The Icon and the Axe

This new heaven was a hell to Zamiatin, for whom Christian imagery was primarily a device for heightening man's sense of the grotesque. Thus, in the comatose aftermath of the Civil War, the author of We turns away from Christian symbols to those of the primordial, pre-Christian world in an effort to depict the unprecedented events that had just taken place. Pil'niak wrote an apostrophe to "damp mother earth"; and in 1924, the year when Leonov presented a collection of dinosaur fossils consumed by fire as the symbol of the end of the old order, Zamiatin turned from the future depicted in We to suggestions of the primordial past in his famous story "The Cave." His eerie picture of man's reversion to stone-age conditions during the Civil War begins with a verbless vignette:

Glaciers, mammoths, wastelands. Nocturnal, black rocks somehow like houses; in the rocks-caves.133

Within the caves, men forage around in search of food and fuel, furtively hiding from "the icy roar of some super-mammothish mammoth" which "roamed at night among the rocks where ages ago Petersburg had stood." In one of the caves, amidst such symbolic artifacts as an axe and a copy of Scriabin's Opus 74, a cultured hero sits half-hypnotized by "the greedy

View of Russian Liberalism

PLATE XX

"new men" during the reign of Alexander II viewed the rising power of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie is reflected in the masthead (Plate XX) of the satirical journal Iskra ("The Spark"). This short-lived journal, by borrowing from the radical press of England and France the weapon of political caricature, paved the way for future Soviet propagandists. The masthead depicted here was first introduced early in 1861.

The coiling serpent is labeled "disrespect for law, for the rights of personality and property . . . self-assumed power and fist-justice . . ." The human parade moves from money through gambling, alcohol, and "speculators" to a scene that shows a mounted, villainous "monopoly" triumphant over a cringing and obese caricature of Justice, whose scales show money far outweighing "truth." At the far right emerge the final fruits of the depraved system: the cannon-bearing zealots of the new post-Crimean chauvinism, a woman trumpeting "publicity," and a man pushing the locomotive that was spreading the new industrial order throughout the empire. It seems appropriate that Lenin later chose the same title, Iskra (derived in both cases from earlier usage by the Decembrists), for the seminal weekly publication of revolutionary Bolshevism, which he founded in 1900.

PLATE XXII

PLATE XXI

imperial periuu is weu miuirutci* uy iuuH.r»v›. ^ ~j namic Suprematism" (Plate XXI): a typical product of the revolutionary style of non-objective art which he conceived in 1913, proclaimed in a manifesto of 1915, and exemplified in a variety of such paintings during the period of war and revolution.

The cultural richness and stylistic variety of this age was obliterated by the canonization under Stalin of "socialist realism," a two-dimensional poster art devoted largely to the glorification of socialist construction and, increasingly, Great Russian historical successes.

There were, however, more imaginative efforts to portray the ideal of the new proletarian culture; and Malevich (unlike most of the best experimental artists from the pre-revolutionary era) stayed on in the U.S.S.R. until his death in 1935, seeking to introduce the leaven of art into the dough of a new mass culture. The sturdy but faceless form of his simple, semi-abstract "Woman with a Rake (Plate XXII) offers a cleaner artistic statement of the idealized "heroine of socialist labor" than official Soviet art, and a secular icon to replace the semi-abstract religious image of a woman with child with which the illustrations for this book (and in many ways the story of Russian culture) begin. It is perhaps a fitting, final irony that the Byzantine Vladimir "Mother of God" is still on public view in the Tret'ia-kov Gallery in Moscow, whereas this thoroughly contemporary Russian painting of a working woman is consigned to the reserve collection of the same museum.

cave-god: a cast-iron stove." In a weird sequence of scenes, the Christian symbols he mentions initially fade away and he becomes in effect a stone age man-robbing his neighbor and burning all available written work in order to feed his new God. At the end of the story

. . . everything is one gigantic, silent cave. Narrow endless passageways… dark, ice-encrusted rocks; and in the rocks are deep holes glowing crimson; there, in the holes by the fire are people squatting . . . and heard by no one, . . . over the boulders, over the caves, over the squatting people comes the huge, measured tread of some super-mammothish mammoth.

In his "On Literature, Revolution and Entropy," written in 1923, Zamiatin made explicit his opposition to the "measured tread of the mammoth" that was taking over Russia: