The Icon and the Axe

One of the many neglected liberal critics of the intelligentsia in the nineteenth century was Eugene Markov, the widely traveled editor of the journal Russian Speech. He accused Russian intellectuals of being responsible for a new fanaticism that was the very antithesis of the pragmatism and empiricism of the positivists whom they were forever quoting.

The "intellectual layer" of Russia has withdrawn from participation in the activity of this essentially "practical" century. It has plunged Russia into a needless "turmoil of thought" (smuta umov) that is far more dangerous than the turmoil (smuta) of the seventeenth century, because the intelligentsia bears within itself the "sickness of narrow party-mindedness" (bolezn' parteinosti).2S Russia needs responsible citizens not "ideologues," deep criticism not "talmudism in journalism" and "judgment by shriek-

ing."30 He rejects the "Muscovite school in literature" for its "zoological" chauvinism. In an article of the late seventies called "Books and Life," Markov relates the revolutionary crisis in Russia not just to the worsening of material conditions but to the continuing refusal of the intellectuals to apply anything but "bookish theories" to Russian problems. In a perceptive passage that applies to the seventeenth as well as the nineteenth century, Markov notes:

Books, in the general course of Russian spiritual growth, have played a remarkably unimportant role, in any case considerably less than in other European countries. But, in Russia, books have produced something which they have not produced anywhere else-they have produced schism (raskol).31

The greatest need in Russia is to overcome schism, the separation between books and life. The future for Russia is almost unlimited, if its writers can "open for Russian thought the broad path to practical activity."82

Russian intellectuals are "good-for-nothings" (nikchemnye), "hypochondriacs," who prefer to be "ideologues rather than citizens or even people." His model for imitation is English political life, which teaches one "how to live, struggle, and accomplish things."33 Everyone, Markov insists, has spiritual doubts and problems; but only the English have learned to separate these concerns from political life. Unfortunately in Russia

none of us know or want to know anything about local interests or local facts. Every schoolboy seeks first of all final ends, first causes, the fate of governments, questions of the world and all humanity.34

Markov issues an almost plaintive plea for an experimental approach to Russian problems and an end to sectarian intolerance:

Let us recognize honorably and clearly the existing world . . . cease the despotic system of proscriptions and intolerance. . . . Let us be, in a word, men, enlightened citizens of Russia and not of a party or a journal. Let us be grown men of experience and strength, and not children all excited about some little book.35

His hero is Alexander II. As Markov wrote immediately after the Tsar's assassination (and shortly before his own journal was shut down by Pobe-donostsev):

This Tsar-liberator suffered like Christ at Golgotha for the sins of others. May his sufferings, like those of Christ, point the way to salvation for his true people.30

But the path of liberalization was not the way taken by Russia. The sufferings of Alexander II were commemorated not by continuing his work of reform but by building on the spot where he died a large brick church in the artificially revived Muscovite style of the late imperial period. The intrusion of this pseudo-Muscovite style into the classical architectural milieu of St. Petersburg was a kind of symbol of the return to reactionary nationalism under Alexander III and Nicholas II. Constitutional democracy was given only a brief and troubled moment on the stage of history. Its temperate ideology was lost between the frozen Russia of Pobedonostsev and the flaming Russia of social revolution. However telling the critiques advanced by Markov, Miliukov, and other liberals, the more extreme traditions of the intelligentsia prevailed over the forces calling for more moderate and experimental approaches. Two new philosophies of the late imperial period-dialectical materialism and transcendental idealism-encouraged the very tendency toward doctrinal and metaphysical thought which the liberals had tried to challenge.

Dialectical Materialism