proposal was given support by Nietzsche’s suggestion that all morality is rationalization and that a new type of superman is needed with the courage to live beyond the stultifying categories of good and evil. Shestov’s Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy saw these two figures as the twin prophets of a new world in which the tragic spirit was to be freed from the shackles of morality for a new life of sensual and aesthetic adventure.⁸³ Shestov later sought to contrast the German with Tolstoy, the běte noire of silver age aestheticism, in his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche.⁸⁴ The tendency to identify Dostoevsky with Nietzsche rather than Christ was particularly marked among those of Jewish origins like Shestov and A. Shteinberg, who tended to see in Dostoevsky a revolutionary new “system of freedom,” to cite the title of a lecture series he gave in St. Petersburg in 1921.⁸⁵

Another important source of the new sensualism was the return to primitivism in the arts. Kandinsky had turned to the lubki, or popular wood cuts, of Old Russia for inspiration, and published in 1904 his Poems without Words, a portfolio of his own cuts, en route to his more abstract and experimental compositions. Malevich also went through a primitivist period; as did Michael Larionov, who turned to folk themes, simple figures, and distorted anatomies in a desperate effort to find a truly original Russian style of art. He eventually created a purely abstract style of “rayonism,” which sought to base painting on “rays of color” rather than lines and fields of color. But in the experimental, interim period that followed the Revolution of 1905, Larionov championed the introduction of pornographic material into painting: salacious slogans in his “Soldier” series and ingenious improvisations on sexual shapes in his subsequent “Prostitute” series.⁸⁶ These and other primitive and suggestive paintings were exhibited in Moscow early in 1912 by a group with the deliberately shocking name “The Donkey’s Tail,” which represented “the first conscious breakaway from Europe”⁸⁷ within the artistic avant-garde. A similar movement through primitivism to modernistic innovation can be traced in music. Stravinsky’s revolutionary “Rite of Spring” was suggested to him by an unexpected and erotic vision of a solemn pagan rite in which a circle of elders watched a young girl dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring and fertility.⁸⁸

The bawdiness of Larionov endeared him to the literary futurists, who used him and his friends as illustrators for their works. The use of erotic motifs, infantile forms of expression, and vulgar epigrams became common to painters and poets alike of the “futurist” persuasion, who were in pre-war Russia generally more preoccupied with the sensuous and personal than the original Franco-Italian futurist Marinetti, who had been more interested in “the aesthetics of the machine.” Russian futurism represented, in the title of its most famous manifesto, “a slap in the face of public taste.” Rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes and dandies of Edwardian England, the Russian futurists delighted in bizarre attire—appearing on the street with abstract signs painted on their cheeks and radishes in their buttonholes. The painter-poet Burliuk brothers, who organized the futurist tour of 1913-14, typified the egocentric exuberance of the movement. Vladimir, a professional wrestler, carried mammoth weights with him everywhere he went, and his equally gigantic older brother, David, appeared with the legend “I am Burliuk” painted on his forehead.

If one can speak of a synthetic proclamation of liberated sensualism comparable to Scriabin’s Promethean proclamation, it would probably be the futuristic movie “Drama in Cabaret No. 13,” which was filmed late in 1913. In contrast to the melodramas set in remote times and places which were the standard fare of the infant Russian movie industry, this film was simply an average bawdy day in the life of the futurists. Its actors were the artists themselves—the Burliuk brothers, Maiakovsky, and Larionov—behaving in particularly shocking ways as they satirized the movie industry, the society that patronized it, the world itself, and the entire subject of sex, through which one senseless generation leads on to another.

By late 1913, sensualism was giving way to Prometheanism, and the subjective side of futurism (“ego-futurism”) to a more dispassionate and formal “cubo-futurism.” Malevich was the harbinger of the new, designing cubistic sets and costumes in December, 1913, for the futurist opera with the appropriately Promethean title, Victory over the Sun. People were transformed into “moving machines” by costumes of cardboard and wire. Some actors spoke only with vowels, others only with consonants, while blinding lights and ear-splitting sounds rocked through the theater in an effort to give man “victory over the sun”: freedom from all dependence on the traditional order of the world.⁸⁹ Freud, too, make his impact on the new art; and plays were written in which the various roles did not represent different people but different levels and aspects of one person.⁹⁰

In the manifesto that accompanied his first Suprematist exhibition in December, 1915, Malevich insisted:

Only when the habit of one’s consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure-painting composition.⁹¹

Shameless nudes had, however, not altogether vanished from Russian culture. They dominated the literary debut late in 1916 of one of Russia’s great storytellers of this century, Isaac Babel.⁹² His description of a seduction in the manner of the French naturalists, whom he admired, attracted the wrath of the government authorities, who transferred to the inventive young writer from Odessa the puritanical denunciations and threats that could no longer be visited upon the absent Larionov. Yet nowhere was sensualism more in evidence than in the inner circles of the imperial government itself. The imperial family was under the sway of the notorious Rasputin, and the rival court figures who succeeded in killing this “holy devil” in December of 1916 were if anything even more corrupt than the remarkable peasant holy man from Siberia. Protopopov, the minister of the interior who was Rasputin’s friend and protégé, was a sensualist thought by many to be a practitioner of necrophilia. Prince Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitry (the high aristocrats who carried out the poisoning, shooting, and drowning of the rugged Rasputin) were widely renowned for their sexual exploits and intrigues.⁹³

Within a year, however, all these figures had been swept aside by the winds of change. First came the gust from the progressive bloc of liberal reformers in the Duma, then the unexpected hurricane of March, 1917, which ended the autocracy, and finally the swirling winds of civil war set in motion by the Bolshevik coup of November.

Revolution and civil war turned the attention of Russian writers from the private to the public arena, and made apocalypticism, the third ideological current of the age, suddenly seem the most relevant of all. Blok, who had already felt himself “drawn into the whirlpool” by “the lilac world of the first revolution,” now tended to see in the erotic and mystical “unknown lady” of his earlier poems only the mother of harlots spoken of in the Book of Revelation.⁹⁴ Sensual desire was cauterized with the fire of revolution and civil war, and zealously repressed by the puritanical Bolsheviks once power was consolidated.

Nonetheless, sensualism—like other attitudes of the late imperial period—did not vanish immediately under the new regime. One writer likened the experience of revolution to that of a “voluptuous shudder.”⁹⁵ A remarkable Soviet novel of the early twenties tells of an aristocratic girl who, by becoming head of a local secret police, converts her sexual appetite into state-sanctioned sadism, proudly proclaiming that “the revolution is all permeated with sex for me.”⁹⁶ Another tale tells of a deacon who leaves his religious calling ostensibly to join the Revolutionary forces, but actually to live freely with the prostitute Marfa. “Underneath all his Marxism rank Marfism was hidden,” the author wryly observes.⁹⁷ Most memorable of all is the picaresque sensuality and ironic spirit in Babel’s tales of the revolutionary era, Red Cavalry, of 1926, and in his Odessa Tales of the following year dealing with the Odessa underworld.

There was an engagingly straightforward irrationalism about the bohemian sensualism of the “Imaginist” school of poetry, which was formed in 1919. Seeking to “smash” grammar and return to primitive roots and suggestive images, they produced such remarkable works as Vadim Shershenevich’s 2 × 2 = 5 and Anatoly Marienhof’s I Fornicate with Inspiration.⁹⁸ Before the group collapsed in 1924 and Shershenevich settled down to the prosaic task of becoming Upton Sinclair’s Russian translator, this leader of the group wrote a number of poems exalting the anti-progressive sensualism that was still widespread among the intelligentsia:

Women, make haste to love us,

For we sing of wonders still,

And we are the last thin cracks

That progress has yet to fill!⁹⁹

Sensualism was, however, not entirely without its official patrons in the early years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, the Revolution was in a very real sense “permeated with sex” for Alexandra Kollontai, the gifted daughter of a Ukrainian general and first commissar of public welfare in the new Bolshevik regime. Between the publication of her New Morality and the Working Class in 1919 and her collection Free Love in 1925, she campaigned incessantly for free love in the new society. She argued, however, for sublimating the physical side of love (“wingless eros”) to a socially creative love, with wings, which seeks a kind of spiritual union with the new proletarian society.¹⁰⁰ Thus, just as Bogdanov saw the proletariat as God, Kollontai saw it as a kind of cosmic sex partner. She favored (to cite the title of one of her stories) “the love of worker bees,” with women as queen bees, producing children from semi-anonymous fathers whose true love lies in productive labor. In a famous metaphor one of her fictional female creations insisted that sexual intercourse in itself had no greater significance than the simple act of drinking a glass of water.¹⁰¹

Although she favored monogamy for purely practical reasons, she was an ardent apologist for the liberalized divorce laws that were promulgated early in the Soviet era. Both she and her wealthy Finnish mother were divorcees. Her own supreme love affair was clearly the one she enjoyed with the working class. A wealthy intellectual, she identified herself with the most ruggedly proletarian faction of Bolshevism, the so-called Workers’ Opposition, which vainly sought to combat the growing power of the new state bureaucracy with a system of decentralized trade union control. Unlike others in the movement, she was not disbarred from further positions of authority after its repudiation in 1921. She spent the entire period from 1923-45 in high diplomatic posts, most of them in the Scandinavian regions that she knew so well (involving herself in such colorful episodes as her attempt to negotiate an end to the Russo-Finnish War together with another militant Bolshevik feminist, the Esthonian-born playwright Hella Wuolijoki, whose most famous work, the Loretta Young movie The Farmer’s Daughter, deals with that enduring popular symbol of promiscuity).¹⁰² Kollontai’s advocacy of sexual liberation can be said to represent in some ways a curious and short-lived introduction of Scandinavian perspectives into the gloomy puritanical picture of Russian Bolshevism. The fact that she was the only important opposition leader within the Bolshevik Party to survive the purges of the thirties could testify to some vestigial nostalgia among old Revolutionaries for her image of the Revolution as “eros with wings.”

There was little room for eros in the Bolshevik ethos, however. The last great festival of public passion may well have been the remarkable production of the play Carmencita and the Soldier, at the Moscow Art Theater in 1923. This “lyric tragedy” was an original reworking of Bizet’s Carmen designed to focus attention exclusively on the savage, love-hate relationship between man and woman. The chorus of older tragedies was reintroduced, and the frivolities of the opera eliminated in an effort to depict that which Nietzsche had written in the margin of his score of Bizet’s Carmen at the “Habanera”: “Eros as the Greeks imagined him, bitterly demonic and untamed.”¹⁰³

The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic. Solov’ev, the author of the turn to sensualism, had begun in his last years to have visions of the devil rather than of sophia, and seems to have felt himself strangely drawn toward the Antichrist of his last writings.¹⁰⁴ Within a few years of Solov’ev’s death, his follower Alexander Blok moved from his earlier mystical reverence for “the beautiful lady” who brought harmony to the universe to his poetic preoccupation with “the unknown woman,” an enigmatic prostitute from the nether world of the city taverns. The less well remembered figure of Alexander Dobroliubov actually championed the worship of Satan, and wrote poems and tracts extolling “the beauty of death” before turning to a life of ascetic self-mortification and radical sectarian preaching.¹⁰⁵ Demons are everywhere in the literary world of Sologub, where the lure of the flesh is almost invariably related to the power of Satan.

