The Icon and the Axe

In the first part, Drops of Blood, we are in the same town that provided the site for The Petty Demon; but attention is now focused on the mysterious poet Trirodov, who has taken up residence there. Perversion is projected onto the phallic towers and subterranean passageways of his country estate, where he presides over a weird colony of "silent children" but ventures forth to take part in revolutionary agitation. The second part of the trilogy, Queen Ortruda, takes one to an imaginary kingdom of lithesome virgins and naked boys on a Mediterranean island, where a volcano is continually preparing for a final eruption, which kills the queen and serves as a mixed symbol of sexual orgasm, political revolution, and death. In the last section, Smoke and Ash, Trirodov leaves Russia to take over the vacant throne of the burned-out Mediterranean kingdom. Thus, the poet-magician reaches a kind of Nirvana by fleeing the real world of the Peredonovs and petty demons to the non-being of an imaginary kingdom-beyond good and evil, beyond male and female (as his name "three genders" suggests), beyond the

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different reincarnations of his personality (also suggested by the variant reading of his name as "three types"), perhaps beyond life itself.

In one of his late stories, "The Future," Sologub speaks of "a place where the future gleams through an azure veil of desire . . . where those as yet unborn rest in peace."74 Four souls in this happy place suddenly conceive the desire to be born into the world, each expressing a special fondness for one of the primal elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Sologub goes on to tell how the first became a miner and was buried alive, the second was drowned, the third burned alive, and the fourth hanged. He concludes by asking:

Oh, why did Will lead them forth from the happy place of non-existence!76

In one of his late short stories, "The Kiss of the Unborn," he lends a certain lyric beauty to this gloomy view of the world. The story begins with the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy, who had become discouraged by reading in the works of Tolstoy and other Russian intellectuals that truth could not be found in life. The boy's unmarried aunt sets off to console her sister, the boy's mother, but soon turns to thinking about her own unborn son: the purely imaginary fruit of an unrequited early love. Suddenly, in the midst of her lonely weeping before the door of her sister, the unborn son appears to her, gives her a kiss, and thanks her for sparing him the agony of being born into the world. She goes in then to see her sister "full of calm and happiness," suddenly armed with "power to strengthen and console."76

The happiness of those who are never born was preached most eloquently by Vasily Rozanov, the high priest of the new cult of sex who likened himself to a fetus in the womb asking not to be born "because I am warm enough here."77 Through Rozanov, the Dostoevskian origins of the new sensualism can be most dramatically traced. Rozanov gave a kind of physical immediacy to this link by seeking out and marrying Dostoevsky's former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova, and launched the new philosophic interest in Dostoevsky with his lengthy essay of 1890, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.

For Rozanov, Dostoevsky appeared as the harbinger of a new supra-rational freedom: a liberation first hinted at in the Notes from the Underground and finally developed in the Legend. Rozanov insists that Lobachev-sky's non-Euclidian mathematics (which were being reproduced in a variety of new editions in the 1880's) demonstrated the teritativeness of scientific truths,78 and that Dostoevsky's works showed the falsity of any scientific attempt to organize society. Neither God nor reality can be apprehended by reason alone. The only way to rediscover both is through sexual experience.

The cult of the immediate, which had been a precarious way back to traditional Christianity in Dostoevsky, became for Rozanov the way back to a God who is not Christ but Dionysius. Rozanov's "sexual transcendentalism"79 exalts the religion of the early Hebrews and primitive fertility cults over the ascetic and unnatural traditions of Christianity, which by sterilizing the idea of God have prepared the way for atheism: the inevitable attitude of thought devoid of sex.