The Icon and the Axe

sualists of this period. Russian sensualism was tinged with aesthetic melancholy, rooted in the German philosophic tradition of Novalis, Schopenhauer, and Wagner's Tristan: a world of insatiable metaphysical longing in which life was a "disease of the spirit"; sexual experience, the means through which the foredoomed human will best expresses itself; and the "Death and Transfiguration" of the body, the only "cure" for the flesh-contaminated spirit.138

Apocalypticism was, however, an attitude that was in many ways more uniquely confined to Russia in the still-optimistic pre-war European world. To be sure, some Western writers like Verhaeren had seen apocalyptical meaning in the rise of the modern "tentacular city," and there was an undercurrent of biblical-tinged pessimism even in such a triumphant spokesman of the European imperial age as Rudyard Kipling. But nowhere else in Europe was the volume and intensity of apocalyptical literature comparable to that found in Russia during the reign of Nicholas II. The stunning defeat by Japan in 1904-5 and the ensuing revolution left an extraordinarily large number of Russians with the feeling that life as they had known it was irrevocably coming to an end. There was a tendency to see apocalyptical significance in everything, from the rise of Asia to the reappearance of Halley's Comet in 1910.139 Unable to find joy or consolation in religion, the Russian creative artist nonetheless looked with fascination at the apocalyptical literature of the Bible and Russian folklore. These writings commended themselves to the brooding psychological condition of Russian writers, and also provided a model for the art they hoped to produce; for tales of apocalypse were both uniquely familiar to the new mass audience that they hoped to reach and, at the same time, rich in the esoteric symbolic language that they themselves admired.

In its apocalypticism as in other ways, the culture of this disturbed age seems at times to represent a throwback to the distant past: more a finale to the Old than a prelude to the New Russia. Artists seemed more to be looking back to the secrets of the seven days that created the world than forward to the slogans of the ten days which shook it. They sought the sources, not the benefits, of electricity; the lost lines and colors of the old icons, rather than the photographic heroism of the new movies.

Russian Prometheanism thus had elements of Utopian compulsion and poetic fantasy that resemble less the optimistic and utilitarian scientism of contemporary Europe than the religious intoxication of earlier Russian heresy-the Judaizers with their pseudo-scientific "Secret of Secrets"; the Boehmist mystics with their esoteric paths to androgyny and divinity; and the recurrent sectarian prophets who sought to supplant traditional Chris-

tendom with a new group that would immediately realize the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Sensualism and apocalypticism were attitudes more reminiscent of the time of Ivan III and IV than of Alexander II and III. Philotheus of Pskov had seen a prophetic connection between the present reality of Sodom and the coming victory of the "third Rome," just as many in the Silver Age were prone to see their own decadence as the harbinger of final deliverance. But what precisely was to come out of Sologub's "dust and ashes"? Was it to be the enigmatic Christ of Blok's poem? Boris Savinkov's or Briusov's "Pale Horse," the fourth and most mysterious of the horsemen of the apocalypse? Stravinsky's and Balmont's "Firebird," the spectacular phoenix of pre-Christian Slavic mythology? or perhaps only the prehistoric dinosaurs of Zamiatin's "Cave"?

The more Russia's experimental intellectuals tried to plunge into the future, the more they tended to drift back into the past. Old themes and metaphors kept returning in new dress-such as the Hamlet symbol. Blok wrote a great deal about the character and even courted his future wife by acting out the scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia.140 In the early twenties the play provided the framework for a new Revolutionary parable which was acted out with great eclat by Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright. The new Hamlet portrayed a kind of Manichean struggle between the passionate and heroic Hamlet (and his allies, Horatio and Ophelia) and the haughty and repressive figure of the King (and his allies Polonius and the courtiers).141 Gothic sets were used to emphasize that this drama took place in the Middle Ages, prior to the coming of light; and the King's forces wear dark costumes and repellent expressions, whereas those of Hamlet are light. The Ghost-as the unalloyed voice of revolutionary conscience-is represented by a pure shaft of light.