The Icon and the Axe

in the seventeenth century. Naturalistic figures and theatrical compositions were introduced awkwardly and eclectically from Western models; older icons vanished beneath metal casings and layers of dark varnish; and serpentine rococo frames agitated the icon screen and seemed to constrict the holy figures they surrounded. The traditional chin of Muscovy had been replaced by the chinovnik ("petty bureaucrat") of Petersburg; and icon painting as a sacred tradition, by icon production as a state concession. The icon is only "good for covering pots," proclaimed Vissarion Belinsky in the 1840's,78 pointing the way to the new artistic iconoclasm of the Rus-sianjreyolutionary tradition.

Yet the spell of the_Jconwasnever TOrrroletely broken. Nothing else quite took its place, and Russians remained reluctant to corlceive of painting as men did in the West. Russians remained more interested in the ideal represented by a painting than in its artistic texture. To Dostoevsky, Holbein's "Cjmst in th^Tbnib;7ju^sted'i~denial of Christian faith; Claude Lorraine's "Acis and Galatea," a secular Utopia. The print of Raphael's Sistine,34adonna over his writing desk was the ???????^?^|^?^???1 effortjo_reconcile faith and creative power.79 The revolutionaries themselves looked with the eyes of icon venerators on the heroic naturalism of much nineteenth-century Russian secular painting. Many found a call to revolutionary defiance in the proud expression of an unbowed boy in Repin's famous "Haulers on the Volga." Just as the Christian warriors of an earlier age had made vows before icons in church on the eve of battle, so Russian Revolutionaries-in the words of Lenin's personal secretary-"swore vows in the Tret'iakov Gallery on seeing such pictures."80

Large-scale cleaning and restoration in the early twentieth century helped Russians rediscover at long last the purely artistic glories of the older icons. Just as the hymns and chants of the church had provided new themes and inspiration for early Russian iconographers, so their rediscovered paintings gave fresh inspirationbackJo.j)oets and musicians as well as painters in late imperial Russia. Undj»jheJioj7riex_sejmnarian Stalinjjjowiver, the icon lived on not as the inspiration for creative art but as a model for mass indoctrinatiorTTTiFolrler icons, like the newerjjxrjejrhnental paintings, were for ffleTnosr-part lockecTup in the reserve collections of museums. Pictures of ????~1????-^??~^??????01????1??1?8 and public ~pTaces~replaced icons of Christ and the Virgin. Photographs of Lenin's successors deployed in a prescribed order on either side of Stalin replaced the old "prayer row," in which saints were deployed in fixed order on either side of Christ enthroned. Just as the iconostasis of a cathedral was generally built directly over the grave of a local saint and specially reverenced with processions on a religious festival, so these new Soviet saints appeared in ritual form over the

mausoleum of the mummified Lenin on the feast days of Bolshevism to review endless processions through Red Square.

In the context of Russian culture thisjitempt to capitalize politically on

the popular_reverence for icons rgpjresents only an extension of an estab-

HshjdJiadTtiraroTrle^Polish pretender JDmitry, the Swedish

warrior Gustavus Adolphus, most of the Romanovs, and many of their generals had themselves painted in semi-iconographic style for the Russian populace.81 An emigre Old Believer-for whom all modern history repre-sentFaloredoomed divergence from the true ways of Old Russia-looked with indifference and even joy upon the transfer of the icon of Our Lady of Kazan from a cathedral to a museum early in the Soviet era:

The Queen of Heaven, divesting herself of her regal robes, issued forth from her Church to preach Christianity in the streets.82

Stalin added an element of the grotesque to the tradition of politically dpbnsin^£m^aOnTn^sTjJ^introducedjiew icons and relics in thejiame_ of science, then proceeded tojetouch and^esecrateftem,JtEfoje_his own

?? lesser figures on the

image and remains were posthumously defiled. Soviet iconostasis had removed the central icon of Stalin enthroned, and largely destroyed the new myth of salvation. But in the uncertain age that followed, lithographs of Lenin and giant cranes continued to hover over prefabricated concrete huts piled on one another much as the icon and the axe had over the wooden huts of a more primitive era

Bell and Cannon

If the icon and the axe in the peasant hut became abiding symbols for Russian culture, so too did the bell and cannon of the walled city. These were-ihe-fitsLlarge metal ?^????^???'? manufactured indigenously in the wooden world of Muscovy: objects that distinguished the city from the surroundingcountryside and fortified it against alien invaders.

Just aTtnellam'^nrr'tne axe were closely linked with one another, so were ??~??~???~^????7^?1?~??? had fashioned and coulu destroythe