The Icon and the Axe

uniquely Russian prophet of universal reconciliation, was the scene of a public demonstration typical of the age. For half an hour he was cheered as scores of people wept, and he was publicly embraced by everyone from the old Slavophile Aksakov to the old Westernizer (and his long-time antagonist) Turgenev. Voices in the crowd called out "prophet" just as they had burst forth in the court scenes of the late seventies to call out their approval for the pleas of political prisoners to fight "in the name of Christ" for "the humiliated and the weak." The raised section in which the accused sat was referred to as Golgotha, and the revolutionaries frequently spoke of themselves as "true Christians" or a "Christian brotherhood." Even the most positivistic of populists, Mikhailovsky and Lavrov, claimed Christ on occasion as the source of their moral ideas; and most "men of the seventies" believed that moral ideals-not political or economic forces-would ultimately determine the course of history.

The assassins of Alexander II seemed to believe that this act was a kind of spiritual duty which would in itself bring about the new age of brotherhood. The moral fervor and selflessness of the conspirators appealed to the intellectuals, many of whom (in the manner of the Karamazov brothers) felt responsible in some way for the assassination and involved in the trial and punishment. Prominent intellectuals like Tolstoy and Solov'ev appealed to the new Tsar for clemency-often precipitating emotional demonstrations of student support. Though few outside of the leadership of the People's Will organization favored terroristic assassination, many believed that the Tsar now had a unique opportunity to perform an act of Christian forgiveness that could resolve the disharmonies in society. It seemed as if the thirty thousand who had flocked to Dostoevsky's grave in January of 1881 were looking to Alexander III to be the "true Tsar," the long-lost Ivan the Tsarevich who would realize the hopes of his suffering people.

Alexander, however, followed the path that Nicholas I had taken after the Decembrist uprising, hanging the killers and initiating a reign of reaction. In a series of manifestoes and decrees he attempted to suppress once and for all both the activity of the revolutionaries and the intellectual ferment that lay behind it. The steady expansion of the educational system (and the unusually liberal range of higher educational opportunities for women) under Alexander II was curtailed by a return to Uvarov's idea of education as a form of civic discipline. By the end of 1884 all ministers even faintly interested in constitutional or federal rights had been dismissed, all publications of the People's Will curtailed, and the leading journal of legal populism, The Annals of the Fatherland, outlawed forever. This determined dash of cold water produced a stunned silence among those who had shared in the great expectations of the populist period. From a cultural

point of view the reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was a period of profound depression. The populist mythos continued to dominate Russian social thought, but gone were the old Utopian expectations and excitement. The period was referred to as one of "small deeds" and "cultural populism" as distinct from the great deeds and socially revolutionary populism of the seventies.

Two long-labored masterpieces of populist art were completed during this period: Repin's painting "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan" and Borodin's opera Prince Igor. They stand as final monuments of the new national art promised by the "wanderers" and the "mighty handful" respectively. Repin's canvas, which occupied him from 1878 to 1891, depicts the idealized exuberance of the rough-hewn "people," spontaneously and communally defying a would-be alien oppressor. Borodin's opera, on which he worked from 1869 till his death in 1887, elaborates the epic tale of Igor's ill-fated battle with the Polovtsy into a colorful stage pageant that harmoniously combined equal measures of earthy comedy, exotic dancing, and vocal lyricism.