The Icon and the Axe

The man_wdioperhaps__didjsast to bring Russia both visually and imaginatively in_xontact with_the_ sea in the late nineteenth century was the gifted and prolific painter lyan^Airazoysky. Born by the sea in the Crimea in 1817, Aivazovsky was fascinated by the sea and ships throughout the eighty-three years of his life. As a favored painter for the St. Petersburg academy, he traveled widely during the Nicholaevan era, and became a personal friend of its most gifted creative figures: Glinka and Briullov, Ivanov and Gogol. While visiting the latter two in Rome during the early 1840's, he sold one of his early canvases to the Vatican-on the appropriately romantic subject "Primitive Chaos." He followed one of Ivanov's early leads by painting numerous scenes of the idealized Italian sea coast and has been credited with introducing sea painting to Italy and influencing the work of Joseph Turner.

Almost all of his more than five thousand paintings were scenes of the sea, and,pafficuTarly after his return to Russia, the majontyshowed either violenT^tormsor~rTattles. Following the tradition~f~Brrullov ????^????? Aivazovsky painted his major works on a gigantic scale, many of them well over fifty feet in width. The sheer size of the sea in his canvases creates a sense of human insignificance both for the figures tossed upon it in the picture and for those looking at it in the gallery. His most influential paintings were his largest and most dramatic: "The Storm," which shows a ship sinking and a lifeboat bobbing in the midst of a vast panorama of contrasting light and darkness; and "The Ninth Wave," which lends a kind of incandescent glory to the last wave of the final flood predicted in the Book of Revelation.

Despite continuing success an^pc^u|arity_JAiyjzovs^yremained consumed by romantic wanderl?£?h??ghj?tJlisJife¦ In his last mgnthsji£\yaji_ contemplating another sea journey in search of new inspiration; but he died in _i2£0_wnile working on Irislastj^ajwjis^^

Warship." Just as poets had often sought to express themselves in painting durrngTKe age of Lermontov, so did this last leaf on the tree of Russian romanticism sometimes turn to poetry to express his feelings:

The great ocean heaves beneath me.

I see the distant shore,

The magic regions of a sunlit land:

With agitation and longing, thither do I strive.32

i\j nnw anuKts

In his latej jeajs.j^vamvsk^^became in-

tensely_nationalistic. He dreamei_Qf_a_gloriousjgiie^^£^^5nliav^l'ic-

tories, which he hoped to record on canvas-just as Briullov had once en

visaged!" designing murals of Russian m^TtanTvictories. ^,u,ssian~vigto"figs

in me~"new^15ror^directions;

jrorrxsE^^^gJU^^^Ldjf^tJSS^i^ Soviet strategisTswe7e~tolransform the Russian navyfrom^ojr?what_futile surface fleet to a somber submarine flotilla within half a j^ejoturyjgf_???? sky^sjdteath. Yet in the folklore of the new regime, two surface ships lived on as symbols of the revolutionary hopes of the new order: the battleship Potemkin, which mutinied briefly against tsarist authority during the Revolution of 1905, and the Cruiser Aurora, which provided perfunctory support fire for the Bolshevik insurrection of 1917. Thus, two ships became \j»WBibols,oMeUverance in the new Soviet ideology.38 TTiiesynibol oicreative ^^curnfiejn.iJie_2owet periodwas, howeverTproyjded by a persecuted~poet, Osip Mandel'shtam, wEoTIEened his~verse to a message cast out in a bottle on melrighse^s^yTningmia£.nTan inT5i^5ope*oTreachjfl£jcS£ISFnB^ distS^rgader.34 Beforesejthigout-OTjhjase watejj_a^dscannirig the new horizons of Soviet Russia, one must chart the course which Russian creativity followed across the troubled seas of the late imperial period.

i. The Turn to Social Thought

A distinctive FEATURjLJ±JBassijEm-a^^t0 the ???1?

fiUpatiflB with, what the Russians "??

iSeo^s was its_extrag^__r ?

"social thought" (obshchestvennaia mysl'). There is no exact equiyalentjor

^s £g^gEorX.of thougIrirTn~"^yeliterr^^and

literary to be discussed fairly in the language of traditional moral philosophy or of modern sociology. Its concerns were not primarily political, and may be best understood in terms o£jisychoiogy or religion.

In any event, Russian social thought is a phenomenon of the late

imperial*'peTioa". It represents in many~ways an artificially delayedTlmcC-..,''

chflSefTsWally"pas^ionate, Russian response to the rich ferment ofre^ ^

fornusTiaE^in"TTiaTggrtat^^of 1830 and 1848. Social^