The Icon and the Axe

visionary impulses which were still very much alive in Russia. He offered Russia, so to speak, one last chance to transcend the world of the ordinary and immediate, the "conglomerated mediocrity" (posredstvennosf) that so repelled the intelligentsia. The political and economic thought of Ple-khanov and Miliukov influenced those who contended for power in an age of revolutionary change; but the extraordinary cultural revival of the early twentieth century was born under the brilliant if evanescent star of Solov'ev. The change in artistic styles from populist realism to the idealism of the silver age may be likened to the change in drinking tastes from the harsh and colorless vodka of the earlier agitators and reformers to the sweet, ruby-colored mesimarja, which became popular among the new aristocratic aesthetes. Mesimarja was a rare, exotic drink, extremely costly and best appreciated at the end of a large and leisurely meal. Like the art of the silver age, mesimarja was the product of an unnatural, half-foreign environment. Mesimarja came from Finnish Lapland, where it was distilled from a rare berry that was ripened by the midnight sun during the brief Arctic summer. The culture of early-twentieth-century Russia was equally exotic and superlative. It was a feast of delicacies tinged with foreboding. As with the mesimarja berry, premature ripeness carried with it the promise of rapid decay. Sunlight at midnight in one season led to darkness at noon in the next.

¦^35 v 1553^

THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS

474

475

The Twentieth Century

i. Crescendo

The cultural explosion amidst war and revolution during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Music as the dominant art form in an age of passionate liberation and liberated passion. The Prometheanism of the revolutionary "God-builders" and of the attempt by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) to transform the world by synthesizing the arts. The ascent into outer space through the rockets of Constantine Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and the "suprematist" art of Casimir Malevich (1878-1934). The concurrent descent into sensualism and diabolism. Apocalypticism in art and life: the poetry of Alexander Blok (1880-1921); the prose of Eugene Zamiatin (1884-1937); the politics of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940).

The March and November revolutions of 1917, and the debt of Lenin (1870-1924) to the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. A quarter century of catechistic totalitarianism under Stalin (1879-1953) from the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 to his death in 1953. The complex roots of Stalinism in both the tsarist and the revolutionary traditions, in the Leninist conception of an authoritarian party, but, above all, in the need to provide an appealing mass culture for a primitive peasant people. The revenge of Muscovy on St. Petersburg, the site of the Revolution and the symbol of cosmopolitanism during the psychotic purges of the Stalin era. The Stakhanovites as "flagellants" and party apparatchiki as  "Old Believers" of Muscovite Bolshevism. The metamorphosis of luminous icons, ringing bells, and consoling incense into lithographs of Lenin, humming machines, and cheap perfume.

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and Dr. Zhivago (1958) as both a last echo of the mystical, poetic culture of late Imperial Russia and a prophetic interpretation of the Russian revolution and the Russian future. Old and new themes in the cultural ferment of the Khrushchev era (1953-64). The restless new generation "of the sixties." The recurring ironies and future possibilities of Russian culture.

Ihe revolutions of 1917 occurred in the midst of a profound cultural upheaval which Bolshevism had not initiated and did not immediately curtail. Between the late 1890's and the "great change" (perelom) effected by Stalin during the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), Russian culture continued to sputter and whir through what might be called its electric age.