The Icon and the Axe

The passion for ideas and the development of psychological complexes about certain names and concepts, though generally characteristic of European romanticism, was carried to extremes in Russia. Bakunin's alleged fury at Raphael-like Belinsky's earlier rage at Hegel-is more understandable in terms of passion than of intellect. There was an unhealthy compulsion about some of the Russian attachment to classical antiquity and an element of sublimated sexuality in the creative activity of the period. The prodigious and original careers of Bakunin and Gogol both seem to have been developed partially as a compensation for sexual impotence. There is, in general, little room for women in the egocentric world of Russian romanticism. Lonely brooding was relieved primarily by exclusively masculine companionship in the lodge or circle. From Skovoroda to Bakunin there are strong hints of homosexuality, though apparently of the sublimated, Platonic variety. This passion appears closer to the surface in Ivanov's predilection for painting naked boys, and finds philosophic expression in the fashionable belief that spiritual perfection required androgyny, or a return to the original union of male and female characteristics. Ivanov in his preliminary sketches of the all-important head of Christ in his "Appearance" used as many feminine as masculine models. Gogol in his strange essay Woman compared the artist's effort to "transform his immortal idea into crude matter" with the effort to "embody woman in man."131

Women in romantic literature were often distant, idealized creatures, such as Schiller's Maid of Orleans or his Queen in Don Carlos. In the relatively rare cases in Russian literature of this period where a woman was simple and believable-like Tatiana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin-she

tended to be venerated almost as a saint. Zinaida Volkonsky was a kind of mother figure to Gogol and Ivanov in Rome; and the suffering, faithful wives of the exiled Decembrists became a favorite subject for fanciful and idealized poems.

The aristocratic intellectual whose outlook was still primarily heterosexual was often just as deeply unhappy in his personal life. Just as he tended to be experimental and inconstant in his attachment to ideas, so he was in his relations with the opposite sex. Indeed, frustration in love was at times relieved by infatuation with an idea (and vice versa). Always the egocentric lover, he embraced both women and ideas with a mixture of passion and fantasy that made a sustained relationship almost impossible. Whether the object was a woman or an idea, the embrace tended to be total and intercourse almost immediate. Then came a fleeting period of euphoria after which the aristocratic intellectual resumed his restless search to find somewhere else the ecstasy that eluded him. His dreamy idealism was transferred en bloc to some new object of ravishment; and all that was venal or ungratifying was associated with the former partner. Thus, ideological attachments were often an extension of personal ones, and neither area of life can be fully understood without some understanding of the other.

But it would be irreverent and inaccurate to concentrate too narrowly on physiological factors. The Russian romantics of the period liked to express their plight in terms of Schiller's Resignation. There were, according to the story, two flowers in the garden of life, the flower of hope and that of pleasure; and one cannot hope to pluck them both.132 The Russian aristocrats had no hesitation in choosing hope. Inconstant in faith and love-the other qualities that St. Paul had commended to the young church of Corinth -the anguished Russians held fast to hope. An implausible, impassioned sense of expectation was the most important single legacy of the aristocratic century to the century that lay ahead. Frustrated both personally and ideologically, the thinking elite of Russia sought with increasing intensity to find a prophetic message in history and art.

At the base of their plight lay not just a world-weary desire to "return to the womb" but also perhaps a subconscious nostalgia for the "other Russia" on which the aristocracy as a class had turned its back. They seemed almost to be feeling their way back to the dimly perceived, half-remembered world of Muscovy where belief was unquestioning and where truth was pronounced by the original prophetic historian and artist: the monastic chronicler and iconographer.

The missing Madonna was perhaps not that of Raphael, which they had never really known, but rather the Orthodox icon of the Mother of God. This icon stands at the center of a prophetic dream for which Tolstoy