The Icon and the Axe

The search for new forms of art and life in the midst of social dislocation, industrial development, and urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth century. The symbol of a ship at sea in search of another shore. The gradual turn to social thought during the late years of Nicholas I's reign; the influence of moralistic French socialism; the Petrashevsky circle of the 1840's; the transfer of hopes to Russia by Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and Michael Bakunin (1814-76) after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in the West. Railroads as a bearer of change and symbol of apocalypse in the countryside.

The ironic growth of revolutionary radicalism during the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II (1855-81). The spread of iconoclastic materialism among the younger generation, or "new men," during the early 1860's-the very period in which Alexander liberated the serfs and instituted trial by fury and a measure of provincial self-government. The turn toward prophetic extremism in the 1870's: the rise in Moscow of reactionary Pan-Slavism based on Darwinistic ideas of struggle for survival; and in St. Petersburg the rise of revolutionary populism based on a Proudhonist idealization of "the people" and a Comtian religion of humanity.

The peculiar genius of art in the age of Alexander II, seeking both the remorseless realism of the materialistic sixties and the idealization of the Russian people of the visionary seventies. The painting of "the wanderers," the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin (1855-88); the music of the Russian national school, particularly the great historical operas of Modest Musorg-sky (1839-81); and the psychological novels of Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-81) with their dramatic penetration "from the real to the more real" and their ideological efforts to overcome the schisms in Russian life and consciousness.

Chekhovian despair of the period of "small deeds" during the reign of Alexander III (1881-94). The inability of either the reactionary Orthodoxy of Alexander's tutor, Constantine Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), or of the unorthodox anarchism of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) to provide effective leadership in late imperial Russia. The emergence amidst the accelerating tempo of life in the 1890's of three new perspectives that broke with

the prevailing atmosphere of subjectivism and despondency as well as with the parochialism of previous ideologies. Constitutional liberalism at last took root in Russia, producing an articulate spokesman in Paul Miliukov (1859-1943) and a Constitutional Democratic Party. Dialectical materialism commanded attention through the writings of George Plekhanov (1856-1918), the increased intellectual interest in problems of economic development, and the formation of a Marxist, Social Democratic Party. Mystical idealism received from Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) a brilliant new apologia, which provided the basis for a revival of Russian poetry and a long-delayed development of formal philosophical study within Russia.

With the death of Nicholas I, defeat in the Crimean War, and the preparations for peasant emancipation, the realization rapidly grew in the late 1850's that Russia was heading for profound changes. The English and French ships which brought troops to Russian soil during the Crimean War did not disrupt Russian culture nearly so much as the new techniques and ideas that streamed in peacefully after the Treaty of Paris. For the reign of Alexander II saw not just another case of cautious contact with "guile from beyond the seas" but the beginnings of a massive, irreversible process of ^modernization. WithJheJEreeing of the serfs, the new jncentives for foreign ihV5sfinent, and the beginnings of industrialization, Alexander II cut Russia off forever from its static, agrarian past. But neither he nor anyone else was able to determine exactly what form of society and culture the modernizing empire would adopt.

The dividing line that falls across Russian history in the mid-nineteenth century is a3sfflTcTlrofa~aiTthe many others which set off periods of insularity from "those of 'Westernization iii Russian history. For the innovations that began seriously in Alexander's reign involved the entire nation and not merely selected regions and groups. Industrialization and urbanization -however fitful and uneven in development-altered the physical sur-roundings"~and social relations of the Russian people in a profoundly disturbing manner. Up until this, the last century of Russian history, all developments in thought and culture were concentrated in a small minority. The peasant masses had suffered on in silence and been heard from only in military campaigns, peasant insurrections, and sectarian movements.