The Icon and the Axe

tently, Chekhov glorifies those who suffer and succumb, still believing in the ideals of populism, but no longer expecting to see them realized on earth. Sonya suggests that "beyond the grave we shall see all our sufferings drowned in mercy that will fill the world." But this is only a lovely lyric moment like the melody from the "Pathetique Symphony." Progressively in his dramas, Chekhov moves away from all hope and consolation-even those found in the familiar conventions of melodrama, such as the escape-through-suicide which he invoked in The Sea Gull and Three Sisters. Seeking perhaps the tranquil twilight of Levitan's landscapes, Chekhov fled to a cherry orchard for his last play and went to the Black Forest to die. But he knew that the forces of material change were prevailing, and the offstage sound of the axe in the orchard brings down the final curtain in his last play.

Lyric lament was replacing the harsh but inclusive realism of the populist age. Short stories and sketches replaced the great works of the populist age. There is nothing in the late nineteenth century to compare in scope and realistic intensity with Nekrasov's poem "Who Then Is Happy in Russia?" (1863-76) or Saltykov's Golovlev Family (1872-6), let alone with Khovanshchina or The Brothers Karamazov. The golden age of the realistic novel came to an end in the eighties just as the golden age of Russian poetry had ended in the forties. Turgenev wrote his last novel (and Tolstoy his last great one) in the late seventies. Pisemsky, another pioneer of the realistic novel, died within a few weeks of Dostoevsky and Musorgsky in 1881. By the end of the decade Saltykov, Shelgunov, Eliseev, and Cherny-shevsky had died, thus severing the last living links with the critical journalistic traditions of the sixties. Of the leading populist writers, only Uspensky and Mikhailovsky remained active in Russia and uncompromised in their fidelity to populist ideals throughout the eighties. But the former was going slowly insane after completing his bleak masterpiece The Power of the Land (1882) and such prophetic fragments as Man and the Machine (1884). Mikhailovsky had developed a marked nervous tic and was increasingly preoccupied with publishing the memoirs of himself and his friends.

It was, in general, a time for memoir writing and commemorative meetings in imitation of the Pushkin fete of 1880. Some former revolutionaries like Tikhomirov publicly renounced their previous beliefs and achieved notoriety inside Russia; others like Kravchinsky (Stepniak) and Kropotkin fled abroad and earned reputations in Western radical circles as martyred heroes and revolutionary theorists. The pathetic conspiratorial effort to kill Alexander III in 1887 (in which such unlikely bedfellows as Pilsudski and Lenin's older brother were involved) reflected the futility and

addiction to old patterns that prevailed among the few who continued as active revolutionaries inside Russia.

More typical of the age than this isolated act of terroristic heroism was the emotional but essentially apolitical student demonstration of 1886 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobroliubov's death. With the death of Ostrov-sky in the same year and of Garshin and Saltykov in 1888 and 1889 respectively, the age of realism in Russian literature can be said to have ended.

In its place a new popular culture appeared that sought neither to depict reality nor to answer vexing questions but to distract the masses with sex, sensationalism, and crude chauvinism. Illustrated weeklies captured the attention of those who might previously have turned to the thick monthly journals for ideas and inspiration. One of these journals, Niva, grew rapidly from its relatively obscure origins in 1869 to gain, by the end of the reign of Alexander III, the totally unprecedented circulation of 200,000. It and other journals offered a new literature of faded romantic escapism. Exotic travel literature, sentimentalized love stories, and stereotyped historical novels rushed in to fill a void created both by the tightened censorship and by general exhaustion at the no-exit realism of the previous era.

Amidst the lassitude and bezideinosf ("lack of ideology") of the era, two powerful figures struggled, as it were, for the soul of Russia: Constantine Pobedonostsev and Leo Tolstoy. They had both opposed and outlived the revolutionaries of the sixties and were already relatively old men by the eighties, yet both were destined to live on into the twentieth century. Neither of them founded a movement, yet each contributed to the climate of fanaticism that made revolution rather than reform the path through which modernization was accomplished in twentieth-century Russia.