The Icon and the Axe

Perun, the god of thunder and_creator of fire, held a pre-eminent_p_lace

in thepn^QijisJian^j^i^^bright-plumed firebird ?

specialplace in Russian myJtok2gyJb;^i_of_Mj^m,j^

lar Eerouoi3^r4stiawzeiL^the

Slavic name^oflthe prophet Eli|a^whQ__sent down fire on the enemies of Isra^aniascjejoo^djpjirawn jn_a fier^-chariot. The first form oTthe drama in Russia was the "furnace show," on the Sunday before Christmas, in which the three faithful Israelites-Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego- were rescued by God from Nebuchadnezzar's fire. Although taken over from Byzantium, this drama received a new richness of staging and musical setting in Russia. Real fire was introduced in the Russian version; and, after their rescue, the three Israelites circulated through church and town to proclaim that Christ was coming to save men, just as the angel of the Lord had rescued them from the furnace.37 In the first of the critical religious

controversies of the seventeenth century, the fundamentalists passionately and successfully defended the rite whereby flaming candles were immersed into the waters that were blessed on Epiphany to remind men that Christ came to "baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire."38 In 1618 the head of Russia's largest monastery was beaten by a mob and forced to perform a penance of a thousand prostrations a day for trying to do away with this uncanonical rite. One of the tracts written to denounce him, On the Enlightening Fire, accused him of trying to deny Russia "the tongue of fire that had descended upon the apostles."39 Fire was the weapon of the fundamentalists in the 1640's as they burned musical instruments, foreign-style paintings, and the buildings of the foreign community itself in Moscow. After the fundamentalists had been anathemized in 1667, many of these "Old Believers" sought self-immolation-often with all their family and friends in an oil-soaked wooden church-as a means of anticipating the purgative fires of the imminent Last Judgment.40

Apocalyptical fascination with the cleansing power of flames lived on in the traditions of primitive peasant rebellion-and indeed in the subsequent tradition of ideological aristocratic revolution. The atheistic anarchist Michael Bakunin? fascinated Europe during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-9 with his prophetic insistence that "tongues of flame" would shortly appear all over Europe to bring down the old gods. After hearing Wagner conduct a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig in 1849, Bakunin rushed forward to assure him that this work deserved to be spared the imminent world conflagration. Fascinated by this man (whom he called the "chief stoker" of revolution), Wagner was haunted by the fact that the opera house did perish in flames shortly thereafter, and may well have been influenced by Bakunin in his characterization of Siegfried, his own fire music, and his over-all conception of "The Downfall of the Gods."41 When Russia produced its own musical revolution in the early twentieth century, the symbol of fire was equally central: in Scriabin's "Poem of Fire" and the spectacular fusion of music with the dance in Stravinsky and Diaghilev's "Firebird."

Their firebird, like the two-headed imperial eagle, perished in the flames of the 1917 revolution, which the winds of war had fanned out of Lenin's seemingly insignificant Spark. Some poets of the old regime feTT whaFone oFTIierrrcalled "the attraction of the moth-soul to fiery death,"42 while one of the first and greatest to be killed by the new regime left behind a posthumous anthology called Pillar of Fire.4* During the terrorized silence that followed under Stalin, the stage production which evoked the greatest emotional response from its audience was probably Musorgsky's "popular music drama" Khovanshchina, which ends with the self-destruction of an

Old Believers' community-using real flame on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. The image recurs in the work of Pasternak; but the guestjon_of what arose from the cultural ashes of the Stalin era belongs to the epilogue rather than the prologue of our story. Suffice ???????? stress that the sense of spiritual intimacy with natural forces already present in earlier times was intensified in the inflammable forest world of Great Russia, where fire contended with fertility; the masculine force of Peran withjhe damp mother earth for control of a world in which human beings seemed strangely insignificant.