The Icon and the Axe

Christianity had melted into and enriched this world of primitive nature worship without supplanting it. Religious rites, particularly the ever-repeated sign of the cross and the "Christ have mercy" prayer in the orthodox liturgy, were often little more than an animistic effort at naklikanie-at summoning up God's power and force by endless repetitions of His name. Trees and birds were thought to have derived their present characteristics from their imagined relationship to the events of Christ's life and death. And the revered intermediaries of the gods of nature-swans or mountain

birds-were often brought in for the cure of a dying man when a "wonderworking icon" had failed.

As the mentality of the Russian intelligentsia sought to enter into the plight of the masses, it tended to feel even more keenly than the peasants themselves the waning of these naive and superstitious but beautiful and ennobling beliefs. The vague pantheism of the peasantry was easier to accept than the doctrines of the Church, and it appealed to the romantic imagination of the populists. But they were forced to recognize at the same time that these beliefs were powerless to relieve the dislocations and suffering of peasant life.

The basic cause of the madness and near madness of the populist age was the unresolved (and largely unacknowledged) conflict that existed within the intelligentsia between its relentless determination to see things as they really are and its passionate desire to have them better. It was the old conflict between harsh facts and high ideals-lifted, however, to a new level of intensity by the conviction that facts and ideals were but two aspects of one Truth. The populists followed Mikhailovsky in contending that both objective and subjective truth were contained in the Russian word pravda and that both must be realized by those "servants of truth," the Russian intelligentsia. The optimistic Comtian belief that there was no contradiction between the truths of science and those of morality was particularly hard to sustain in Russia, where analysis tended to lead to revulsion and ideals to utopianism.

The agony of populist art resulted essentially from its unique sense of tension between things as they are and as they should be. The tension between the limpid realism of Tolstoy's novels and the muddled moralism of his religious tracts is a classic illustration. But this conflict is illustrated even more dramatically in the brief career of Vsevolod Garshin, one of the greatest short-story writers of modern Russia.

Garshin was born in the first year of Alexander's reign, and he had an early brush with the "new men of the sixties" when his mother eloped with a revolutionary, taking the four-year-old Garshin with her. He read Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? at the age of eight and developed a life-long interest in the natural sciences while at the gymnasium. With his first short story, "Four Days," in 1877, he proved himself a master of clipped realism. It is a compelling, semi-autobiographical account of a Russian volunteer lying wounded for four days on the battlefield, driven almost to madness not so much by his own suffering as by his inability to explain why he killed a poor Egyptian peasant fighting for the Turks.

When a Pole made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of a Tsarist minister in February, 1880, Garshin suddenly became possessed with the

idea that he must save the life of the young would-be assassin. Garshin wrote and visited the minister, but all to no avail, as the Pole was led through the streets, humiliated, and publicly hanged, in an obvious effort to discourage further terrorism. Garshin had never been a terrorist, but this action and the general reaction that set in in the 1880's demonstrated to him the illusion of the populist belief that there could ever be an alternative to the horror and cruelty of the real world. Uspensky had already reached that conclusion in his mammoth study of the Russian countryside, The Power of the Earth, which proved the prelude to insanity. Garshin, just before he too went insane, suggested in the manner of Dostoevsky's Idiot that perhaps insanity was the form that sainthood must now assume in the world. His masterpiece of 1883, "The Red Flower," tells of a man committed to an insane asylum because of his neurotic preoccupation with ridding the world of evil. Removed from the real world, he clearly does go mad-imagining that all the evil in the world is concentrated in one red flower in the courtyard. Plucking the red flower becomes in a sense the dying gesture of the modern Don Quixote, for whom there is no longer any place in the real world. He is found dead in the garden.

When they placed him on the stretcher, they tried to loosen his hand and take out the red flower. But the hand stiffened, and he took his trophy down into the grave.1