The Icon and the Axe

world of the mythological "damp mother earth" has beckoned in many forms from the first monastery in the caves of Kiev to the present-day shrine of the mummified Lenin and the gilded catacombs of the Moscow subway. Not only the earth, but fire, water, the sky-the other "elements" of medieval cosmology-have been important symbols for the Russian imagination; and even today the Russian language retains many earthy overtones that have been filtered out of more sophisticated European tongues.

A second supra-personal force behind modern Russian culture is that of Eastern Christendom. However fascinating pagan survivals, however magnificent earlier Scythian art, Orthodox Christianity created the first distinctively Russian culture and provided the basic forms of artistic expression and the framework of belief for modern Russia. The Orthodox Church also played a key role in infecting Russia with the essentially Byzantine idea that there is a special dignity and destiny for an Orthodox society and but one true answer to controversies arising within it. Thus, religion will play a central role in this narrative-not as an isolated aspect of culture but as an all-permeating force within it.

Along with nature and faith stands a third powerful force: the impact of the West. For the entire period of this chronicle, interaction with Western Europe was a major factor in Russian history. Russians have repeatedly sought to define this relationship, usually seeking a formula by which they could both borrow from and remain distinct from the West. The celebrated controversy between Slavophiles and "Westernizers" in the 1840's is but one episode in a long struggle. Here, as elsewhere, the self-conscious, intellectualized disputes of the nineteenth century will be placed in historical perspective by considering other Westernizing forces that have sought to determine the direction of Russian culture: Latinizers from Italy, pietists from Germany, "Voltairians" from France, and railroad builders from England. Particular attention will also be paid to those centers of Russian life which have provided a Western leaven within Russia: the real and remembered Novgorod and the majestic metropolis of St. Petersburg-Leningrad.

Many of the special emphases of this work are at variance with the general image currently reflected in either the formal interpretations of Soviet ideologists or the informal consensus of most Western intellectual historians. Specialists will be aware (and laymen should be alerted) that my interpretation includes among its unconventional and debatable features: a general stress on earlier (though not on the earliest) periods born of the belief that "all ages are equidistant from eternity" and that formative influences sometimes tell us more about later developments than immediately precedent circumstances; detailed immersion in certain critical and often neglected turning points, such as the onset of the schism under Alexis and

of the anti-Enlightenment under Alexander I; a continuing concern for religious as well as secular ideas and trends; and a relative emphasis within the more familiar period since 1825 on the distinctively Russian rather than the more recognizably Western or "modernizing" aspects of Russian development. I have been encouraged both by the volume of the older materials written on these subjects and by the depth of continuing interest in them among many people deeply immersed in Russian culture, both within and outside the USSR, to believe that the special emphases of this study reflect in some degree objective reality about Russia, and not solely the subjective curiosity of an individual historian.

The text is based largely on a fresh reading of primary materials and of detailed Russian monographs-particularly those published during the last great flowering of humanistic scholarship prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Considerable use has also been made of Western and recent Soviet scholarly writings; but relatively little use has been made of other general histories, and almost none at all of the substantial but repetitive and apocrypha-laden body of popular Western literature about Russia.

The text is written for a broad range of general readers and will, hopefully, be completely intelligible to someone with no previous knowledge of Russian history. The references at the end of the book are designed to provide the more specialized student with the original-language version of key citations and a running bibliographical guide to available materials in major European languages-particularly on subjects that are controversial, unfamiliar, or not adequately treated elsewhere. The length of the documentation is not intended to lend any illusion of completeness or any aura of special authority to my interpretations and emphases. Many good works have not been used or mentioned; many important subjects not discussed.