The Icon and the Axe

To the men of the "remarkable decade"-many of whom courted or committed suicide-Hamlet stood as a kind of mirror of their generation As with so many attitudes of the period, Hegel was their indirect and unacknowledged guide. Hegel had associated the melancholy and indecision of Hamlet with his subjectivism and individualism-his "absence of any formed view of the world" or "vigorous feeling for life"147-problems be* setting any modern man who stands outside the rational flow of history as a proud and isolated individuum. This pejorative Hegelian term for "individual" was precisely the label that BeUnsky adopted in his famous letter to Botkin rejecting Hegel. It is in the context of this strange struggle that Belinsky waged with Hegel-always accepting Hegel's basic terminology, definitions, and agenda-that one must read Belinsky's extended portrayal of Hamlet in 1838 as a true idealist dragged down by the venal world about him.148

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Belinsky was captivated not only by the quality of frustrated idealism in Hamlet but also by the intense way in which the part was played by Paul Mochalov. This extraordinary actor played the role of Hamlet repeatedly until his death in 1848, the last year of the "remarkable decade." So popular did the play become that simplified versions began to be given in the informal theatricals presented by serfs seeking to entertain their landowners; and the term "quaking Hamlet" became a synonym for coward in popular speech.149

Mochalov was the first in a series of great stage personalities that was to make the Russian theater of the late imperial period unforgettable. The remarkable feature of Mochalov's acting-like that of Nizhinsky's dancing and Chaliapin's singing-was his ability to be the part. Just as later generations found it difficult to conceive of Boris Godunov without Chaliapin, or of The Specter of the Rose without Nizhinsky, so Russians of the forties could not think of Hamlet without Mochalov. The simple peasant, of course, always thought of Christ as he appeared on icons. Popular saints were "very like" the figures on icons, and the aristocratic hero felt impelled to become "very like" the figures on the stage. Stankevich confessed that he came to regard the theater as a "temple" and was deeply influenced in his personal patterns of behavior by watching Mochalov.150

Turgenev used Hamlet as a symbol of the late-Nicholaevan generation of intellectuals in his famous essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote." Having just created one of the most famous Hamlet figures in Russian literature in his first novel, Rudin, Turgenev now spoke of the contrasting but also typical Quixotic type: the uncomplicated enthusiast who loses himself in the service of an ideal, unafraid of the laughter of his contemporaries. Such figures were to become prominent in the Quixotic social movement of subsequent decades, but "Hamletism" remained typical of much of Russian thought. Indeed, many of Turgenev's subsequent literary creations were to end in suicide.

The conflict of these two types is mirrored in the career of one of the most interesting thinkers of late Nicholaevan Russia: V. S. Pecherin. There seems a kind of poetic justice in the similarity of his name to that of Pechorin, Lermontov's wandering and brooding "hero of our time." For this real-life Pecherin was an even more peripatetic and romantic figure. He moved from philology to poetry, from socialism to Catholicism, to an English monastery, and finally to an Irish hospital, where he died in 1885 as a chaplain to the sick-a distant admirer and faint echo of the populist movement in Russia. Yet he was tortured throughout-not so much by the fear that his ideas were Utopian as by gnawing uncertainty whether life itself was worth living. He had in his student days been driven to "the Hamlet

question" by Max Stirner, whose lectures at Berlin inspired him to embark on one of the many unfinished trilogies of the Russian nineteenth century. The first part of this untitled drama is a weird apotheosis of Stirner's idea that man can achieve divinity through his own uncaused act of self-assertion: suicide. The leading character (with the heroic Germanic name of Woldemar) not only kills himself but convinces his lover (with the spiritualized name of Sophia) to do likewise. "Sophia," he tells her, "thy name means Wisdom, Divine Wisdom. . . . There is but one question: To be or not to be."161