Alexis Remizov, one of the most popular storytellers of the late imperial period, believed that the world was ruled by the devil. His portrayal of Satan in the vernacular language and fantastic metaphor of the Russian countryside made him seem almost a congenial figure. Remizov’s popular marionette production The Devil’s Show was a kind of satanic mystery play; and his Flaming Russia of 1921 paid tribute to Dostoevsky as the author of the strange dualism and “theomachism” (bogoborchestvo, or “struggle with God”) that underlay his own exotic writings. Chiurlionis suggested that the sun was really black; and in Satan’s Diary, the last work of Leonid Andreev, the author identifies with Satan, who—in the shape of an American millionaire—records his deceptions and triumphs in a deeply corrupted world.¹⁰⁶

Diabolism also found expression in music, where Scriabin professed to find a kind of exaltation of the devil in the music of Liszt and in his own celebration of sensual delights. The devil found his most notable conquest in the field of painting, where the gifted figure of Vrubel moved from early religious paintings to experimentalism to anguish and insanity in the course of an artistic quest centered on representing Lermontov’s Demon in painting.¹⁰⁷

From his early representation of the demon as a seated figure similar in form to his earlier Pan, Vrubel proceeded to a final picture which showed the demon stretched out horizontally, as if on a rack, with his head cocked up at an unnatural angle, staring out in horror at the viewer. It is as if the devil were conducting a kind of final satanic review of his lesser servants: those “pillars of society” who always lined up in ignorant admiration before any work of a widely acclaimed artist. Vrubel both shocked and fascinated society by returning periodically to retouch and further distend his devil even after it was placed on public exhibit. The only refuge left on earth was to be found in an insane asylum, where Vrubel spent the last years before his death in 1910. The devil which haunted Vrubel had, of course, fascinated thinkers of the romantic age throughout Europe. Faust was, after all, inconceivable without Mephistopheles; and in their brooding about paradises lost or regained, the romantics found Milton’s Satan somehow more credible and interesting than his God. In their determination to revitalize the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth-century philosophers, romantic philosophers often preferred to equate vitality with Satan rather than attempt to redefine or rehabilitate the discredited idea of God.

Yet there is something strange and uniquely Russian about Vrubel’s effort to encase Satan in a painting. It was a kind of inversion of the quest launched in Russian painting by Alexander Ivanov a half century earlier.¹⁰⁸ As in the case of Ivanov, Vrubel’s effort became a kind of focal point of the communal interests and expectations of the entire intellectual elite. Just as Ivanov had attempted to portray “The Appearance of Christ to the People,” Vrubel was trying to have the devil make his appearance to the people. But whereas Ivanov’s Christ was an artistic failure, Vrubel’s Demon was a relative success. Romanticism had found its icon; and the sensualists of late imperial Russia, their patron saint.

Apocalypticism

THIS SENSE of the satanic presence led to a brooding and apocalyptic mentality. Apocalypticism, the third key characteristic of the era, was in many ways the by-product of the unresolved psychological tension between the other two: Prometheanism and sensualism. How, after all, can one reconcile great expectations with petty preoccupations? an intellectual belief in a coming utopia and a simultaneous personal involvement in debauchery? One way of holding on to both commitments was to convince oneself with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that apocalyptical change was in the offing, that the sensualism of today forebodes the transformation of tomorrow. As Diaghilev put it during the revolutionary year of 1905 (in a toast delivered in connection with the exhibit of three thousand Russian historical portraits which he organized at the Tauride Palace):

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.¹⁰⁹

The second and more obvious source of apocalypticism was the popular religious mentality which tended to influence even many of the openly irreligious contributors to the emerging mass culture of the early twentieth century. Reading and writing were now becoming regular activities of many with a primitive, peasant background for whom it seemed natural to talk of change in apocalyptical terms.

The stridently secular manifestos of the futurists were filled with images of prophecy and martyrdom. The poet Maiakovsky, who rapidly became their leader, called himself “the thirteenth apostle” and “an uncrowned king of souls,” whose body will someday be “lifted to heaven like the communion wafer by prostitutes to cleanse them of their sins.” His sonorous verse captures, like the zaumny iazyk, the language of pure sound of Khlebnikov, some of the musical cascading quality of the original zaumny iazyk of the church: the blagovestie of church bells. If the bells of “rejoicing” are harsh ones, jangled out of tune by the iconoclastic poet, his ultimate assurance of salvation is phrased in the language of apocalypse, which is, after all, a kind of “theology beyond reason.” He alone, the ultimate romantic, “will come through the buildings on fire” to see “the second tidal flood.”¹¹⁰ If futurist poets were led into a kind of masochistic apocalypticism in their effort to reach beyond the ordinary world, abstract artists tended to follow a similar path in their quest for a new art of pure form and color. Kandinsky in the critical period of his development, during 1912-14, repeatedly returned to the theme of apocalyptical horsemen and the Last Judgment in the canvases with which he slowly rode altogether out of the world of objective art.¹¹¹

In the feverish literature of this decade of war and revolution, apocalypticism became an increasingly central theme. Solov’ev’s posthumously published short story of the Antichrist heralded a host of imitators who were, for the most part, less interested in his positive vision of ultimate Christian unification than in his negative vision of the coming Asian domination of Europe.

Merezhkovsky’s trilogy, Christ and Antichrist, presented a vast historical panoply of the death of gods under Julian the Apostate, their resurrection under Leonardo da Vinci, and a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist that had begun under Peter and was to be resolved on Russian soil.¹¹² Far more interesting and original was the apocalyptical work of Boris Bugaev, the brooding son of a famous Moscow mathematician who became a leading symbolist writer and moved from Buddhism to theosophy to anthroposophy: the attempt to create a new humanistic culture by the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner.¹¹³ Early in his religious and philosophic studies Bugaev became fascinated with the inner links that he felt existed between the intelligentsia and the popular religious mentality. He chose the pen name Andrew Bely—combining that of the “first chosen” saint who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia with the word for “white,” the apocalyptical color. Bely thus rebaptized himself with a name which symbolized his own sense of mission in bringing tidings of apocalypse to the Russian people. Like Solov’ev he saw the problem in terms of the confrontation of Europe and Asia with Russia as the critical arena of conflict. Like Briusov, who wrote apocalyptically about “the coming Huns” during the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-5,¹¹⁴ Bely was haunted by this unexpected Asian victory and soon embarked on a great novelistic trilogy East or West. The first part appeared in two large volumes in 1910 under the title Silver Dove, telling the story of a Moscow student who gives away all his earthly goods in order to follow a mad flagellant “Mother of God.” He is in search of a world-wide resurrection: a union of West and East through a conflagration out of which will come the bird that can rise to heaven: the “dove” of the sectarian tradition, the firebird of Russian mythology. The practice of selfimmolation by the Old Believers is represented as a kind of prophetic anticipation of what the entire world is about to experience on the way to salvation.

