The Icon and the Axe

rrjrn" Moscow to St i'etersDurginib^ojsvas accompanied by the ostentatio^s~q^claratioh: "To .Petersburg, to Petersburg, therein lies my salvation."19 St. Petersburg was the laijestjmd most commercially active of Russian cities. The journals to which Belinsky contributed there, Thelinnals of the Fatherland and The Contemporary, attained by 1847 an unprecedented number of subscriptions (4,000 and 3,000, respectively)20 and were to become the leading vehicles for the populism of the seventies ano^Tra amp;caTTcbnoclasm of the sixties, resibettlWlvrBy ? 1,'????

Sail half of the privately operated journals in

private journals

"PoffiififfTMuscovite was the last effort of the romantic nationalists to found

a major "thick journal" (that is, a journal with ideological pretensions sup

ported by comprehensive bibliographical and critical sections) in Moscow.

Despite (or perhaps because of) official support, it enjoye^ripihingUketiie

successoTlhTirnewji^^When it

collapsed m_i856, most of its personnel moved to St. Petersburg, where the

most important newnmtT-WBsTerrflz^:

rarjgjng ????? amp;????^????'?^?? b^A^M^fTpiayr""

??? nntTmistic hone that a new sociaTorder migbLcpme into being in

The optimistic hope that a new sociaTorder the WesForUrte-bSsis of advanced French sociaf theories was deajj^a fourttH9tow"~b"y~tne failure of the

W0i1abwiar5jrprmn^*of 1848-9 in J WSftern and Centra Europe. Russia did not participate in" thiswave~5f revolutions and thus did notfe^bdjscredite5~bytEeir faim7e7Tn3eed, the Russians~werr7Tifm^eliced by the impassioned writings of Herzen, who witnessed these events, and Bakunin, who participated in them, to conclude that the torch of leadership in the coming transformation of society had simply been passed from Jthe^jiefeated workers of the West to the slumbering peasants of the East.

1. me 1 urn ? juciui x nvugru

The furious„ reaction of Nicholas I to the revolutionary events of

48-9 further crystallae‹rtEe~sSmT^social

thinners camTtcnEeelwM^iefrustrated Western hopes for social reforrrl""

???~????31^^^^^^^?^??^2^^^? ^^n|^threie~were ??????^ and^exiled) and the^dispatching of Russian troops to help put down the KossuffiTebellion in Hungary^^trrmn^e~A^H!^fT849-were followed"" by a crude effo^Jo^ill_o^jth£intellectual ferment of the "remarkable de6a3e/' No more than three hundred students were to be enrolled in a university at one time. Philosophy was banned from the curriculum, and all public merujrojofJ^linskyTnanTe^was ????????? Letters signed "all my love" aeifc£ensored foxthehnpligd denial^ of affection 5-G^lMidlBg[l^T' and thgjnusical compositions of an astonished Rubinstein were confiscated as he returjjeiLlttfflP^

notesiinight be_a secret revolutionary code.

Lacking as yet the "escape valve" of large-scale emigration to America that was draining off so many of the revolutionary intellectuals of Central Europe, the ^Russian intellectuals compensated themselves with the _vague and appeahngjd^ajIilrR^

kinooiT^merica in the making. GlorifilSioTrtiftne communal peasant

forms of organization among the~Sravs~was thus corribmed wiTSTEe*political

ideal of a loose, democratic federalism. Bakunin proposed atteTTHe* llav

Congress of 1848 in Prague the ideal of a revolutionary federation of Slavic

peoples opposed to the "knouto-Germanic" rule of central authority. A

friend of Herzen wrote a verse play praising the "socialist" William Penn,

and spoke of America as the "natural ally" of a regenerated Russia.21

Herzen believed that the Padfib^JceanjsQuld become the "Mediterranean

Sea oTthe future," which Russia and. America would jointly Duua.'!! Kussian

radwSs_fc]lowed_with romantic fascination the Jiajf^understood develop-

ments injjje^d^tant^ja^tmejinv^advance"

resembled the Russianj^astward advance in so manyjespects: and the semi-anarchistic criticism of all existing political authorities which was to become commonplace in Russian radical social thought was rarely extended to America.

Saltykov spoke retrospectively of the Petrashevtsy as a group which wanted "to read without knowing the alphabet, to walk without knowing how to stand upright."23 Yet its strivings inside Russia and the prophetic reflections of Herzen and Bakunin outside reflect the turn in mid-century Russian thinking from philosophic to social thought: from Hamlet to Don Quixote, to use the terminology of Turgenev's famous essay of the late fifties. In order for the brooding Hamlet to become the chivalric Don Quixote-to leave his castle and set forth into the countryside-there had