The Icon and the Axe

Peter, of course, was opening, while Nicholas was shutting, windows to the West. But the century between the end of Peter's reign and the beginning of Nicholas' had brought too much cultural exposure to the West ever to be blocked off; ideas from the West could not be stopped as Mag-nitsky would have wished. Like a swollen river suddenly confronted with a major obstacle, the flow was merely diverted into channels that had hitherto carried only a small trickle of ideas. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism replaced politics and religion in the mainstreams of Russian culture. For awhile it seemed that Russian intellectual life was to be diverted from practical concerns altogether. Many leading figures went abroad for visits that slowly lengthened into semi-exile. Many of Russia's finest minds moved into the realm of the distant or theoretical. In Kazan in the aftermath of the Magnitsky era, a young mathematician, Nicholas Lobachevsky, sought to supplant Euclid with a new "pan-geometry." His modern geometry, perhaps the greatest Russian contribution to scientific thought during the reign of Nicholas, earned him an unprecedented six terms as rector of Russia's easternmost university.5 Another area of scientific accomplishment lay in astronomy, which had been since the days of Kepler an area of active inquiry in the navigation-minded Baltic world. The long nights and northern lights stimulated interest, and as early as 1725 there was an observatory in St. Petersburg. Russia later fell heir to a larger observatory at Tartu, and in the i83o's Russia turned to the building of an observatory at Pulkovo, outside St. Petersburg, which became the largest in the world upon its completion in 1839. J-ts director, F. G. W. Struve, had turned from literary to astronomical studies during the late years of Alexander's reign, and his life's work at Pulkovo was a long study of a relatively nebulous astronomical subject: the Milky Way. Another fascination of the age was comets, which were a lively topic of speculative discussion, particularly before and after the rare appearance of Halley's comet in 1835.0 The most important philosophic journal of the Nicholaevan period called itself The Telescope.

There was also a romantic interest in exotic portions of the Russian Empire itself. One scientific explorer, who was forced to make a long dis-

claimer of any association with Masonic or secret societies upon returning from abroad in 1830, even idealized the frozen northern region of Novaia Zemlia (New Land).

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

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

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

The Flight to Philosophy

Old Russia had repeatedly and consistently rejected the need for any systematic secular philosophy. "The Russians are philosophers not in words, but in deeds,"8 Krizhanich wrote sadly after his unsuccessful efforts to introduce Western philosophic ideas into seventeenth-century Russia. Philos-

ophy was rejected not only because it was irrelevant to salvation but because it can lead men-in the words of an early nineteenth-century Old Believer- "to contemplate the overthrow of kingdoms."8