The Icon and the Axe

lived on as a symbol of rebellion. The radical intellectuals were accused by moderate liberals as early as the 1850's of "seeking out lovers of the axe" and inviting Russians "to sharpen their axes."51 Nicholas Dobroliubov, the radical journalist of the early 1860's, summarized the Utopian socialist program of his friend Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? as "Calling Russia to Axes." The first call inside Russia for a Jacobin revolution, the proclamation "Young Russia" on Easter Monday of the same 1862, proclaimed prophetically that Russia will become "the first country to realize the great cause of Socialism," and announced "we will cry 'To your axes' and strike the imperial party without sparing blows just as they do not spare theirs against us."52 By the late 1860's, the notorious Nechaev had set up a secret "society of the axe" and young Russia had begun to develop-a conspiratorial tradition of revolutionary organization that was to help inspire Lenin's own What Is To Be Done? of 1902: the first manifesto of Bolshevism. The sound of an axe offstage at the end of Chekhov's last play^ ^ The Cherry Orchard, announced the coming end of Imperial Russia. The terrifying purges of the 1930's, which brought to an end the hopes of the original visionary revolutionaries, finally played themselves out in distant Mexico in 1940 with the sinking of jmjice axe into the most fertile and prophetic brain of the Revolution: that of Leon Trotsky.

Thojejjdioopposed revolution as the answeTlo Russia's problems often did so by playing back the old theme of the ravished forest eventually triumphing over the axes of men. The felled tree goes to its death more gracefully than dying man in Tolstoy's Three Deaths; and a fresh green sapling was planted over his grave by his request. Leonov's powerful novel of the mid-fifties, The Russian Forest, indicates that the Soviet regimelVjf played a key role in cutting down the forest, which becomes a symBolnoTT)I‹r " Russian culture. If Leonov leaves the reader uncertain whether he stands on the side of the axe or the fallen trees, the political custodians of the Revolution made it clear that they stood behind the axe. Khrushchev publicly reminded Leonov that "not all trees are useful . . . from time to time the forest must be thinned." But Khrushchev himself was felled by political fortune in 1964; while Leonov, still standing, reminded his successors in power that "an iron object-that is, an axe-without the application of intelligence can do a great deal of mischief in centralized state use."5'1 Returning to the primitive forest hut of the early Russian peasant, one

finds that there was one object which invariably hung next to the axe on the crude interior wall: areligious painting_on_wood. knowrno~fhe"Russians as a "form"Jofrraz), but better known by the original Greek word for picture or ?-likeness: eikon. Icons were found wherever people lived and gatheredjn ‹5› Russia-omnipresent remindersof the7aTfh\\?rTgave the frojitijranan_of the east^a sense ofhigher purpose.

The_history_of_ijcons_reyeals both the underlying continuity with Byzantium and the originality^rTRu^ian~cultural development. Thougli. there is probably a continuous history back to the facial death portraits of early Egypt and Syria, holy pictures first became. objecls_of systematic veneration and religious instruction in sixth- and seventh-century Byzantium at the time of a great growth in monasticism.54 In the eighth century, the original iconoclasts led a movement to reduce the power of monks and destroy all icons. After a long struggle, they were defeated and icon veneration was officially endorsed at the second Council of Nicaea in 787: the last of the seven councils recognized as universally binding by the Orthodox world.

The Slays were.cjM}yerted_in the wake of this "triumph of Orthodoxy" -as the council was popularly called-ajnd inherited the rediscovered Byzantine enthusiasm for religious painting. A sixth-century legendTEaFtHe first icon was miraculously printed by Christ himself out of compassion for the leper king of Edessa became the basis forjTiost^f Russian tales^about icons "not ??????? by hands." The triumphal carrying of-this icon from EdesslTtoTS^tantfnople on August 16, 944, became a feast day in Russia, and provided a model for the many icon-bearing processions which became so important in Russian church ritual.55