The Icon and the Axe

Rozanov agreed with the general preference for the earthy, anguished Dostoevsky over the aristocratic, moralistic Tolstoy expressed in Merezhkov-sky's famous series on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But he dissented from Merezhkovsky's view that Dostoevsky was a kind of Christian seer. This tendency to view Dostoevsky as the prophet of a renovated Christianity and The Brothers Karamazov as (to cite Gorky's phrase) "a fifth gospel," predominated in the Religio-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg from the time of its dedication "to the memory of Vladimir Solov'ev" in 1907 until its dissolution in 1912. The view was perpetuated in the brilliant critical works on Dostoevsky written by two of the society's most famous members: Viacheslav Ivanov and Nicholas Berdiaev.

Although Berdiaev has subsequently become better known in the West, Ivanov was in many ways the more seminal thinker. A student of Mommsen in Berlin who had become converted to the Nietzschean idea that "a new organic era" was at hand, Ivanov bade his associates join him in plunging "from the real to the more real"; to leave behind the prosaic realities of the present for a future that will bring with it a new tragic sense. Ivanov insisted that he longed not for the unattainable but simply "for that which has not yet been attained."80 "Viacheslav the Magnificent" was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh-floor apartment "The Tower," overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full swing until after supper had

been served at 2 a.m.

Nietzsche was in a sense the guiding spirit, for Ivanov looked nostalgically to the lost world of classical antiquity through the eyes of Nietzsche's own academic discipline-philology-and worshipped at the shrine of the vitalistic Dionysus: the god of fertility and wine and patron of drama and choral song. But from the time of his early studies of 1904-5, "Nietzsche and Dionysus," "The Religion of Dionysus," and "The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God," to his scholarly dissertation on Dionysus defended at Baku in 1921,81 Ivanov tended to see in the Dionvsian cult a prefiguration of Christianity; and he became after his exile

in 1925 a resident of Rome and convert to Catholicism. Berdiaev, who later became an emigre apologist for Christianity within the Orthodox fold, was in pre-Revolutionary days closer to Nietzsche in such books as The Meaning of the Creative Act of 1916.

Rozanov went much further, insisting that there was a basic conflict between Dionysus and Christ. In a famous speech to the Religio-Philo-sophical Society, Rozanov attacked Jesus as a figure who never laughed or married, and pleaded for a new religion of uninhibited creativity and sensuality.82 Rozanov's proposal was given support by Nietzsche's suggestion that all morality is rationalization and that a new type of superman is needed with the courage to live beyond the stultifying categories of good and evil. Shestov's Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy saw these two figures as the twin prophets of a new world in which the tragic spirit was to be freed from the shackles of morality for a new life of sensual and aesthetic adventure.83 Shestov later sought to contrast the German with Tolstoy, the bete noire of silver age aestheticism, in his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche.84 The tendency to identify Dostoevsky with Nietzsche rather than Christ was particularly marked among those of Jewish origins like Shestov and A. Shteinberg, who tended to see in Dostoevsky a revolutionary new "system of freedom," to cite the title of a lecture series he gave in St. Petersburg in 1921.85