The Icon and the Axe

The second part of the trilogy, entitled The Triumph of Death, elaborates this theme with ghoulish delight, as King Nemesis watches the destruction of the entire world-announced by a storm, a musical chorus, and five falling stars representing the slain Decembrist leaders. The chorus in praise of death echoes some of the dark thoughts of Pushkin's "Hymn in Praise of the Plague" and draws freely from both apocalyptical and romantic symbolism. Death appears as a youth on a white horse and is hailed as "the God of freedom, the God of striving." Then the stage is cleared for one last monologue, which ends this second (and last) part of the trilogy. It is a song of the dying poet. "The poet," says Pecherin, "is Don Quixote . . . (who) will save the fatherland . . . find the new world for us." Then, in an ending that runs off into dots to indicate its incompleteness, the "dying poet" speaks of Russia as the land of "the brightening dawn" and says: "I shall pour forth abundant strength on Russia, and the steeled Russian knife . . ."162

If "the Hamlet question" was never resolved by the aristocratic intellectuals, preoccupation with it nonetheless served to clear away secondary concerns. Indeed, the oft-ridiculed generation of "the fathers," the romantic, "superfluous" aristocrats of the forties, in some ways did even more to tear Russian thought away from past Russian practices and traditions than the iconoclastic "sons," the self-proclaimed "new men" of die sixties. The fantasy-laden romanticism of the Nicholaevan age swept away petty thoughts with the same decisiveness with which actors were swept off the stage in the last act of Hamlet or the final scene of The Triumph of Death. The passion for destruction which burst onto Europe in the late forties in the person of Bakunin was only the most extreme illustration of the philosophic desperation produced by the interaction of German ideas, Slavic enthusiasm, and the personal frustrations and boredom of a provincial aristocracy. Bakunin illustrates as well the transfer of the vision of a "brightening dawn," of "abundant strength," and "steeled knives" from the lips of a "dying poet" to the life of a living revolutionary. His volcanic career anticipated, and in some degree influenced, the proliferation of quixotic

causes and crusades which swept through Russia during the eventful reign of Alexander II. All of these movements-Jacobinism, populism, Pan-Slavism, and variants thereof-elude the usual categories of social and political analysis and can be seen as parts of an implausible yet heroic effort to realize in life that which had been anticipated in prophecy but could not be realized in art: the final act of Pecherin's play, the Paradise of Gogol's Poema, the new icons for Ivanov's temple.

One of the powerful if invisible forces driving Russian aristocrats to the "cursed questions" was the oppressive, inescapable boredom of Russian life. To Francophile or Germanophile aristocrats, Russia appeared as the immense and final province of Europe. Life was an unrelieved series of petty incidents in one of those indeterminate towns "in N province," in which the stories of Gogol generally take place. Pent-up hysteria Was released in prophetic utterance. Even in their travels Russians complained with Belinsky: "Boredom is my inseparable companion."153 They were impelled onward to question the value of life itself by the feeling expressed in the world-weary last lines of Gogol's tragicomic "How the Two Ivans Quarreled": "Life is boring on this earth, gentlemen."

When a revolutionary social transformation finally came to Russia in the twentieth century, Stalin's "new Soviet intelligentsia" sought to ridicule Hamlet as a symbol of the brooding and indecisive old intelligentsia. A production of Hamlet during the period of the first five-year plan portrayed the Danish prince as a fat and decadent coward who recites "To be or not to be" half-drunk in a bar.154 A critic of that period went so far as to claim that the real hero of the play was Fortinbras. He alone had a positive goal; and the fact that he came from victory in battle to pronounce the final words of the play symbolized rational, militant modernity triumphing over the "feudal morality" of pointless bloodletting that had dominated the last act prior to his arrival.155

Modernization under Stalin was to be far from a rational process, however; and the Russian stage was not to be dominated entirely by faceless Fortinbras figures. The aristocratic century left a legacy of unresolved anguish and unanswered questions that continued to agitate the more complex culture that emerged in the following century of economic growth and social upheaval.

~P  ? *

ON TO NEW SHORES

The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

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