The Icon and the Axe

Far below me, behind a veil of thick darkness, the sea kept up a low angry growl. . . . And it seemed to me that the whole world consisted only of the thoughts straying through my head . . . and of an unseen power murmuring monotonously somewhere below. Afterwards, as I sank into a doze, it began to seem that it was not the sea murmuring, but my thoughts, and that the whole world consisted in nothing but me. Concentrating the whole world in myself in this way, I . . . abandoned myself to the sensation I was so fond of: the sensation of fearful isolation, when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. It is a proud, demonic sensation, only possible to Russians, whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as their plains, their forests, and their snow.29

An artist rather than a metaphysician, Chekhov looks_in_the end to

"the expression ??^?"???;?~??11?~??£?? rather than to the logical con-

clusion of his thoughtsT^neHfiiTOroT"^rather than__

commits suicidef j^""ls^IlieTbby^^elf_^oves froJTl_tteJ?leJoiir?rlatic__, suicidelittne" end of his firsTgreat play, The Sea Gull, through an unsuccess-

un to i\ew snores

ful suicide in Uncle Vanya, to the elegiac beauty of his last play, The Cherry Orchard, in which there is no attempt at suicide-or any other form of escape from the lingering sadness of late Imperial Russia. Nonetheless, Chekhov's fascination with what he was the first to call "the Hamlet question" helped keep thoughts of suicide before his audiences.

To some extent drowning was a romantic imitation of Ophelia in Hamlet or of the real-life Byron. But drowning had abo_teen_aii-ijBportaflt

?

form of ritual execution in Old Russia. Pre^hristian beliefsJjadL survived about the need to propitiate jealous~*wite7"^^ritsr^A^s_J^_missing nf^madonna ^ amp;1???~?7?????^?'^those transformed figures of drowned ?| women who became^aTHnd of enchanted ???? maiden ffii the florid pagan \ mythology of "Russian romanticism. Perhaps also somewhere at the bottom -of iHaETiay a purer existence than existed on land-perhaps the "shining city of Kitezh" which was said to have descended uncorrupted to the bottom of a trans-Volga lake at the time of the first Mongol invasion.

A final symbol increasingly connectedwith the sea in the late imperial period waTthat oflne'coming apocalypse. Belief in "a past "of "comffigTSSa is one of the oldest and most universal wajs in which man's poetic imagination has expressed his fear of divine judgment and retribution.30 There may be traces of the Eastern myth of "an insatiable sea" seeking to inundate all humanity in the belief among Old Believers in the Urals that a great flood was coming and that God's people must flee to the mountains, where alone they could be rescued by God.31

Fear of the sea_was perhaps to be expected among an earthbound

people whose discovejj^fjbeje^^discove|y__

of the £utside worJ_dJ_Jbemfact that the we£^ard-looking__capital~Qf_St. Petersburg was built on land reel aimed from--and periodically threatened by-^the.sea.gaxe_sgecial vividnessJoJhe_BjbJicjJJmagw^_rf^e_fJ£od. The occurrence of the first important flood of the city in 1725, the very year of Peter's death, encouraged those who had resisted Peter's innovations to speak of a "second flood" and the coming end of the world. Belief that these calamities represented the wrathful judgment of God was encouraged by the curious fact that two of the greatest subsequent floods of the city occurred almost exactly one hundred and two hundred years later, at the very times when two other imperial innovators had just died: Alexander I and Lenin respectively. In both subsequent cases, the death and flood occurred at the end of periods of hopeful expectation and broughTmore prosaic, re-\A preserve forces into power: Nicholas I and StalmTTEusTIKi" ncrThistoricai 2* imagination!^

colnHdencis."™"""" *-«---"^-

Particularly after Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman," the image of a flood

consuming St. Petersburg recurs frequently in the literature of the late imperial period. Whereas fire was the enduring fear and symbol of judgment -j in the wooden_w£dd_r^_Moscoffi,. the sea prWMea]^chasymbbriOTTne~i2^ cityj3nthe_NgX£.