The Icon and the Axe

Belinsky was not at all embarrassed by his own contradictions and convolutions. He was not trying to transplant the clean, but remote categories of classical thought to the Russian scene-let alone the tidy, confining categories of timid bourgeois thinkers. "For me," he wrote, "to think, feel, understand, and suffer are one and the same thing."135 Books casually received in the West drove him and his contemporaries into intense personal and spiritual crises. They were pored over by Belinsky and other literary and bibliographical critics for hints of the "new revelation" and prophecy that Schelling and Saint-Martin had taught them to look for in literature.

Belinsky was particularly concerned with discovering among his Russian contemporaries examples of the new prophetic art his teacher Nadezh-din had insisted lay beyond both classicism and romanticism. The great Russian novels of the sixties and seventies can be considered examples of

such art, and it is impossible fully to understand the genius of those works without considering how it was influenced by, and responsive to, the traditions of philosophic and critical intensity pioneered by Belinsky.

The Russians looked to literature for prophecy rather than entertainment. There is almost no end to the number of Western literary influences on Russian thought. They range from inescapable ones like Schiller, Hoffmann and George Sand136 to all-but-forgotten second-rate figures like Victor-Joseph Jouy, whose depiction of Parisian life was transposed to St. Petersburg and given new intensity by Gogol.137 Perhaps the most important of all was Sir Walter Scott, whom Gogol called "the Scottish sorcerer," and whose works inspired the writing of history as well as of historical novels.138 Pseudo-medieval romances helped give an active, historical cast to the "spiritual knighthood" of higher order Masonry. Russians dreamed of being "a knight for an hour," to cite the title of a famous Nekrasov poem; or of recreating the masculine friendship and implausible heroism of Posa and Don Carlos in opposing the authoritarianism of the Grand Inquisitor and Philip II in Schiller's Don Carlos. They also identified themselves with the metaphysical quest of such favorite romantic heroes as Byron's Cain and Don Juan, Goethe's Faust and Wilhelm Meister.

But there was one Uterary character who seemed particularly close to the soul of the aristocratic century. He was the favorite stage figure of the "marvelous decade," the subject of one of Belinsky's longest articles, and a source of unique fascination for modern Russian thought: Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The romantic interest in the melancholy prince began in the eastern Baltic, on the gloomy marshes that divide the German and Slavic worlds. It was in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) that the "magus of the North," Johann Hamann, first taught the young Herder to regard the works of Shakespeare as a form of revelation equal to the Bible and to use Hamlet as his basic textbook for this new form of symbolic exegesis.139 Hamann was an influential pietist preacher, a student of the occult, and a bitter foe of what he felt to be the excessive rationalism of his neighbor and contemporary, Immanual Kant. If Kant's influence was great, indeed decisive, on the subsequent development of Western philosophy, the immediate influence on ordinary thinking of men like Hamann was far greater, particularly in Eastern Europe. For better or worse, Kant's critical philosophy never gained a serious hearing in Russia until the late nineteenth century, whereas Hamann's quasi-theosophic idea of finding symbolic philosophic messages in literary texts became a commonplace of Russian thought.

By the time Herder moved east from Konigsberg to Riga, Russia had already welcomed Hamlet as one of the first plays to be regularly performed

on the Russian stage. Sumarokov started the Russian critical discussion of the tragedy with his immodest claim to have improved on the original by his garbled translation of 1747.140 Whether or not Herder first imparted his fascination with the original version directly while in Russian-held Riga or only indirectly through his later impact on German romantic thought, Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.