The Icon and the Axe

into outer space. After his "white on white" series of 1918, Malevich did not paint again for nearly a decade, producing instead a series of sketches for what he called an "idealized architecture": future dwelling places for humanity bearing the name planity, from the Russian word for "airplane." Malevich's only serious rival for dominance of the artistic avant-garde in the 1920's, Vladimir Tatlin, was ostensibly far more down to earth with his doctrine of utilitarian "constructivism" and his demand for a new living art of "real materials in real space." But he too reflected this Promethean urge to move out and master that space. Increasingly, his three-dimensional constructions acquired an upward, winged thrust that seems to be tugging at the wires connecting them to earth. Tatlin spent most of the last thirty years of his life designing a bizarre new glider that looked like a giant insect and was called a Letatlin-a fusion of the Russian word "to fly" and his own name.44

The first thirty years of the twentieth century in Russia was a period in which traditional terms of reference seemed largely irrelevant. As Leo Shestov, the philosopher and future Russian popularizer of Kierkegaard, proclaimed in his Apotheosis of Groundlessness in 1905: "Only one assertion has or can have objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible."45 Men believed in an earthly "world without end," to cite the title of a Futurist anthology of 1912.46 Followers of Fedorov continued to believe that the resurrection of the dead was now scientifically possible; Mechnikov argued that life could be prolonged indefinitely by a diet centered on yoghurt; and a strange novel of 1933, Youth Restored, by the most popular writer of the 1920's, Michael Zoshchenko, offered a final Promethean reprise on the Faust legend by portraying an old professor who believes that he can restore his youth merely through the exercise of his will.47

Beyond the five dimensions of Malevich's art lay the seven dimensions offered by the philosopher, psychologist, and Oriental traveler P. D. Uspensky. Beginning with his Fourth Dimension of 1909, he provided new vistas for self-transformation: a completely internal "fourth way" which lies beyond the three past ways to godliness of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. He offered-in the words of two of his later book titles-"a key to the enigmas of the world" and "a new model for the universe."48 He insisted that man was capable of a higher inner knowledge that would take him into "six-dimensional space." There are three dimensions in time, which are a continuation of the three dimensions of space, and which lead in turn to a "seventh dimension" of the pure imagination.49

In St. Petersburg, Prometheanism found its most extreme-and historically important-expression in the movement known as "God-building" (Bogostroitel'stvo). St. Petersburg intellectuals were, predictably, more con-

cerned with social questions than their Moscow counterparts; and, amidst the agitation of the first decade of the new century, a group of Marxist intellectuals struck upon the Promethean idea of simply transferring to the urban proletariat the attributes of God. "God-building" developed partly in reaction to "God-seeking," an earlier movement of St. Petersburg intellectuals who followed Merezhkovsky in turning from aesthetic to religious questions. Their return to philosophic idealism (and in many cases Orthodox Christianity) was celebrated in a variety of publications from the periodicals New Road (1903-4) and Questions of Life (1905-6) to the famous symposium of 1909, Landmarks (Vekhi), which offered an impressive philosophic challenge to the positivist and Marxist categories which had long dominated the philosophic thinking of the urban intelligentsia. A musical landmark in this return to religious mysticism was the primarily choral opera The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which was finished amidst the revolutionary turmoil of 1905-6 and first produced early in 1907 by the last survivor of the "mighty handful," Rimsky-Korsakov.