The outbreak of World War I and the enormous casualties on the eastern front seemed to provide further evidence to Bely that the end was indeed coming; and the second part of the trilogy which appeared in 1916, under the title Petersburg, is even more haunted by the distortion of traditional shapes and the sense of approaching catastrophe. He sees the calamity being brought on by “both father and son, both reactionary and revolutionary,” who are equally nihilistic at heart, secret collaborators in bringing on “the kingdom of the beast, … of the Antichrist, of Satan.”¹¹⁵

The outbreak of revolution seemed to Bely and many others to be the beginning of the last great earthly struggle that would deliver men from the reign of Antichrist to that of the returned Messiah. “Christ is Risen,” Bely wrote in a famous hymn to the Revolution just a few months after Blok’s Twelve.¹¹⁶ At almost the same moment Russia was called the “new Nazareth” by the most authentically earthy and rural of all the great poets of the age, Serge Esenin.¹¹⁷ Another peasant poet, Nicholas Kliuev, hailed the Revolution as a sign of messianic deliverance, in his remarkable works of the early twenties: “Song of a Bearer of the Sun,” “The Fourth Rome,” and “Lenin,” in which he compared the Bolshevik leader to Avvakum.¹¹⁸

It was not long before the new revolutionary regime became equated with Antichrist rather than Christ. The identification of the Revolutionary leader with the returning Christ in Blok’s “Twelve” had been only tentative and symbolic, and Blok died disillusioned in 1921. Berdiaev, Merezhkovsky, Kandinsky, Remizov, and many others had emigrated abroad permanently by 1922, and begun writing about the new order in tones of Spenglerian gloom.¹¹⁹ Even Gorky, a man of lower-class origin, who was close to Lenin, went abroad late in 1922 for a long stay. His departure was but one sign of the revulsion that passed through precisely those writers who were closest to the simple people and to the great hopes they had originally had for the Revolution.

The city joined the railroad train as the symbol of apocalypse. An apocalyptical poem of 1903 by Briusov, “The Pale Horse,” inspired Blok to write in 1904 “The Last Day,” the first in a gloomy series called The City.¹²⁰ The modern city was “a curse of the beast,” to cite the title of Andreev’s famous story of 1908: “the final curse of man,” a labyrinth with “many doors and no exits,” populated by people with “small compressed, cubic souls.”¹²¹ Bolshevism was only the last and most extreme product of the “steel fever” of the cities, of an “electrical uprising”¹²² which was leading men to Armageddon and the final struggle between “iron and the land.”¹²³ People were only minor actors in this Manichean battle between factory chimneys and the cupolas of churches. Chimneys became “red fingers” of the beast threatening to rip out of the soil the onion domes of the faithful, or trumpets reaching above the city to announce the Last Judgment.¹²⁴

Within the accursed cities “earth no longer resembles earth.… Satan has beaten and trampled it down with iron hoofs … riding over it like a foaming horse across a meadow.”¹²⁵ The image of an apocalyptical horseman is blended into that of an armored train carrying the curse of the city out into the countryside and provinces by means of “dragon trains,” “the iron serpent in the clean field,” “the forty-mouthed creature”:

Did you see

Racing over the steppe,

On cast-iron paws

Knifing through lakes of mist

Snorting with iron nostrils

—the train?

And after him

Across the great lawn

As in some festival of desperate races

Pitching his thin legs forward

The galloping red-maned foal?¹²⁶

The train symbol was given new suggestiveness by the Bolshevik use of brightly ornamented propaganda trains and Trotsky’s repeated forays to the front in an armored command train during the Civil War. Among the most powerful early prose accounts of this period are Vsevelod Ivanov’s Armoured Train No. 14-69, the chapter “Train No. 58” in Pil’niak’s panoramic Naked Year, and Nikitin’s memorable story “Night,” in which the Civil War is portrayed as a nocturnal collision between two armored trains, red and white, moving from East and West to a fated collision in the heart of Russia.¹²⁷

Almost alone among the visionary writers of the silver age, Bely returned permanently to the USSR in 1923, professing to see signs of deliverance rather than apocalypse in the new order. Yet the second part of his trilogy, Petersburg, written between 1913 and 1916, had already presented an apocalyptical picture of men and women in a half-mad city paralyzed by a box containing a bomb, which no one can either disarm or discard. His literary efforts of the twenties—such as the Baptized Chinamen and Moscow—are less successful; and his attempt to invest older religious symbols with new Bolshevik content are even more inept than in his “Christ is Risen.” His most successful work after Petersburg was Kotik Letaev, depicting the coming into awareness of a small child by journeying imaginatively back into the child’s infant and even pre-natal experience. This world had already been discovered by the greatest of all literary apocalypticists of the period—Vasily Rozanov, who had variously fancied himself as a fetus longing to remain in the womb and as “the baby Rozanov lost somewhere on the breast of the earth.”¹²⁸

Shortly before his death in 1919, this prince of sensualism retreated altogether from the Revolutionary chaos around him to the Monastery of St. Sergius and the Holy Trinity, where he wrote his Apocalypse of Our Time. The Russian Revolution was, he declared, a catastrophe of apocalyptical proportions for all human civilization. It was the result not of Revolutionary agitation but of the total failure of Christianity to deal with the social and physical spheres of life. Believing that the original apocalypse of St. John was written as an indictment of the early Christian Church, Rozanov designed his new apocalypse as an indictment of the modern church, which has stood by helplessly amidst war, famine, and revolution, making the flight to Bolshevism all but inevitable. Rozanov seemed to be longing for the church to reassert in this Time of Troubles the leadership that it had assumed during the Smuta three centuries earlier, which had led to the national revival of the seventeenth century under the new Romanov dynasty. Appropriately enough, Rozanov wrote his Apocalypse in the Monastery of St. Sergius, which alone had not fallen under foreign domination during this earlier Time of Troubles. He received the sacrament shortly before his death, which took place (to cite the title of one of his best works) “in the shadow of church walls.”¹²⁹

