The Icon and the Axe

Closely identified with classical antiquity in Russian eyes was the neoclassical Renaissance, which Russians also idealized. BeUnsky's sobriquet "furious Vissarion" was a conscious adoption of Ariosto's Orlando Fu-rioso. Batiushkov built up a cult of the Italian Renaissance. Many lyric poets compared themselves to Petrarch, and "universal men" like Venevitinov likened themselves to Pico della Mirandola. The literary circles of the age looked for inspiration to the Neoplatonic mysticism of Ficino's Academy.

The nostalgia which Russians began to feel even during this period for the measured form of Pushkin's poetry and the broader vistas of Russian life under Catherine and Alexander bears tribute to the sense of lost opportunity which Russians were later to feel about this age. This was to remain the golden age of Russian letters, in which classical forms and Renaissance exuberance first struck real roots in Russian soil.

Perhaps the finest legacy of this vanishing neo-classicism was the rich supply of palaces, parks, and public buildings that had been built in most of the cities and many of the estates of Russia. There was a last flurry of building in this grand ensemble manner during the early years of Nicholas' reign: the triumphal gate over the Tver entrance to Moscow from the St. Petersburg road; the Bolshoi Theater and Square in Moscow; the imposing

complex around the Synod and senate building in one part of St. Petersburg (and around the library, theater, and university buildings in another); and the stately ring of library, cathedral, and government buildings around the great square in Helsinki, the new capital of Russian-occupied Finland. The building of St. Isaac's Cathedral and the refashioning of the surrounding square in St. Petersburg were the last of these monumental efforts. Henceforth the style was to be more eclectic and utilitarian, the architectural development of the great cities more piecemeal and haphazard.

The forty years of work on St. Isaac's finally came to an end in 1858, the year in which Ivanov returned to die in St. Petersburg with his long-labored canvas. Ivanov's painting and sketches failed to inspire painters to remain faithful to the "technique of Raphael" just as decisively as St. Isaac's failed to encourage continued architectural allegiance to the neo-classical style of the past.124

The highest symbol of the classical culture that the Russians longed to share and the quintessence of ideal beauty to their romantic imagination was Raphael's Sistine Madonna. On exhibit in Dresden-an accustomed stopover point for Russians traveling by land to Western Europe-the painting inspired Russians to sigh for a world of "beauty and freedom! . . . the madonna of Raphael and the primitive chaos of mountain heights."125 Zhukovsky made frequent pilgrimages to the painting and wrote of it in the true romantic spirit:

Ah, not in our world dwells

The genius of pure beauty: Only for a time it visits us

From the heights of heaven.126

The painting became a kind of icon of Russian romanticism. A Russian visitor of the fifties wrote that after looking at the painting he was "deprived of all capability for thinking or talking about anything else."127 By that time, the painting had become an object of heated controversy as well as extreme veneration. Lunin cited it as a principal factor in his conversion to Catholicism;128 Belinsky, moving in the opposite direction, felt obliged to condemn it as a mere aristocratic portrait:

She looks at us, the distant plebeians, with cold benevolence, fearful at one and the same time either of being dirtied by our looks or of bringing grief to us.129

Herzen contended that the face of Mary revealed an inner realization that the child she held was not her own. Uvarov spoke of "the Virgin of Dresden" as if Dresden itself had been the site of new miracles.180 Dostoev-

sky kept a large print of the painting over his writing desk as a symbol of the combination of faith and beauty which he hoped would save the world.

But the feeling was growing in the fifties that beauty in truth "dwells not in our world." If men of Gogol's and Ivanov's talent could succeed only in depicting earthly suffering, perhaps there were no other worlds-or at least no .other worlds that could be reached through art. Chernyshevsky, whose admiration for Gogol and Ivanov had helped lead him out of the seminary, began to cast doubt on the intrinsic merit of art in his Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality in 1855. It was only a short stride to Pisarev's declaration that a cook in St. Petersburg had done more for humanity than Raphael; to the slogan "boots rather than Raphael" (or in some versions, Shakespeare); and to the popular revolutionary legend that Bakunin had urged that the Sistine Madonna be pitched onto the barricades to keep the slavish soldiers of the old order from firing on his revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849.