The Icon and the Axe

Even above these peaks rose the sky-borne hope of transforming the cosmos expressed in "The Chains of Blue," the longest poem ever written by Khlebnikov in his "alphabet of stars." But at the end of a long "blue chain" of images, the poet gives us a prophetic glimpse into a future that was to devour its futurists. He suddenly introduces the familiar figure of Prometheus. But it is a distorted image in which we see only his liver being devoured by eagles.66

Sensualism

Along with the effort to storm the heavens went a simultaneous impulse to plunge into the depths. Cosmic Prometheanism was accompanied by a counter-current of personal sensualism; boundless public optimism, by morbid private pessimism. Indeed, the early years of the twentieth century brought about a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.

In part, the new sensualism was a reaction against the long-dominant moralism and ascetic puritanism of the radical tradition which had been carried to extremes in the late Tolstoy. The new generation of writers delighted in the knowledge that their main source of inspiration, Vladimir Solov'ev, had used the sage of Yasnaya Polyana as the model for his portrayal of the Antichrist. They longed to rediscover the delights of sex and artistic indulgence which Tolstoy had denied himself no less systematically than had Pobedonostsev.

Exaltation of the flesh was to some extent caused by the rapid advent of a mass, urban culture. The lonely, atomized man of the city found in sex

one of his few surviving links with the vital, natural world dimly remembered from his rural boyhood. The provincial, rural elements that increasingly flooded the ranks of art and literature also tended to bring with them elements of earthy folklore, of a popular culture previously suppressed by the official, Orthodox culture of the Empire. The novels of bleak realism that had previously concentrated on characteristic sufferings of the countryside-¦ starvation and exploitation-now turned in the first decade of the new century to the peculiar shame of the cities-sexual degradation. From Leonid Andreev's picture of syphilis and suicide in The Abyss and In the Fog to Alexander Kuprin's panorama of urban prostitution in The Pit, the Russian reading public was subjected to vivid portrayals of sordid sexuality. To a large extent, however, the increasing preoccupation with sexual matters was a logical development of the romantic preoccupation with the will that had become characteristic of the emancipated aristocratic intelligentsia. Having tried to discover the will of the historical process in the early nineteenth century and the will of the people in the late century, the intellectuals now turned to discovering the inner recesses of their own wills. They now sought to discover not just "the other shore," the new society dreamed of in the nineteenth century, but also "the other side" of human personality. It is significant that both phrases came from German-the language of romantic longing. The original title of Herzen's call for Russia to fulfill the revolutionary hopes that had been betrayed in the West by the failure of 1848 was Vom andern Ufer; and Die andere Seite was the title of a widely studied German treatise in psychology calling for a new "psycho-graphic" art.67

In part, the new sensualism was a Nietzschean effort to find "bloody truths" capable of supplanting the lifeless truisms of a society just entering into a phase of bourgeoisation and national delusions, such as that which Germany had experienced in Nietzsche's lifetime. But Russian sensualism was more than an aristocratic program for replacing Christ with Dionysus in the manner of Nietzsche or Stefan George. It was also at times a confused plebeian effort to revitalize the image of Christ with the flesh that had been taken away from him by the official churchmen in the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky's Schilleresque praise of the earthy and spontaneous, his allusion to "the indecent thoughts in the minds of decent people . . . which a man is afraid to tell even to himself"68 was taken as a signpost pointing to a new world of experience. Ivan Karamazov's dictum that, in the absence of God, "all things are permissible" became a kind of invitation to sexual adventure for a new generation.

The final repeal of the censorship in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 led to an increasingly candid public discussion of sex. A feverish