The Icon and the Axe

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

Of these two theories, that of continuing animistic influences takes us

perhaps deeper into the formative processes of Russian thought.5 The Tatars

provided a fairly clear-cut imaginative symbol for the people arid an

administrative example for the leaders, but were an external force whose

contact with the Russian people was largely episodic or indirect. Pre-

existent j›agan practices, on the other hand, were a continuing force,

' absorbed from within"by broad segments of the populace and reflecting a

? direct response to inescapable natural forces. If the fragmentary surviving

'; materials cannot prove any coherent, continuing pagan tradition, there can

no doubt that the cold, dark environment of Great Russia played a

decisive role in the culture which slowly emerged from these, the silent

centuries of Russian history. As in the other wooded regions of Northern

Europe-Scandinavia, Prussia, and Lithuania-brooding pagan naturalism

seemed to stand in periodic opposition to a Christianity that had been

brought in relatively late from more sunlit southerly regions. Far more,

however, than her forest neighbors to the west, Great "Russia thrust

monasteries forth into the wooded wastes during the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries. Thus, in Great Russia, there was not so much a duality of belief as

a continuing influx of primitive animism into an ever-expanding Christian

culture.

The animistic feeling for nature blended harmoniously with an Orthodox sense of history in the springtime festival of Easter, which acquired a special intensity in the Russian north. The traditional Easter greeting was not the bland "Happy Easter" of the modern West, but a direct affirmation of the central fact of sacred history, "Christ is risen!"' The standard answer "In truth, risen!" seemed to apply to nature as well as man;

fin ihc resurrection feast came at the end not just of the long Lenten fast, hill nl iliu dark, cold winter. Easter sermons were among the most carefully I'M rived and frequently recopied documents from the Kievan period. To 1I1. ? Uy/antine elegance was added in the north the simple assertion that ilir goodness hidden in the hearts of the holy shall be revealed in their risen I'i.'Iiis" just as trees long veiled in snow "put out their leaves in the iptlng.""

I lie weakening of central authority and the presence of new enemies- 1 Hi natural and human-forced a deepening of family and communal

1Is within the widely scattered communities of the Russian north.

Vlilhority in most areas was naturally invested in "elders" and exercised through extended family relationships. Within.,Jhe Christian name of each Kiissiiiu is included even today the name of his father. The prevailing 1 1 i;tu worJsToF^cSnfifry" andwpeoplevr*have the~same root as "birth"; native land" and "land ownership," the same as "father."7 The individual h id in subordinate himself to group interests to accomplish his daily tasks: tin* communal clearing of land, building of fortifications and churches, and • hunting of group prayers and offices. Later attempts to find in the "Russian »uiil" an innate strtving""toward communality {sobornost') and "family happiness" may often represent little more than romantic flights from l'ir i-iil realities. But the practical necessity for communal action is hard to deny for the early period; and already in the fourteenth century the word "communal" (sobornaid) apparently began to be substituted for the word "1 ntholic" (kafolicheskaia) in the Slavic version of the Nicene Creed.s