In Rozanov’s religion, the flesh was made word, rather than the word flesh, as Berdiaev noted. His views represented the fulfillment of the cult of earthy immediacy (pochvennost’) that his idol Dostoevsky had launched. He called for a “return to the passions and to fire” near the end of the Apocalypse, insisting that there is more theology “in a bull mounting a cow” than in the ecclesiastical academies, and citing Dostoevsky in support of the view that “God has taken the seeds of other universes and sowed them in the earth.”¹³⁰

Apocalypse and judgment were immediate sensuous realities for Rozanov just as the physical world had been. He could not believe in “the immortality of the soul” (he invariably put such abstract phrases in quotation marks) but could not bring himself to believe that “the little red beard” of his best friend would ever perish. He envisaged himself as standing before God on Judgment Day saying nothing, only sobbing and smiling.

Rozanov died early in 1919 before finishing his Apocalypse; but in the following year there was written an even more remarkable description of the coming end, in the prophetic novel We by Eugene Zamiatin. A former naval engineer and Bolshevik, Zamiatin portrays the coming totalitarianism with such penetrating acuteness that We has never yet been published in the USSR. The scene of the novel is “the United State,” a horrendous utopia of the future, which has subordinated the earth to a mysterious “Well-Doer” and a uniform “Table of Hours.” The latter is a kind of cosmic extension of the railroad timetable: “that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature.” Election Day is the Day of Unanimity, and order is maintained by electric whips, with death by evaporation the ultimate sanction.

The narrator and hero—like everyone in the United State—is known by a number (D-503) rather than a name. D—503 is still, however, a recognizable human being—indeed, in some ways, a distilled representation of the silver age. He combines Prometheanism and sensualism, the two abiding attitudes of that period; and the tension in the novel arises from the inherent conflict between the two. On the one hand he is the ultimate Prometheus: a mathematician who has built “the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral,” an object that is about to “integrate the indefinite equation of the Cosmos” by sending to all other planets “the grateful yoke of reason … a mathematically faultless happiness.” At the same time, however, D—503 suffers from an irrational attachment to a woman, I—330, who is associated with the music of the past, which, unlike the mathematical harmony of the present, is the product of purely individual inspiration (“an extinct form of epilepsy”).

I—330 leads D—503 out beyond the Green Wall of the United State to a wilderness in which live the Mephi: semi-bestial survivors of the Two Hundred Years’ War which preceded the founding of the United State. The Mephi are, of course, the ultimate sensualists, children of Mephistopheles, as their name suggests. In their world the breasts of women break through the uniforms of the state like the shoots of plants in spring; fire is worshipped; and insanity advocated as the only form of deliverance. Only the Mephi have not succumbed to “the mistake of Galileo” in believing that there is “a final number.”

In a series of surrealistic scenes, D-503 almost succumbs to their world of energy, which is contrasted with the entropy of the United State. Insisting on the infinite and Dionysian in face of the need for rationality is, however, ominously likened early in the novel to placing one’s hand over the barrel of a rifle. As D-503 begins to succumb, this image becomes magnified to apocalyptical proportions. With the “forces of unreason” on the loose, Doomsday is at hand. D-503 prepares for suicide, but, at the very end, he is mysteriously brought back to daylight. His faith in finitude and the power of reason is restored by an operation which removes his soul.

We is not only a brilliant forerunner of the anti-utopian Brave New World and 1984, it is also a culmination of the essentially anti-Christian preoccupation with Prometheanism and sensualism in the late imperial period. It might even be called a kind of black scripture for the satanists. Black masses had, after all, become a fashionable form of diversion in certain aristocratic circles; and Khlebnikov had not been alone in seeing “the world upside down” and life itself as little more than “a game in Hell.”¹³¹

We is divided into forty “records” (rather than chapters), a number almost certainly suggested by the length of Christ’s temptation and of the flood. It is related in the chronicle form of the Gospels, beginning with a black parody of the first chapter of St. John (“I am only copying—word by word … Before taking up arms, we shall try out the word”) and a kind of annunciation (“The great historic hour is near, when the first INTEGRAL will rise into limitless space”). It ends with a surrealistic mock passion, crucifixion, descent, and resurrection of a hero whose age is that of Christ at the time of his passion. These events occur in the final “records,” which correspond to the last days of Christ. The wall is shattered like the temple of Jerusalem; his descent into hell is portrayed through the image of the latrine in the underground railway, where he meets the Anti-God of the sensualists in a satanic parody on the image of Christ seated in glory at the right hand of God the father. Amidst the “unseen transparent music” of the waters in the latrine, Satan approaches D-503 from a toilet seat to the left. He introduces himself with an affectionate pat, and soon proves to be nothing more than a gigantic phallus: the true God of this neo-primitive and unnaturally erotic age. His “neighbor” is nothing but “a forehead—an enormous bald parabola” with “indefinable yellow lines of wrinkles” that suddenly seemed to be “all about me.” This strange shape assures D-503 that he is capable of orgasm and not the “discarded cigarette butt” (which D-503 had assumed himself to be after an unsuccessful attempt at sexual union with I-330).

I understand you, I understand completely—he said—but just the same you must calm down: it is not necessary. All of that will return, it will inevitably return.¹³²

He then tries to get D-503 to believe that “there is no infinity.” Comforted by this thought, D-503 hastens to finish his chronicle on toilet paper and “put down a period just as the ancients placed a cross over the pits into which they threw their dead.” In the last record, the fortieth, he is mysteriously resurrected and shown the path to salvation. This is again a kind of parody of the final vision of glory in the New Testament. The walls of the New Jerusalem are “a temporary wall of high voltage waves”; its bells are one giant Bell (Kolokot), which is the name given a torture chamber. Into it is led a mysterious person with sharp white teeth and dark eyes, a final satanic metamorphosis of the missing Madonna into the sensuous “unknown lady” of the silver age. As she is placed under “the Bell” she stares out at D-503 rather like the Queen of Spades in Pushkin’s story and Chaikovsky’s opera and the Demon of Vrubel’s painting. However, for D-503, from whom the soul has now been removed, she is a creature from another world. He turns instead to look on “the Numbers who have betrayed reason” as they enter into the purgatory of the Gas Chamber, which will reintegrate them in preparation for “the ascent up the stairs to the machine of the Well-Doer.”

This new heaven was a hell to Zamiatin, for whom Christian imagery was primarily a device for heightening man’s sense of the grotesque. Thus, in the comatose aftermath of the Civil War, the author of We turns away from Christian symbols to those of the primordial, pre-Christian world in an effort to depict the unprecedented events that had just taken place. Pil’niak wrote an apostrophe to “damp mother earth”; and in 1924, the year when Leonov presented a collection of dinosaur fossils consumed by fire as the symbol of the end of the old order, Zamiatin turned from the future depicted in We to suggestions of the primordial past in his famous story “The Cave.” His eerie picture of man’s reversion to stone-age conditions during the Civil War begins with a verbless vignette:

Glaciers, mammoths, wastelands. Nocturnal, black rocks somehow like houses; in the rocks—caves.¹³³

Within the caves, men forage around in search of food and fuel, furtively hiding from “the icy roar of some super-mammothish mammoth” which “roamed at night among the rocks where ages ago Petersburg had stood.” In one of the caves, amidst such symbolic artifacts as an axe and a copy of Scriabin’s Opus 74, a cultured hero sits half-hypnotized by “the greedy cave-god: a cast-iron stove.” In a weird sequence of scenes, the Christian symbols he mentions initially fade away and he becomes in effect a stone age man—robbing his neighbor and burning all available written work in order to feed his new God. At the end of the story

A Satirical View of Russian Liberalism

PLATE XX

The suspicion and enmity with which the iconoclastic “new men” during the reign of Alexander II viewed the rising power of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is reflected in the masthead (Plate XX) of the satirical journal Iskra (“The Spark”). This short-lived journal, by borrowing from the radical press of England and France the weapon of political caricature, paved the way for future Soviet propagandists. The masthead depicted here was first introduced early in 1861.

The coiling serpent is labeled “disrespect for law, for the rights of personality and property … self-assumed power and fist-justice …” The human parade moves from money through gambling, alcohol, and “speculators” to a scene that shows a mounted, villainous “monopoly” triumphant over a cringing and obese caricature of Justice, whose scales show money far outweighing “truth.” At the far right emerge the final fruits of the depraved system: the cannon-bearing zealots of the new post-Crimean chauvinism, a woman trumpeting “publicity,” and a man pushing the locomotive that was spreading the new industrial order throughout the empire. It seems appropriate that Lenin later chose the same title, Iskra (derived in both cases from earlier usage by the Decembrists), for the seminal weekly publication of revolutionary Bolshevism, which he founded in 1900.

PLATE XX

PLATE XXI

PLATE XXII

Malevich’s “Art of Outer Space”

PLATES XXI-XXII

The experimental spirit of Russian art in the late imperial period is well illustrated by Malevich’s “Dynamic Suprematism” (Plate XXI): a typical product of the revolutionary style of non-objective art which he conceived in 1913, proclaimed in a manifesto of 1915, and exemplified in a variety of such paintings during the period of war and revolution.

The cultural richness and stylistic variety of this age was obliterated by the canonization under Stalin of “socialist realism,” a two-dimensional poster art devoted largely to the glorification of socialist construction and, increasingly, Great Russian historical successes.

There were, however, more imaginative efforts to portray the ideal of the new proletarian culture; and Malevich (unlike most of the best experimental artists from the pre-revolutionary era) stayed on in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1935, seeking to introduce the leaven of art into the dough of a new mass culture. The sturdy but faceless form of his simple, semi-abstract “Woman with a Rake (Plate XXII) offers a cleaner artistic statement of the idealized “heroine of socialist labor” than official Soviet art, and a secular icon to replace the semi-abstract religious image of a woman with child with which the illustrations for this book (and in many ways the story of Russian culture) begin. It is perhaps a fitting, final irony that the Byzantine Vladimir “Mother of God” is still on public view in the Tret’iakov Gallery in Moscow, whereas this thoroughly contemporary Russian painting of a working woman is consigned to the reserve collection of the same museum.

… everything is one gigantic, silent cave. Narrow endless passageways… dark, ice-encrusted rocks; and in the rocks are deep holes glowing crimson; there, in the holes by the fire are people squatting … and heard by no one, … over the boulders, over the caves, over the squatting people comes the huge, measured tread of some super-mammothish mammoth.

In his “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy,” written in 1923, Zamiatin made explicit his opposition to the “measured tread of the mammoth” that was taking over Russia:

Revolution is everywhere, in everything; it is endless, there is no last revolution, no last number. Social revolution is only one of innumerable numbers: the law of revolution is not social, but infinitely greater—a cosmic and universal law.…¹³⁴

He invokes Nietzsche to show that dialectical materialism has become the ideological “crutch” for a “weak-nerved” generation unable to face “the fact that today’s truths become tomorrow’s mistakes.… This (the only) truth is only for the strong.…” Realism was the literary language appropriate only for the outmoded “flat coordinates of a Euclidian world.” True realism now requires a feeling for

The absurd. Yes. The meeting of parallel lines is also absurd. But it is absurd only in the canonical, flat geometry of Euclid: in non-Euclidian geometry it is an axiom.… For today’s literature the flat surface of life is what the earth is for an airplane: a take-off path for the climb from ordinary life to true being [ot byta k bytiiu] to philosophy to the fantastic.

Into the world of the fantastic, Zamiatin plunged along with others of the “Serapion Brotherhood,” the brilliant new literary group named for a story of Ernst Hoffmann about a hermit in a cave who believed in the reality of his own visions. Primitive images of apocalypse continued to populate the visions of Zamiatin, as can be seen simply from the titles of his later works: Attila and The Flood.¹³⁵ Zamiatin’s work stands as a kind of valedictory not only for the imaginative Silver Age but for the century of cultural ferment that had led up to it. He was gloomily convinced that “the only future for Russian literature is its past”;¹³⁶ and he left behind one last image of the writer’s task, an elegiac reprise on the symbol of the sea as apocalypse.¹³⁷ In times such as these, Zamiatin contends, the writer is like a lonely lookout on the mast of a storm-tossed ship. He still stands high above the din of the ordinary deckhands, and is better able to survey dispassionately the dangers that lie ahead. Yet he too stands to sink with the ship of humanity, which is already listing at a forty-five-degree angle and may soon be confronted with the all-consuming ninth wave of the apocalypse.

Silence soon fell on this anti-authoritarian modernist. We and many of Zamiatin’s other writings could only be published abroad, where he too went in 1931, dying six years later in Paris at the very time when Babel, Pil’niak, Gorky, and others were going to their death within the USSR. Zamiatin’s belief in infinite numbers and unending Revolutionary aspiration was giving way to Stalin’s world of fixed quotas and five-year plans; crescendo, to silence; electrification, to liquidation.

In summarizing the cultural upheaval during the first three decades of the twentieth century, one may say that all three major currents—Prome-theanism, sensualism, and apocalypticism—helped sweep Russia further away from its moorings in tradition. Intellectuals drifted from one of these rushing currents to another—unable to chart a stable course, but unwilling to look back for familiar landmarks. Each of the three attitudes of the age was an extension of an idea already present among the anguished aristocratic philosophers of the nineteenth century: Prometheanism made explicit the transfer from God to man of the title to dominion over the external world; sensualism brought to the surface their secret fascination with the world of immediate physiological satisfaction and with its demonic patron; apocalypticism represented an agonizing, often masochistic clinging to the Judeo-Christian idea of retribution by those unable to believe in salvation.

The first two emphases in Russian thought can be considered an Eastern intensification of a general European trend. Russian Prometheanism reflected the faith of many Europeans in the new creative vistas opened up by the growth of science, industry, and human inventiveness. This faith was particularly vivid in Eastern Europe, where the rapidly growing, increasingly cosmopolitan cities seemed to offer new possibilities to hitherto static peasant empires.

Sensualism tended to be the creed of the aging aristocrat rather than the prodding parvenu—of those who saw in industrial development the multiplication rather than the solution of the world’s problems. Russian sensualism was closely related to the contemporary turn toward sex and irrationalism in men like Swinburne, Wilde, Lawrence, and Rimbaud. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions which properly merit the overused designation of decadence, Russian sensualism was generally less pictorially lurid and programmatically anti-moral than that of the Anglo-French sensualists of this period. Russian sensualism was tinged with aesthetic melancholy, rooted in the German philosophic tradition of Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Wagner’s Tristan: a world of insatiable metaphysical longing in which life was a “disease of the spirit”; sexual experience, the means through which the foredoomed human will best expresses itself; and the “Death and Transfiguration” of the body, the only “cure” for the flesh-contaminated spirit.¹³⁸

Apocalypticism was, however, an attitude that was in many ways more uniquely confined to Russia in the still-optimistic pre-war European world. To be sure, some Western writers like Verhaeren had seen apocalyptical meaning in the rise of the modern “tentacular city,” and there was an under-current of biblical-tinged pessimism even in such a triumphant spokesman of the European imperial age as Rudyard Kipling. But nowhere else in Europe was the volume and intensity of apocalyptical literature comparable to that found in Russia during the reign of Nicholas II. The stunning defeat by Japan in 1904-5 and the ensuing revolution left an extraordinarily large number of Russians with the feeling that life as they had known it was irrevocably coming to an end. There was a tendency to see apocalyptical significance in everything, from the rise of Asia to the reappearance of Halley’s Comet in 1910.¹³⁹ Unable to find joy or consolation in religion, the Russian creative artist nonetheless looked with fascination at the apocalyptical literature of the Bible and Russian folklore. These writings commended themselves to the brooding psychological condition of Russian writers, and also provided a model for the art they hoped to produce; for tales of apocalypse were both uniquely familiar to the new mass audience that they hoped to reach and, at the same time, rich in the esoteric symbolic language that they themselves admired.

In its apocalypticism as in other ways, the culture of this disturbed age seems at times to represent a throwback to the distant past: more a finale to the Old than a prelude to the New Russia. Artists seemed more to be looking back to the secrets of the seven days that created the world than forward to the slogans of the ten days which shook it. They sought the sources, not the benefits, of electricity; the lost lines and colors of the old icons, rather than the photographic heroism of the new movies.

Russian Prometheanism thus had elements of utopian compulsion and poetic fantasy that resemble less the optimistic and utilitarian scientism of contemporary Europe than the religious intoxication of earlier Russian heresy—the Judaizers with their pseudo-scientific “Secret of Secrets”; the Boehmist mystics with their esoteric paths to androgyny and divinity; and the recurrent sectarian prophets who sought to supplant traditional Christendom with a new group that would immediately realize the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Sensualism and apocalypticism were attitudes more reminiscent of the time of Ivan III and IV than of Alexander II and III. Philotheus of Pskov had seen a prophetic connection between the present reality of Sodom and the coming victory of the “third Rome,” just as many in the Silver Age were prone to see their own decadence as the harbinger of final deliverance. But what precisely was to come out of Sologub’s “dust and ashes”? Was it to be the enigmatic Christ of Blok’s poem? Boris Savinkov’s or Briusov’s “Pale Horse,” the fourth and most mysterious of the horsemen of the apocalypse? Stravinsky’s and Balmont’s “Firebird,” the spectacular phoenix of pre-Christian Slavic mythology? or perhaps only the prehistoric dinosaurs of Zamiatin’s “Cave”?

