The Icon and the Axe

By the end of the century, the somewhat artificial links that Ivanov and aristocratic Russia had sought to forge with the classical world of Rome (where he painted) and Raphael (whom he emulated) had given way to harsh, plebeian realism. Thus, the crucifixion of 1891 by Nicholas Ge (Plate XVII) is a bleak, purely human scene. This painting, which moved Ge's friend Leo Tolstoy to tears, shows a wretched, wasted Christ, no longer capable of resurrection, let alone enthronement. To the left is no longer the iconographic John the Baptist pointing to the coming glory of God's world, but only a thief whose frightened look suggests the self-centered pathos of a new, godless world.

Worse was yet to come in the twentieth century. Repin, in exile from Bolshevism in 1922, painted a crucifixion which showed only the two thieves, with Christ's cross lowered and a wolf-like dog licking the blood of an altogether vanished saviour.

PLATE XVII

LATE XVIII

The influence of Michael Vrubel (1856-1910) in late imperial Russia was almost as great on poets and composers as on experimental painters, for whom he had an impact that Naum Gabo likens to that of Cezanne on modern Western artists. Apprenticed in the restoration of church frescoes and mosaics, he soon turned from traditional religious subjects to the mystery of earthly beauty. From his early painting of "Hamlet and Ophelia" to his powerful illustration of Pushkin's "Prophet," Vrubel displayed his greatest power in portraying those figures from the pantheon of romanticism who in some way incarnated the proud beauty of his ultimate hero: the devil.

Beginning with a first sketch in 1885 and stimulated by a commission to illustrate a commemorative edition of Lermontov's "The Demon" in 1890-1, Vrubel painted the devil in a variety of forms, and increasingly referred to "seances" with Satan himself. The two illustrations on the left show his first and last major efforts to depict Satan through a monumental oil canvas. "The Demon Seated" (1890; Plate XVlll) broke sharply with the prevailing artistic realism and provided the Silver Age with a brooding hero: the newly seated prince of this world replacing, as it were, the traditional "Christ enthroned" of the next. "The Demon Prostrate" (1902; Plate XIX, central part only) was completed in the year of Vrubel's mental breakdown. The artist succeeds in suggesting the devil's own mental anguish by distending the figure in a manner somewhat reminiscent of some Russian variants of icons of "Our Lady of Tenderness." The swirling background reveals the influence of art nouveau and expressionism, and contrasts with the more controlled, semi-cubist backgrounds of the earlier "Demon."

Vrubel and the Devil

PLATES XVIII-XK

LATE XIX

Scriabin appears as the consummate romantic, a kind of cosmic Novalis, conceiving of his art as "the last great act of fulfillment, the act of union between the male creator-spirit and the woman-world."27 His mysticism of endless desire flows, thus, with a certain logic out of the lush Chopin- and Liszt-like melodies of his early piano works. Yet the complex orchestral works to which he soon turned show both technical inventiveness and a unique ability to express the inner aspirations of the age. There were essentially four musical stages in his late artistic-spiritual development: "The Divine Poem" of 1903, his third and last symphony; "The Poem of Ecstasy" of 1908; "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire" of 1909-10; and his "Mystery," which he had only begun at the time of his sudden death in 1915.

The "Divine Poem" depicted the ascent of humanity to divinity: the first movement represented the struggles, the second the sensual delights, and the last the "divine play" of the spirit liberating itself from matter. While composing the "Poem of Ecstasy" abroad, he met many socialists and proposed at one point to use the famous line from The International ("Arise ye wretched of the earth") as the epigraph to his work.28 Deliverance was to come, however, not from a revolutionary leader, but from a messiah who would unify the arts and provide mankind with a "new gospel" to replace the outmoded New Testament. Scriabin apparently viewed himself as a new Christ preaching from a boat in Lake Geneva and establishing close links with a radical Swiss fisherman named Otto: his St. Peter.29

The language of his new gospel was to be even more unconventional than the iridescent "Poem of Ecstasy," which still bore some musical resemblance to the tonal sheen of Tristan and Isolde. Wagner's "music of the future" was enjoying great popularity in Russia at the turn of the century; and the new musical world of Scriabin's "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire" has been described by one leading Russian critic as