The Icon and the Axe

1 he central fact of the populist era, which haunted the imagination of its creative artists, was that all of Russian life was being materially transformed by modernizing forces from the West. Even in its initial stages under Alexander II, this process had gone far deeper than the massive Westernization of aristocratic thought under Catherine and the extensive administrative and technological changes under Peter. The only previous confrontation comparable in psychological effect was that of the seventeenth century. Like that century, the populist era was distinguished by profound schism and search that affected all of society and culture. Just as the most dynamic and original movement of the seventeenth century was that of the schismatics and other defenders of the old ways, so the most arresting movement of the Alexandrian age was the heroic populist effort to defend the old patterns of life and culture. This similarity helps explain the peculiar fascination of the Russian populists with the Old Believers and the period of Russian history that stretched from the Time of Troubles to the advent of Peter the Great.

Both the Old Believers and the populists were defending a partially imagined and idealized past along with very real forms and practices of Old Russian life. Each was basically a peaceful, non-revolutionary movement which was, however, sometimes allied with violent insurrectionaries: the peasant rebels and student terrorists respectively. But there was a critical difference between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth century. For the Old Believers and peasant rebels who defended Old Muscovy all had a clear religious faith and a clear idea of the enemy-whether it was the rituals and priests of the new church or the administrators and bureaucrats of the new state. The St. Petersburg populists, on the other hand, had no such clear faith and no agreed conception of what or who was the enemy. They were, for the most part, "repentant noblemen" projecting the anguish of earlier aristocratic thought onto Russian society as a whole. They were determined to overcome their own "superfluousness" by becoming active

agents of a new communal form of social life, anxious to overcome their alienation from the real world by establishing direct personal contact with Russia as it really was.

The desire for realism, for the remorseless honesty of the natural scientist, produced a sense of despair among the young intelligentsia as they went forth to discover the long-forgotten masses. But the certainty that Russia was somehow destined to produce a new kind of society, perhaps even a "new Christianity," rescued most of them from the total Welt-schmerz of the aristocratic century. Indeed, whereas suicide was the besetting moral illness of creative thinkers in the "romantic" first half of the nineteenth century, insanity tended to be the curse of the "realistic" second half. Many of the most original and imaginative figures of the populist age -revolutionaries like Khudiakov and Tkachev, writers like Garshin and Uspensky-went completely insane long before they died. The "mad summer" of the mid-seventies seems at times like part of a confused dream sequence in which the main characters suffer from nervous tics, alcoholic addictions, aimless wanderings, epileptic fits, or neurotic oscillations between extreme exaltation and bleak depression. All of these disorders were widespread among the "cultural pioneers" of the populist age.

One disturbing factor was the fact that the urban intellectuals were looking to the simple people at precisely the time when they were losing their sense of purpose and identity. The peasantry had been confused by the emancipation and was tending to lose confidence, not just in the Church, but in the entire animistic cosmology of Russian rural life. For the primitive peasant imagination of pre-industrial Russia, the world was saturated with religious meaning. God came to man not just through the icons and holy men of the Church but also through the spirit-hosts of mountains, rivers, and, above all, the forests. Each animal, each tree had religious significance like the details in a medieval painting. Belief in the magic power of words and names persisted; the fear of naklikanie, or bringing something upon oneself merely by mentioning its name, was widespread, and one always referred to the devil by such euphemisms as "he," "the unclean," or "not

ours."