The more Russia’s experimental intellectuals tried to plunge into the future, the more they tended to drift back into the past. Old themes and metaphors kept returning in new dress—such as the Hamlet symbol. Blok wrote a great deal about the character and even courted his future wife by acting out the scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia.¹⁴⁰ In the early twenties the play provided the framework for a new Revolutionary parable which was acted out with great éclat by Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright. The new Hamlet portrayed a kind of Manichean struggle between the passionate and heroic Hamlet (and his allies, Horatio and Ophelia) and the haughty and repressive figure of the King (and his allies Polonius and the courtiers).¹⁴¹ Gothic sets were used to emphasize that this drama took place in the Middle Ages, prior to the coming of light; and the King’s forces wear dark costumes and repellent expressions, whereas those of Hamlet are light. The Ghost—as the unalloyed voice of revolutionary conscience—is represented by a pure shaft of light.

From a variety of perspectives Russians seemed to be feeling their way back to the shrine of light, the mythological, pre-Christian sun gods of the East. “Let us be like unto the sun,” Balmont had written in one of the most widely quoted of the early symbolist poems. Remizov’s Following the Sun of 1907 was but one of many hymns of praise to the real and imagined sun gods of Eastern mythology. Gorky’s Confession of the following year hailed “the people” as “the master of the Sun.”¹⁴² In 1909 Blok found his symbolic harbor for the long-lost ship at sea in the all-consuming, coldly impersonal Sun:

Set forth your boat, plunge to the distant pole

through walls of ice …

And midst the shudders of the slow-moving cold Acclimate your tired soul

So that here on earth it will nothing need

When from there the rays come streaming through.¹⁴³

The same sun symbol becomes one of intoxicating neo-pagan life affirmation in early post-Revolutionary poetry: Khlebnikov’s “Chains of Blue,” Kliuev’s Song of the Sunbearer, and Maiakovsky’s “Extraordinary Adventure,” where the poet plays host to the sun at tea, and is told:

Let us sing

In a world of dull trash.

I shall pour forth my sun

And you—your own

In verse.

Together the “double-barreled suns” break through “a wall of shadows and jail of nights” and pledge themselves

To shine always

To shine everywhere

To the depth of the last days

To shine

And nothing else.¹⁴⁴

Maiakovsky invokes the Sun God of antiquity in the final ecstatic hymn of his Mystery Bouffe, the famed dramatic apotheosis of the new order, which he presented on the steps of the St. Petersburg stock exchange building in the early days of the Soviet regime:

Over us sun, sun and sun …

The sun—our sun!

Enough! …

Play a new game!

In a circle!

Play with the sun. Roll the sun. Play in the sun!¹⁴⁵

“Mystery” had, of course, also been the title of Scriabin’s unfinished revolutionary symphony of sound, speech, and smell—which seems strangely reminiscent of the Church liturgy. There, too, drama, speech, and music were fused with the color of the icons and the smell of incense. Scriabin and Maiakovsky were, each in his own idiom, writing mystery plays for a new organic society in which all participated in the common ritual the aim of which was not entertainment but redemption. But if they were Christian in form, they were in many ways mystical and semi-Oriental in content. Meierhold insisted that there were no mystery plays in modern times and that “the author of ‘Prometheus’ is longing for the Banks of the Ganges.”¹⁴⁶ Khlebnikov was preoccupied with mystical, Asian themes and called himself “A dervish, a yogi, a Martian …”¹⁴⁷ adopting the ancient Slavonic version of Vladimir, “Velimir,” as his pen name. His search for a language of pure sounds as a prerequisite for the utopian society to be created by his “society for the presidents of the world” also bears some resemblance to the quest of earlier, Slavic Christendom. There, too, the liturgy, the “common work” of salvation, proceeded through the rhythmic incantations of the human voice to the joyous and climactic ringing of bells: a pure “language beyond reason,” a zaumny iazyk prefiguring the celestial rejoicing of the world to come.

The entire emphasis on the non-literary, supra-rational arts is a throwback to the culture of Old Muscovy, with its emphasis on sights, sounds, and smells. Yet in Old Russia there had been a unifying faith to give each of the art media a common focus and a willingness to accept its limitations. In modern Russia the poetry of Blok and Khlebnikov was straining to burst into music. The music of Scriabin was seeking to unravel the language of color; and the colors of Kandinsky, the language of music.

Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art, was in some ways the most deeply rooted of all in the aesthetics of Muscovy. He sought not art for its own sake but “the spiritual in art,” and sought to end idle spectatorism by re-creating the intimacy between man and art that existed in earlier religious art. His painting was based on pure line and color—the two primary ingredients of icon painting. Kandinsky’s art was—like that of the ancient icons—not concerned with the visual aspects of the external world, but was rather a kind of “abstract musical arabesque … purified like music of all but its direct appeals to the spirit.”¹⁴⁸

Yet the most abstract and purified of all sound, the language farthest “beyond reason,” is that of silence. The most inclusive of all colors is the all-containing womb of white: the “white on white” of Malevich’s painting, the bely which the “symphonic” novelist chose for his very name. An unleashed fantasy of line leads men into the infinity of space. A mystical longing for annihilation often followed the frenzied assertion of Promethean power. Whiteness, space, and infinity had replaced the sea as the symbol of this fulfillment-in-obliteration.

Moving within a generation from authoritarian traditionalism to ego-futurism, Russian culture had produced an extraordinary “commotion of verse and light.”¹⁴⁹ But everything had been taken to excess; and it seems strangely symbolic that the awesome decimation of the artistic community in the mid-thirties began with Andrew Bely’s death in 1934 from over-exposure to the sun.

Russia was not yet a fully self-sustaining industrial power, and had not yet evolved social and political institutions capable of combining the philosophy of its new leaders and the traditions of its people. By the late twenties the awesome decision was made to build socialism with “the methods employed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids.”¹⁵⁰ The thirties witnessed the merciless herding of workers into new industrial complexes and of peasants into new collectives. The “commotion of verse and light” gave way to the coercion of prose and darkness. It is to the fate of Russian culture in the wake of Stalin’s “second revolution” that attention must now be turned.