The Icon and the Axe

The "free and beautiful cosmos" of art seemed to offer new possibilities for harmonizing the discords of an increasingly disturbed world. The romantic idea so prevalent in the age of Pushkin that different art forms were all expressive of a common spiritual truth was revived and intensified.

The Ballet Russe represented a harmonious fusion of the scenic designs of Benois, Bakst, and Roerich, the music of Stravinsky, the dancing of Nizhinsky, the choreography of Fokin, and the guiding genius of Diaghilev. One artistic medium tended to flow into another. Futurism, the most bold and revolutionary of the new artistic schools, began in painting before moving into poetry.20 The painter Vrubel drew much of his inspiration from poets; and his florid colors, in turn, inspired other poets. Briusov praised the "peacock sheen of outstretched wings" that Vrubel raised over the "desert" of contemporary life;21 and Blok, at Vrubel's funeral, waxed lyrical over the color of his sunset:

As through a broken dam, the blue-lilac twilight of the world bursts in, to the lacerating accompaniment of violins and tunes reminiscent of gypsy songs.22

Poetry in turn burst into song, most notably in the work of Blok. Before the Revolution, he had written a cycle of poems to tell "What the Wind Sings About"; and just after the coup of November he suggested in his

famous "Twelve" that it was singing about the Revolution. Powerful, gustlike lines bring a Revolutionary band of twelve into wintry St. Petersburg. Then, the poet introduces the Revolutionary song traditionally played to the accompaniment of throbbing balalaikas:

No sound is heard from the city,

There is silence in the Nevsky tower, And on the bayonet of the sentry Glistens the midnight moon.23

In Blok's version, the last two lines are changed to suggest liberation rather than confinement:

And there are no more policemen-•

Rejoice, lads, without need of wine!24

Yet the unheard melody is still that of lamenting strings; and Blok came to look on his own poetic tribute to revolution with irony before his early death in 1921.

Blok loved painting and music, wrote plays, studied philology, discoursed with philosophers, and married the daughter of Russia's greatest scientist, Mendeleev. As the greatest poet of a poetic age, he is, ex officio, one of its key cultural figures. But because Blok himself felt that music was closer than poetry to the spirit of the age, it is perhaps appropriate to use Alexander Scriabin, one of the greatest pianists and the most original composer of the age, as the main illustration of Russian Prometheanism.

Scriabin's creative activity was inspired by Solov'ev's mystical faith in divine wisdom and also by the international theosophic movement which had been launched by Mme Blavatsky, the teacher of Solov'ev's elder brother and self-styled bearer of the hidden secrets of universal brotherhood and communion with the dead. The anniversary of her death, May 8, 1891, became known to her followers as White Lotus Day; and it was-among the intellectuals of the silver age-at least as well known as the socialist festival of May Day, which had been established by the Second International exactly a week before her passing.

Solov'ev and the symbolists saw in sophia a mystic union of the divine wisdom and the eternal feminine; and Scriabin sought to possess sophia in both senses through his art. "Would that I could possess the world as I possess a woman,"25 he wrote, reverting to the obscure, but seductive language of Boehme so familiar to Russian mystics:

The world is in impulse toward God. … I am the world, I am the search for God, because I am only that which I seek.2''

Christ Dethroned

PLATES XVI-XVII

The nineteenth century's increasing preoccupation with the purely human aspects of Christ's personality manifested itself in Russian art in a particularly dramatic fashion.

Traditional iconography had displayed a serene but powerful Christ enthroned in triumph-resolving, as it were, the trace of anguish still noticeable in the face of his "precursor," John the Baptist, who is reverently inclined toward him from the left-hand side of the central tryptich of the icon screen. In Ivanov's long-labored "Appearance of Christ to the People" (Plate XVI), John the Baptist is the dominant, central figure; and the timid Christ is less noticeable than the worldly figures in the foreground.