The Icon and the Axe

images of prophecy and martyrdom. The poet Maiakovsky, who rapidly became their leader, called himself "the thirteenth apostle" and "an uncrowned king of souls," whose body will someday be "lifted to heaven like the communion wafer by prostitutes to cleanse them of their sins." His sonorous verse captures, like the zaumny iazyk, the language of pure sound of Khlebnikov, some of the musical cascading quality of the original zaumny iazyk of the church: the blagovestie of church bells. If the bells of "rejoicing" are harsh ones, jangled out of tune by the iconoclastic poet, his ultimate assurance of salvation is phrased in the language of apocalypse, which is, after all, a kind of "theology beyond reason." He alone, the ultimate romantic, "will come through the buildings on fire" to see "the second tidal flood."110 If futurist poets were led into a kind of masochistic apocalypticism in their effort to reach beyond the ordinary world, abstract artists tended to follow a similar path in their quest for a new art of pure form and color. Kandinsky in the critical period of his development, during 1912-14, repeatedly returned to the theme of apocalyptical horsemen and the Last Judgment in the canvases with which he slowly rode altogether out of the world of objective art.111

In the feverish literature of this decade of war and revolution, apocalypticism became an increasingly central theme. Solov'ev's posthumously published short story of the Antichrist heralded a host of imitators who were, for the most part, less interested in his positive vision of ultimate Christian unification than in his negative vision of the coming Asian domination of Europe.

Merezhkovsky's trilogy, Christ and Antichrist, presented a vast historical panoply of the death of gods under Julian the Apostate, their resurrection under Leonardo da Vinci, and a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist that had begun under Peter and was to be resolved on Russian soil.112 Far more interesting and original was the apocalyptical work of Boris Bugaev, the brooding son of a famous Moscow mathematician who became a leading symbolist writer and moved from Buddhism to theosophy to anthroposophy: the attempt to create a new humanistic culture by the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner.113 Early in his religious and philosophic studies Bugaev became fascinated with the inner links that he felt existed between the intelligentsia and the popular religious mentality. He chose the pen name Andrew Bely-combining that of the "first chosen" saint who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia with the word for "white," the apocalyptical color. Bely thus rebaptized himself with a name which symbolized his own sense of mission in bringing tidings of apocalypse to the Russian people. Like Solov'ev he saw the problem in terms of the confrontation of Europe and Asia with Russia as the critical arena of conflict. Like Briusov, who

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wrote apocalyptically about "the coming Huns" during the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-5,114 Bely was haunted by this unexpected Asian victory and soon embarked on a great novelistic trilogy East or West. The first part appeared in two large volumes in 1910 under the title Silver Dove, telling the story of a Moscow student who gives away all his earthly goods in order to follow a mad flagellant "Mother of God." He is in search of a world-wide resurrection: a union of West and East through a conflagration out of which will come the bird that can rise to heaven: the "dove" of the sectarian tradition, the firebird of Russian mythology. The practice of self-immolation by the Old Believers is represented as a kind of prophetic anticipation of what the entire world is about to experience on the way to salvation.

The outbreak of World War I and the enormous casualties on the eastern front seemed to provide further evidence to Bely that the end was indeed coming; and the second part of the trilogy which appeared in 1916, under the title Petersburg, is even more haunted by the distortion of traditional shapes and the sense of approaching catastrophe. He sees the calamity being brought on by "both father and son, both reactionary and revolutionary," who are equally nihilistic at heart, secret collaborators in bringing on "the kingdom of the beast, … of the Antichrist, of Satan."115