The Icon and the Axe

Like electricity-which spread through Russia during this period- new currents of culture brought new energy and illumination into everyday life. The leading revolutionary rival of Lenin and Trotsky later complained of the "electric charges of will power" that they imparted in 1917; and those leaders in turn sought to move from power to paradise by defining Communism as "Soviet power plus electrification." Many assumed that the bringing of light and energy to the intellect was equally compatible with Soviet power. Just as amber, long thought to be merely decorative, had revealed the power of electricity to mankind, so the theater was "destined to play the part of amber in revealing to us new secrets of nature."1 Just as raw electricity often ran wildly through new metal construction in the rapidly growing cities of early-twentieth-century Russia, so these new artistic currents broke through the insulation of tradition to jolt and shock the growing numbers of those able to read and think. As with electricity, so in culture it was a case of old sources for new power. Man had simply found new ways of unlocking the latent energy within the moving waters and combustible elements of tradition. Thus, the new, dynamic culture of this electric age was, in many ways, more solidly rooted in Russian tradition than the culture of the preceding, aristocratic era.

In poetry, the new symbolism soon gave way to futurism, acmeism, imaginism, and a host of unclassifiable styles. On the stage, the spirited ensemble work of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater, the fiery impressionism of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, the "conditionalism" and "bio-mechanical" expressionism of Meierhold's theater-all demonstrated an accelerating pace of life and exuberance of expression. In music, Stravinsky

47f*VI. THE UNCERTAIN COLOSSUS

1. Crescendo

All

sounded the death knell of romantic melodic cliche with his cacophonous "Rite of Spring"; and Russia produced a host of new musical forms along with two of the relatively few figures whose pre-eminence in a given area of the musical stage has remained undisputed: the bass Chaliapin and the dancer Nizhinsky. In all phases of creativity there was an exhilarating new concern for form and a concurrent revulsion against the moralistic messages and prosaic styles that had dominated Russian culture for half a century. Of all the art media, music was perhaps the determining one. Alexander Blok, the greatest poet of the age, spoke of escaping from calendar time to "musical time."2 Vasily Kandinsky, its greatest painter, considered music the most comprehensive of the arts and a model for the others. Chiurlionis, another influential pioneer of abstract painting, called his works "sonatas" and his exhibitions "auditions."3 The "futurist" Khlebni-kov, the most revolutionary of poets and self-proclaimed "chairman of the world," broke up familiar words just as cubist painters broke up familiar shapes, seeking to create a new and essentially musical "language beyond the mind" (zaumny iazyk). Words, he contended, "are but ghosts hiding the alphabet's strings."4 The Moscow home of David Burliuk, where futurist poets and painters met, was referred to as "the Nest of Music."

In prose, a new musical style was evolved and a new form of lyrical tale, "the symphony," developed by the seminal figure of Andrew Bely.5 In the theater Meierhold's fresh emphasis on the use of gesture and the grotesque was born of his belief that "the body, its lines, its harmonic movements, sings as much as do sounds themselves."6

Even among the most puritanical and visionary of Marxist revolutionaries there was a curious fascination with music. Alexander Bogdanov, theoretician and leader of the remarkable effort to produce an integral "proletarian culture" during the Civil War, believed that oral singing was the first and model form of cultural expression, because it arose from man's three most basic social relationships: sexual love, physical labor, and tribal combat.7 Bogdanov's friend, Maxim Gorky-the proletarian realist among the aristocratic nightingales-dedicated his anti-religious Confession of 1908 to Chaliapin; and Lenin confided to Gorky that music provided a profoundly disturbing force even in his monolithic world of revolutionary calculation:

I know nothing more beautiful than the "Appassionata," I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every -time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the

time to stroke people's heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal-it is a hellishly hard task. . . .8