The Icon and the Axe

later sought an explanation from the elders of Optyna Pustyn. In the dream a single candle is burning in a dark cave before a solitary icon of the Mother of God. The cave is full of faceless people praying with lamentation that the time of the Antichrist has come; while Metropolitan Philaret and Gogol's fanatical spiritual guide, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, stand trembling outside, unable to enter. The "fear and trembling" which Kierkegaard found missing from the complacent Christendom of nineteenth-century Europe is literally present in this dream-as it is in the ugly, shivering, naked old men that John the Baptist is trying to lead into the river Jordan in one of Ivanov's best sketches,133 and in the trembling, skeletal figure of Gogol being forcibly bled by leeches as he lay uncovered and trembling on his deathbed underneath an icon of the Virgin.

Father Ambrose explained to Tolstoy that the dream illustrates the plight of Christian Russia which "looks with lively feeling, sadness, and even fear on the sad state of our present faith and morality, but will not approach the queen of heaven and pray to her for intercession like those in the cave."

When a trickle of inteUectuals began to return to the Church in the late imperial period, one of the converts likened the process to an exchange of the Sistine Madonna for the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.134 In both cases the missing God was feminine-linked not only to the Christian image of the Virgin but also perhaps to the "damp mother earth" of pre-Christian Russia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci of European romanticism.

The "Hamlet Question"

Although none of the "cursed questions" were fully answered in the "remarkable decade," the debate now tended to take place within the framework of certain basic assumptions. Truth was to be found within rather than beyond history. Russia had some special destiny to realize in the coming redemption of humanity. A new, prophetic art was to announce and guide men to this destiny. The golden age "lay not behind us but ahead": in a time when man's Promethean labors will end and he will come to rest both physically and spiritually in eternal and ecstatic union with the elusive feminine principles of truth and beauty.

Within this vague romantic cosmology, however, the Russians pressed on relentlessly, seeking more complete answers. What was this truth, this destiny? Where was this feminine principle to be found? And, above all, what specific message does prophetic art bring to us?

Thus, however impractical their ideas may seem to the Western mind, the driving force behind Russian thought during this period was an essentially practical impulse to find more specific answers to these psychologically compelling questions. They were not interested in form or logic, which were part of the artificial "pseudo-classicism" of the eighteenth century. They were not afraid to seek truth in fantasies and symbols, though they were no longer fascinated with the occult for its own sake as in the Alexandrian age. The men of the "marvelous decade" wanted answers to the questions that arose inescapably, existentially, along the new path they had chosen. Any kind of inconsistency or idiosyncrasy was permissible as long as a thinker remained dedicated to "intelligence" in the prophetic spiritual sense in which Saint-Martin and Schwarz had understood the word; as long as they remained what their Schellingian and Hegelian professors had commended them to be: "priests of truth."

In their heated desire to find answers for the "cursed questions," the aristocratic intellectuals mixed fact, fantasy, and prophecy at every turn. They created a unique fusion of intense sincerity and ideological contradiction, which has been the fascination and despair of almost every serious chronicler of Russian thought. Though not an aristocrat, Belinsky, "the furious Vissarion," epitomized this combination. The special authority which he-and his chosen ideological medium of literary criticism-came to occupy in the culture of the late imperial period is not understandable without appreciating the sense of human urgency that lay behind the Russian quest for answers. In a famous scene that became part of the developing folklore of the Russian intelligentsia, Belinsky refused to interrupt one particularly heated all-night discussion, professing amazement that his friends could consider stopping for breakfast when they had not yet decided about the question of God's existence.