The Icon and the Axe

God-building developed somewhat later than God-seeking, and sought to harness the religious anguish of the intellectuals not to traditional faith but to the coming revolution. During the dark days of reaction that followed the failure of the Revolution of 1905, a group of intellectuals sought to supplement Marx with a more inclusive and inspiring vision of the coming revolution. Led by Maxim Gorky, the rough-hewn writer and future high priest of Soviet literature, and Anatol Lunacharsky, the widely traveled critic who became the first commissar of education in the new Soviet state, the God-builders considered themselves to be merely elaborating the famous Marxist statement that philosophers should change rather than merely explain the world. Traditional religion was always linked with intellectual confusion and social conservatism, and the "God-seekers" were only rebuilding the tower of Babel rather than moving on to the New Jerusalem.60 Nevertheless, religious conviction had been the greatest force for change in history, Lunacharsky contended, and Marxists should, therefore, conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God. Gorky concluded his long Confession of 1908 with a prayer to "the almighty, immortal people!"

Thou art my God and the creator of all gods, which thou hast fashioned from the beauties of the spirit in the toil and struggle of thy search-

ings!

And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God that creates miracles!

Thus do I believe and confess!51

Some contemporary critics referred to Gorky's position as "demotheism" or "people-worship,"52 and there are many resemblances to the more extreme forms of populism. But Gorky spoke in the more universal language of the silver age. He referred to all men, not merely Russians; to the conquest of death, not merely of hunger. In the final sentence of the Confession, Gorky holds out the image of "the fusion of all peoples for the sake of the great task of universal God-creation."53

An anonymous Marxist pamphlet published in 1906 and subsequently reissued by the Soviet regime bluntly declared that man is destined to "take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal."54

Death is only a temporary setback, Lunacharsky affirmed as early as 1903:

Man moves toward the radiant sun; he stumbles and falls into the grave. But … in the ringing clatter of the grave-diggers' spades he hears creative labor, the great technology of man whose beginning and symbol is fire. Mankind will carry out his plans . . . realize his desired ideal.55

His Faust and the City declares that the idea of an immortal God is only an anticipatory "vision of what the might of men shall be,"56 and ends ecstatically with the people crying over the dead body of Faust "he lives in us!. .. Our sovereign city roused in might."57

After the Revolution, Lunacharsky turned to an undertaking that had attracted many past Russian artists: the composition of a trilogy which would provide a new redemptive message for mankind. Like Gogol's Dead Souls, Dostoevsky's Brothers, and Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, Luna-charsky's trilogy was never finished. In keeping with the spirit of the silver age, the first part, Vasilisa the Wise, was fantastic in form and cosmic in pretensions. The second part, "a dramatic poem," Mitra the Saviour, was never published, and the final part, The Last Hero, was apparently never written. The last lines we have of the trilogy is the paean at the end of the mythological Vasilisa to the coming of "man's divinity on earth."58 Such talk was clearly dangerous in a society bent on camouflaging its own myths and absolutes with scientific terminology.

The figure who best portrayed the Promethean vision of the early God-builders was Alexander Malinovsky, a brilliant theorist who has suffered the relative oblivion of those who neither joined the emigration nor rose to high authority in the new Soviet state. Shortly after taking his first regular position as a journalistic critic in 1895 at the age of twenty-two, Malinovsky assumed a new name which remained with him and accurately conveys the image he had of his own high calling: Bogdanov, or "God-gifted." He

soon became active in the Social Democratic movement, siding immediately with the Bolsheviks after the split of 1903, and helping edit their theoretical journal New Life, where he began his friendship with Gorky.