The Icon and the Axe

The populist movement represented a self-denying, penitential effort to establish some other connection. Aristocratic leaders of the movement cried forth their desire to reject "the Divine Raphael" and "immerse themselves in the ocean of real life,"22 "to drown in that grey, rough mass of the people, to dissolve irrevocably. . . ."23 Young activists went almost eagerly to prison or death for the futile populist cause, less in the manner olmodem revolutionary technHanjlSian of jbroo3mg romantic heroes.

*Ttnp^rceptibly the imageof the sea became that of self-annihilation: the dveath"wish fgFthe'Hjem^ ner's Tristan; the beckoning abyss of Novalis' Hymns to the Night~in which

"Memory dissolves in the cool shadow-waves."24 This romantic longing for self^mnMatio£j££ij£^^

of Nirvana by theannihilation of will, by losing oneself like a drop in the ocean. Schopenhauer, the most profound apostle of the futility of striving and the wisdom of suicide, drew inspiration from the Orient, as did Tolstoy, one of his many Russian admirers. Russia's other novelists of the Alex-andriajijgriod also give many literary rejections of Schopenhauer's gloomy" teaching. There is the death-wish figure of Svidrigailov in DostoeyiTcy's" Crime ~??????????, the heroic, ideological suicide of Kirillov in The Possessed. Then: IS IfiF'suTcTdaT^ouble drowning which ends Leskov's pow-erfuLnojyehaot 1^65:Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Turgenev's~~ works abound m suicides;26 and the influence of Schopenhauer is woven in with~ffieTmaw6f the sea in such passages as the darkly prophetic dream of his revolutionary heroine, Elena, just before the hero dies in On the Eve. This novel, which was finished in the same year as Wagner's Tristan and its strange, symbolic Liebestod, begins with Elena imagining herself drifting across a lake

in a boat with some people that she did not know. They were silent and sat quite still. No one was rowing the boat, which moved of its own accord. Elena was not feeling frightened, but she was bored; she wanted to know who these people were and why she was with them.

Out of this boredbm and confusion comes a revolutionary upheaval:

Shejopisd around and as she did so, the lake grew wider, the banks disappeared: andjjow it was""no~ longer ??????? but a heaving seafEIiSa1? unknown companions jumped up, "ffioTIting and waving their arms. . . . ElenaJeCOgiflZea meir races now: her falher_was among. Iheml Then-»--sort of white hurricane burst upon the waters.

Thus, the aristocracy itself was beinp; consnmed| In an effort to chart the course mat lay beyond, Turgenev turns the water into "endless snow," moves Elena from a boat to a sleigh, and gives her a new companion: "Katya, the little beggar-girl she had known years ago." Katyais. of course^. a prototype of the new populist saint: a "humiliated and insulted" figure who retains nonetrIeTess*inherent noMty_and imparts to the aristocratic Elena ??^?????????)^^

world"

"Katya, where are we going?" Elena asks; but Katya, like Gogol's troika and Pushkin's bronze horseman, does not answer. Instead, traditional

symbols of messianic deHyerjace.i^xJaefor«4je£.^^

of tEe_dieam:

She looked along the road and saw in the distance, through the blown snow, the outlines of a city with tall white towers and silver-gleaming cupolas. "Katya, Katya, is that Moscow? But no," she {\yumgnt}, "that's not Moscow, that is the §olovetsk monastery"; and she knew that in thereTin one of its innumerable narrow cells, sturTy*"ancl crowded to-' gethellike toe cells of a beehive-in mere bmitry Was locked up. "1 must free him."

Liberationcomes^however, only in death; and, atthjs very ???????-?»^

"a yawnffl^Tgrey abyss suddenly opened up in front of her." The sleigh I

plunged into it, and Katya's last distant cry 6f"'"Elena" proved in reality ?

the voice of her Bulgarian lover,Insarov, the "true Tsar" of the new Russia, I

its would-be revolutionary deliverer, saying "Elena, I am dying."""--J

In the metaphysics of late romanticism, death offers a kind of liberation; and the sea appears more as a place for obliteration than purification. Suggestions of such thinking are present even in Christian thinking. The Spanish martyr and mystic Raymond Lully (one of the most popular of medieval Western writers among Russians) had proclaimed "I want to die in an ocean of love";27 and Dante's Paradise had likened the peace of God to "that sea toward which all things move."28

In Chekhov's "Lights," the night lights of a half-finished railroad by the sea are likened to "the thoughts of man . . . scattered in disorder, stretching in a straight line toward some goal in the midst of darkness" leading the narrator to look down from a cliff at the "majestic, infinite, and forbidding" sea: