The Icon and the Axe

Although she favored monogamy for purely practical reasons, she was an ardent apologist for the liberalized divorce laws that were promulgated

early in the Soviet era. Both she and her wealthy Finnish mother were divorcees. Her own supreme love affair was clearly the one she enjoyed with the working class. A wealthy intellectual, she identified herself with the most ruggedly proletarian faction of Bolshevism, the so-called Workers' Opposition, which vainly sought to combat the growing power of the new state bureaucracy with a system of decentralized trade union control. Unlike others in the movement, she was not disbarred from further positions of authority after its repudiation in 1921. She spent the entire period from 1923-45 in high diplomatic posts, most of them in the Scandinavian regions that she knew so well (involving herself in such colorful episodes as her attempt to negotiate an end to the Russo-Finnish War together with another militant Bolshevik feminist, the Esthonian-born playwright Hella Wuolijoki, whose most famous work, the Loretta Young movie The Farmer's Daughter, deals with that enduring popular symbol of promiscuity).102 Kollontai's advocacy of sexual liberation can be said to represent in some ways a curious and short-lived introduction of Scandinavian perspectives into the gloomy puritanical picture of Russian Bolshevism. The fact that she was the only important opposition leader within the Bolshevik Party to survive the purges of the thirties could testify to some vestigial nostalgia among old Revolutionaries for her image of the Revolution as "eros with wings."

There was little room for eros in the Bolshevik ethos, however. The last great festival of public passion may well have been the remarkable production of the play Carmencita and the Soldier, at the Moscow Art Theater in 1923. This "lyric tragedy" was an original reworking of Bizet's Carmen designed to focus attention exclusively on the savage, love-hate relationship between man and woman. The chorus of older tragedies was reintroduced, and the frivolities of the opera eliminated in an effort to depict that which Nietzsche had written in the margin of his score of Bizet's Carmen at the "Habanera": "Eros as the Greeks imagined him, bitterly demonic and untamed."103

The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic. Solov'ev, the author of the turn to sensualism, had begun in his last years to have visions of the devil rather than of sophia, and seems to have felt himself strangely drawn toward the Antichrist of his last writings.104 Within a few years of Solov'ev's death, his follower Alexander Blok moved from his earlier mystical reverence for "the beautiful lady" who brought harmony to the universe to his poetic preoccupation with "the unknown woman," an enigmatic prostitute from the nether world of the city taverns. The less well remembered figure of Alexander Dobroliubov actually championed the worship of Satan, and wrote poems and tracts extolling "the beauty of

death" before turning to a life of ascetic self-mortification and radical sectarian preaching.106 Demons are everywhere in the literary world of Sologub, where the lure of the flesh is almost invariably related to the power

of Satan,

Alexis Remizov, one of the most popular storytellers of the late imperial period, believed that the world was ruled by the devil. His portrayal of Satan in the vernacular language and fantastic metaphor of the Russian countryside made him seem almost a congenial figure. Remizov's popular marionette production The Devil's Show was a kind of satanic mystery play; and his Flaming Russia of 1921 paid tribute to Dostoevsky as the author of the strange dualism and "theomachism" (bogoborchestvo, or "struggle with God") that underlay his own exotic writings. Chiurlionis suggested that the sun was really black; and in Satan's Diary, the last work of Leonid Andreev, the author identifies with Satan, who-in the shape of an American millionaire-records his deceptions and triumphs in a deeply corrupted world.106

Diabolism also found expression in music, where Scriabin professed to find a kind of exaltation of the devil in the music of Liszt and in his own celebration of sensual delights. The devil found his most notable conquest in the field of painting, where the gifted figure of Vrubel moved from early religious paintings to experimentalism to anguish and insanity in the course of an artistic quest centered on representing Lermontov's Demon in painting.107