The Icon and the Axe

Shameless nudes had, however, not altogether vanished from Russian culture. They dominated the literary debut late in 1916 of one of Russia's great storytellers of this century, Isaac Babel.92 His description of a seduction in the manner of the French naturalists, whom he admired, attracted the wrath of the government authorities, who transferred to the inventive young writer from Odessa the puritanical denunciations and threats that could no longer be visited upon the absent Larionov. Yet nowhere was sensualism more in evidence than in the inner circles of the imperial government itself. The imperial family was under the sway of the notorious Rasputin, and the rival court figures who succeeded in killing this "holy devil" in December of 1916 were if anything even more corrupt than the remarkable peasant holy man from Siberia. Protopopov, the minister of the interior who was Rasputin's friend and protege, was a sensualist thought by many to be a practitioner of necrophilia. Prince Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitry (the high aristocrats who carried out the poisoning, shooting, and drowning of the rugged Rasputin) were widely renowned for their sexual exploits and intrigues.93

Within a year, however, all these figures had been swept aside by the winds of change. First came the gust from the progressive bloc of liberal reformers in the Duma, then the unexpected hurricane of March, 1917, which ended the autocracy, and finally the swirling winds of civil war set in motion by the Bolshevik coup of November.

Revolution and civil war turned the attention of Russian writers from the private to the public arena, and made apocalypticism, the third ideological current of the age, suddenly seem the most relevant of all. Blok, who had already felt himself "drawn into the whirlpool" by "the lilac world of the first revolution," now tended to see in the erotic and mystical "unknown lady" of his earlier poems only the mother of harlots spoken of in the Book of Revelation.94 Sensual desire was cauterized with the fire of revolution and civil war, and zealously repressed by the puritanical Bolsheviks once power was consolidated.

Nonetheless, sensualism-like other attitudes of the late imperial period-did not vanish immediately under the new regime. One writer likened the experience of revolution to that of a "voluptuous shudder."95 A remarkable Soviet novel of the early twenties tells of an aristocratic girl

who, by becoming head of a local secret police, converts her sexual appetite into state-sanctioned sadism, proudly proclaiming that "the revolution is all permeated with sex for me."90 Another tale tells of a deacon who leaves his religious calling ostensibly to join the Revolutionary forces, but actually to live freely with the prostitute Marfa. "Underneath all his Marxism rank Marfism was hidden," the author wryly observes.97 Most memorable of all is the picaresque sensuality and ironic spirit in Babel's tales of the revolutionary era, Red Cavalry, of 1926, and in his Odessa Tales of the following year dealing with the Odessa underworld.

There was an engagingly straightforward irrationalism about the bohemian sensualism of the "Imaginist" school of poetry, which was formed in 1919. Seeking to "smash" grammar and return to primitive roots and suggestive images, they produced such remarkable works as Vadim Shershenevich's 2x2=5 and Anatoly Marienhofs / Fornicate with Inspiration.9* Before the group collapsed in 1924 and Shershenevich settled down to the prosaic task of becoming Upton Sinclair's Russian translator, this leader of the group wrote a number of poems exalting the anti-progressive sensualism that was still widespread among the intelligentsia:

Women, make haste to love us, For we sing of wonders still, And we are the last thin cracks That progress has yet to fill!99

Sensualism was, however, not entirely without its official patrons in the early years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, the Revolution was in a very real sense "permeated with sex" for Alexandra Kollontai, the gifted daughter of a Ukrainian general and first commissar of public welfare in the new Bolshevik regime. Between the publication of her New Morality and the Working Class in 1919 and her collection Free Love in 1925, she campaigned incessantly for free love in the new society. She argued, however, for sublimating the physical side of love ("wingless eros") to a socially creative love, with wings, which seeks a kind of spiritual union with the new proletarian society.100 Thus, just as Bogdanov saw the proletariat as God, Kollontai saw it as a kind of cosmic sex partner. She favored (to cite the title of one of her stories) "the love of worker bees," with women as queen bees, producing children from semi-anonymous fathers whose true love lies in productive labor. In a famous metaphor one of her fiotional female creations insisted that sexual intercourse in itself had no greater significance than the simple act of drinking a glass of water.101