The Icon and the Axe

Ivanov's failure to find a new religious philosophy-or a philosophical religion-represents the frustration of a pursuit that had begun in higher order Masonry. Higher order Masonry was known to its adepts as the "royal art";120 and the prophetic artists of the Nicholaevan era had sought to find the art forms for the new kingdom. But no one was yet sure what kind of a kingdom it would be, and artists tended to become either haunted by the God they had lost or driven to madness in pursuit of His inner secrets. Ivanov's failure only posed in more dramatic terms the nagging question that Herzen had asked as early as 1835:

Where is our Christ? Are we students without a teacher, apostles without a Messiah? 121

In their anguish, thinkers of the late Nicholaevan era looked for a messiah almost everywhere: in the person of Nicholas I (Ivanov), the holy wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, suffering Poland (Mickiewicz), the Ukrainian peasantry (Shevchenko), or among the ascetic elders of the Optyna Pustyn (Kireevsky). The religious works of Gogol and Ivanov made Christ no longer appear to be a source of deliverance or tenderness. Ivanov's picture of Christ as a lonely, suffering, and uncertain man was reflected and magnified in subsequent nineteenth century paintings: suffering predominating in the work of Ge, brooding loneliness in that of Kramskoy. The seductive thought that the aristocratic reformer himself might prove to be the messiah was suggested by Pleshcheev, the prophetic "first poet" of the Petrashevsky circle in the late forties, who exhorted that confused circle of reformers to "believe that thou shalt meet, like the Savior, disciples along the way."122

As if to clear the stage for new and less narrowly aristocratic movements, the brief period from 1852 to 1858 claimed the lives of a host of gifted figures of the Nicholaevan age: Nadezhdin, Chaadaev, Granovsky, Gogol, Ivanov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky. None of these were old men; but they had burnt themselves out like those who had died even earlier and at much younger ages: Venevitinov, Pushkin, Stankevich, Lermontov, and Belinsky. Out of their collective effort had come an art that was truly national and rich in prophetic overtones. Khomiakov, who was himself to die in i860, wrote the epitaph for this chapter of Russian culture in a letter of 1858 on the occasion of Ivanov's death:

He was in painting what Gogol was in writing and Kireevsky in philosophy. Such people do not live long, and that is not accidental. To explain their death it is not enough to say that the air of the Neva hangs heavy or that cholera enjoys honorary citizenship in Petersburg . . . another cause leads these laborers prematurely to the grave. Their work is not mere personal labor. . . . These are powerful and rich personalities who lie ill not just for themselves; but in whom we Russians, all of us, are compressed by the burden of our strange historical development.123

The Missing Madonna

The waning of classical form in art and life was one of the many fateful results of the reign of Nicholas I. His official ideologists-Uvarov and Pletnev-had found the literary heritage of classical antiquity largely

incompatible with the new doctrine of official nationality. The continued loyalty of the aristocratic intellectuals to the distant world of classical antiquity and the neo-classical Renaissance became a sign of their estrangement from official ideology.

The most gifted creative figures of the late Nicholaevan period- Gogol, Ivanov, and Tiutchev-had gone to Rome in hopes of forging some kind of link between the awakening culture of Russia and classical antiquity. Slavophiles sought these links no less than Westernizers; Shevyrev's lectures did much to introduce Russia to the wonders of classical literature. Herzen called his oath to avenge the Decembrists "Hanniballic." Catherine was the "Semiramis" and St. Petersburg the "Palmyra of the North." Most masonic lodges bore names from classical mythology, and there was an abundance of classical statuary, Latin and Greek anthologies, and classical captions and titles. A century of aristocratic poetry was in a sense framed by the figure of Homer. The first poem to enjoy real popularity was Fenelon's continuation of the Odyssey, TeMmaque, and the first important Russian epic poet, Kheraskov, was known as "the Russian Homer." The most eagerly awaited poetic accomplishment in the late years of Nicholas* reign (after the death of Pushkin and Lermontov) was Zhukovsky's translation of the Odyssey. Both Skovoroda and Kireevsky were called "the Russian Socrates" by their followers.