The Icon and the Axe

From his early representation of the demon as a seated figure similar in form to his earlier Pan, Vrubel proceeded to a final picture which showed the demon stretched out horizontally, as if on a rack, with his head cocked up at an unnatural angle, staring out in horror at the viewer. It is as if the devil were conducting a kind of final satanic review of his lesser servants: those "pillars of society" who always lined up in ignorant admiration before any work of a widely acclaimed artist. Vrubel both shocked and fascinated society by returning periodically to retouch and further distend his devil even after it was placed on public exhibit. The only refuge left on earth was to be found in an insane asylum, where Vrubel spent the last years before his death in 1910. The devil which haunted Vrubel had, of course, fascinated thinkers of the romantic age throughout Europe. Faust was, after all, inconceivable without Mephistopheles; and in their brooding about paradises lost or regained, the romantics found Milton's Satan somehow more credible and interesting than his God. In their determination to revitalize the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth-century philosophers, romantic philosophers often preferred to equate vitality with Satan rather than attempt to redefine or rehabilitate the discredited idea of God.

Yet there is something strange and uniquely Russian about Vrubel's

effort to encase Satan in a painting. It was a kind of inversion of the quest launched in Russian painting by Alexander Ivanov a half century earlier.108 As in the case of Ivanov, Vrubel's effort became a kind of focal point of the communal interests and expectations of the entire intellectual elite. Just as Ivanov had attempted to portray "The Appearance of Christ to the People," Vrubel was trying to have the devil make his appearance to the people. But whereas Ivanov's Christ was an artistic failure, Vrubel's Demon was a relative success. Romanticism had found its icon; and the sensualists of late imperial Russia, their patron saint.

Apocalypticism

This sense of the satanic presence led to a brooding and apocalyptic mentality. Apocalypticism, the third key characteristic of the era, was in many ways the by-product of the unresolved psychological tension between the other two: Prometheanism and sensualism. How, after all, can one reconcile great expectations with petty preoccupations? an intellectual belief in a coming Utopia and a simultaneous personal involvement in debauchery? One way of holding on to both commitments was to convince oneself with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that apocalyptical change was in the offing, that the sensualism of today forebodes the transformation of tomorrow. As Diaghilev put it during the revolutionary year of 1905 (in a toast delivered in connection with the exhibit of three thousand Russian historical portraits which he organized at the Tauride Palace):

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.109

The second and more obvious source of apocalypticism was the popular religious mentality which tended to influence even many of the openly irreligious contributors to the emerging mass culture of the early twentieth century. Reading and writing were now becoming regular activities of many with a primitive, peasant background for whom it seemed natural to talk of change in apocalyptical terms.

The stridently secular manifestos of the futurists were filled with

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