The Icon and the Axe

The Crimea had increasingly attracted aristocratic visitors in the years since Catherine incorporated it into the empire in 1783 and compared the region to "a fairy tale from the 1001 nights" after a visit four years later.97 The embellished account of a journey through the Crimea in 1820 by the tutor in classical languages to the future Tsar Nicholas I and the Grand Duke Constantine lent a glow of classical and pseudo-classical glory to what Pushkin was moved to call the "enchanted periphery" of the Russian empire.98 Though known in this period by the classical name of Taurida (Tauris), the more familiar, Tatar-derived name of Crimea also came into use-a reminder that this was the land of a recently vanquished Moslem people. Legends of Moslem magnificence began to mingle with memories of classical antiquity in the Russian romantic imagination. Pushkin's glittering pseudo-historical poem "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" became one of his most popular works and immortalized the Tatar capital.

Pushkin's "Fountain," as distinct from Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets (or Lermontov's Hero of Our Time), has a balanced structure and a plot free from morbidity or melodrama. His picture of the captive Polish maiden at the court of the Tatar khan in Bakhchisarai inspired one of the most popular ballets of the Stalin era, and became, through the magic of Galina Ulanova's characterization, a suggestive symbol of a European heritage in bondage to despotic, quasi-Oriental rule.

Pushkin remained essentially a classical European even while staying inside Russia and visiting no more than the periphery of the classical world. Gogol and Ivanov, on the other hand, became profoundly and selfconsciously Russian even while leaving their native land and journeying to the very heart of classical culture: to Rome, the artistic and religious capital of the Western world. A Russian colony had assembled there around Zinaida Volkonsky. She had brought with her a rich art collection and memories of her intimate friendship with Alexander I and the poet Venevitinov. She seems to have viewed herself as a kind of Russian Joan of Arc-having written, and sung the title role in, an opera of that name.99 It was in Rome, in the shadow of the Volkonsky villa, that Gogol and Ivanov were to create their greatest masterpieces.

The two artists brought to their new home a profound conviction that their work must in some way exemplify Russia's redemptive spiritual mission in the world. They sought, as it were, to provide the artistic guides and weapons for the "spiritual conquest of Europe" that the prophets of the

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thirties were predicting for Russia. Gogol had a special sense of responsibility born of the feeling that he had succeeded Pushkin as the first man of Russian letters. Ivanov felt a similar sense of special responsibility as the son of the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

Each man devoted his life to one great work which was never really completed. Each became more politically conservative toward the end of his life (as did many of the Slavophiles), believing that Nicholas I and the existing powers could alone bring about a new order. Most important-and fateful for the subsequent history of Russian creative art-each came to believe that aesthetic problems should be subordinated to moral and religious ones. Each remained unmarried and apparently unmoved by women. Each life ended in strange wanderings, partial mental derangement, and a death that was unnecessary and-like that of Venevitinov, Pushkin, and Lermontov before them-brought on by their own actions. Unlike these earlier poets, however, the new prophetic artists included in their wanderings the idea of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and ascetic self-mortification.

Their work was-as they had wished it to be-uniquely Russian and quite unlike anything else in the world of art. By commanding the fascinated attention of Russia in their last years, they helped excite others with their blend of stark realism and aesthetic moralism. They swept aside not only the conventions of classicism but the sentimentality of romanticism as well. Despite their final conservatism, these two figures were idolized by radical and disaffected intellectuals who helped invest their anguish with an aura of holiness that had previously been confined to saints and princes.

The main point about Gogol's advent into Russia is that Russia was, or at least appeared to be, a "monumental," "majestic," "great power," yet Gogol walked over these real or imaginary "monuments" with his thin weak feet and crushed them all, so that not a trace of them remained.100