The Icon and the Axe

Shortly before his death in 1919, this prince of sensualism retreated altogether from the Revolutionary chaos around him to the Monastery of St. Sergius and the Holy Trinity, where he wrote his Apocalypse of Our Time. The Russian Revolution was, he declared, a catastrophe of apocalyptical proportions for all human civilization. It was the result not of Revolutionary agitation but of the total failure of Christianity to deal with the social and physical spheres of life. Believing that the original apocalypse of St. John was written as an indictment of the early Christian Church, Rozanov designed his new apocalypse as an indictment of the modern church, which has stood by helplessly amidst war, famine, and revolution, making the flight to Bolshevism all but inevitable. Rozanov seemed to be longing for the church to reassert in this Time of Troubles the leadership that it had assumed during the Smuta three centuries earlier, which had led to the national revival of the seventeenth century under the new Romanov dynasty. Appropriately enough, Rozanov wrote his Apocalypse in the Monastery of St. Sergius, which alone had not fallen under foreign domination during this earlier Time of Troubles. He received the sacrament shortly before his death, which took place (to cite the title of one of his best works) "in the shadow of church walls."129

In Rozanov's religion, the flesh was made word, rather than the word flesh, as Berdiaev noted. His views represented the fulfillment of the cult of earthy immediacy (pochvennosf) that his idol Dostoevsky had launched. He called for a "return to the passions and to fire" near the end of the Apocalypse, insisting that there is more theology "in a bull mounting a cow" than in the ecclesiastical academies, and citing Dostoevsky in support of the

view that "God has taken the seeds of other universes and sowed them in the earth."130

Apocalypse and judgment were immediate sensuous realities for Rozanov just as the physical world had been. He could not believe in "the immortality of the soul" (he invariably put such abstract phrases in quotation marks) but could not bring himself to believe that "the little red beard" of his best friend would ever perish. He envisaged himself as standing before God on Judgment Day saying nothing, only sobbing and smiling.

Rozanov died early in 1919 before finishing his Apocalypse; but in the following year there was written an even more remarkable description of the coming end, in the prophetic novel We by Eugene Zamiatin. A former naval engineer and Bolshevik, Zamiatin portrays the coming totalitarianism with such penetrating acuteness that We has never yet been published in the USSR. The scene of the novel is "the United State," a horrendous Utopia of the future, which has subordinated the earth to a mysterious "Well-Doer" and a uniform "Table of Hours." The latter is a kind of cosmic extension of the railroad timetable: "that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature." Election Day is the Day of Unanimity, and order is maintained by electric whips, with death by evaporation the ultimate sanction.

The narrator and hero-like everyone in the United State-is known by a number (D-503) rather than a name. D-503 is still, however, a recognizable human being-indeed, in some ways, a distilled representation of the silver age. He combines Prometheanism and sensualism, the two abiding attitudes of that period; and the tension in the novel arises from the inherent conflict between the two. On the one hand he is the ultimate Prometheus: a mathematician who has built "the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral," an object that is about to "integrate the indefinite equation of the Cosmos" by sending to all other planets "the grateful yoke of reason … a mathematically fauldess happiness." At the same time, however, D-503 suffers from an irrational attachment to a woman, I-330, who is associated with the music of the past, which, unlike the mathematical harmony of the present, is the product of purely individual inspiration ("an extinct form of epilepsy").

I-330 leads D-503 out beyond the Green Wall of the United State to a wilderness in which live the Mephi: semi-bestial survivors of the Two Hundred Years' War which preceded the founding of the United State. The Mephi are, of course, the ultimate sensualists, children of Mephis-topheles, as their name suggests. In their world the breasts of women break through the uniforms of the state like the shoots of plants in spring; fire is worshipped; and insanity advocated as the only form of deliverance. Only

the Mephi have not succumbed to "the mistake of Galileo" in believing that there is "a final number."