The Icon and the Axe

Conservative adherence to past practices was to serve, ironically, to heighten radical expectations of an approaching end to history. Believing that the forms of art and worship should be preserved intact until the second

coming of Christ, Russians tended to explain unavoidable innovations as signs that the promised end was drawing near. Though this "eschatological psychosis" was to be more characteristic of the later Muscovite period, there are already traces of it in the dark prophetic preaching of Abraham of Smolensk.28

Kievan Russia received such unity as it attained essentially through waves of conversion-moving north from Kiev and out from the princely .court in each city to ever wider sections of the surrounding populace. Conversion was apparently more important than colonization in unifying the region,29 and each new wave of converts tended to adopt not merely the Byzantine but the Kievan heritage as well. The Slavonic language became the uniform vehicle for writing and worship, slowly driving the Finno-Ugrian tongues which originally dominated much of northern Russia to peripheral regions: Finland and Esthonia to the west and the Mordvin and Chefemis regions to the east along the Volga. The sense, of historic destiny grew; and the idea of Christianity as a religion of victorious combat increased as the obstacles-both pagan and natural-grew more formidable.

Everywhere that the new faith went it was dramatically translated into monuments of church architecture: j the magnificent Santa Sophia in Novgorod, the second city of early Russia and a point of commercial contact with the Germanic peoples of the Baltic; the lavish Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir, the favored northern headquarters for the Kievan princes and a key center on the upper Volga. Both of these twelfth-century masterpieces were modeled on (and named after) counterparts in Kiev; but the building of churches extended beyond the cities, even beyond the records of monastic chroniclers, out to such forbidding spots as the shores of Lake Ladoga. There, in the late 1160's, the church of St. George was built and adorned with beautiful frescoes which illustrate the fidelity to tradition and sense of destiny that were present in the chronicles. The fact that this memorable church is not even mentioned in the chronicles points to the probability that there were many other vanished monuments of this kind. Named after the saintly dragon slayer who became a special hero of the Russian north, St. George's was probably built as a votive offering for victory in battle over the Swedes.30 Byzantine in its iconography, the surviving frescoes reveal nonetheless a preoccupation with the details of the Last Judgment, which-characteristically in Russian churches-dominated, and even extended beyond, the confines of the inner west wall.

Some of the most memorable figures depicted in the frescoes are the prophets and warrior krng amp;of the Old Testament. The very severity of their stylized, Byzantine presentation makes the compassionate figure of Mary

‹ccm a unique and welcome source of relief and deliverance. She was the protectress of Kiev and Novgorod as she had been of Constantinople. Russians were singing hymns to her presanctified state and dedicating • lunches to her assumption into heaven well before Western Christendom. She alone brought respite from damnation in the famous apocryphal tale of "Trie Virgin's Visit to Hell," which was brought from Byzantium in the twelfth century to new and enduring popularity in Russia.31 For the love of departed sinners, she had descended into the Inferno to win them annual i ? lease from their suffering during the period from Holy Thursday to

I'rntecost.

Much of the mythology that had gathered about the holy cities of curlier civilizations was transferred to Kiev and Novgorod; and the lore of ancient shrines and monasteries, to the new ones of the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The legend that the apostle Andrew had brought Christianity directly to Kiev just as Peter had to Rortie was taken over from Constantinople. I egends resembling those about the catacombs at Rome were developed w amiujdjthe caves of Kiev, and the idea subtly grew that Kiev might be a "second Jerusalem."32