The Icon and the Axe

From a variety of perspectives Russians seemed to be feeling their way back to the shrine of light, the mythological, pre-Christian sun gods of the East. "Let us be like unto the sun," Balmont had written in one of the most widely quoted of the early symbolist poems. Remizov's Following the Sun of 1907 was but one of many hymns of praise to the real and imagined sun gods of Eastern mythology. Gorky's Confession of the following year hailed "the people" as "the master of the Sun."142 In 1909 Blok found his symbolic harbor for the long-lost ship at sea in the all-consuming, coldly impersonal Sun:

Set forth your boat, plunge to the distant pole

through walls of ice . . . And midst the shudders of the slow-moving cold

Acclimate your tired soul

So that here on earth it will nothing need

When from there the rays come streaming through.143

The same sun symbol becomes one of intoxicating neo-pagan life affirmation in early post-Revolutionary poetry: Khlebnikov's "Chains of Blue," Kliuev's Song of the Sunbearer, and Maiakovsky's "Extraordinary Adventure," where the poet plays host to the sun at tea, and is told:

Let us sing

In a world of dull trash. I shall pour forth my sun And you-your own In verse.

Together the "double-barreled suns" break through "a wall of shadows and jail of nights" and pledge themselves

To shine always

To shine everywhere

To the depth of the last days

To shine

And nothing else.144

Maiakovsky invokes the Sun God of antiquity in the final ecstatic hymn of his Mystery Bouffe, the famed dramatic apotheosis of the new order, which he presented on the steps of the St. Petersburg stock exchange building in the early days of the Soviet regime:

Over us sun, sun and sun . . .

The sun-our sun!

Enough! . . .

Play a new game!

In a circle!

Play with the sun. Roll the sun. Play in the sun!145

"Mystery" had, of course, also been the title of Scriabin's unfinished revolutionary symphony of sound, speech, and smell-which seems strangely reminiscent of the Church liturgy. There, too, drama, speech, and music were fused with the color of the icons and the smell of incense. Scriabin and Maiakovsky were, each in his own idiom, writing mystery plays for a new organic society in which all participated in the common ritual the aim of which was not entertainment but redemption. But if they were Christian in form, they were in many ways mystical and semi-Oriental in content. Meierhold insisted that there were no mystery plays in modern times and

that "the author of 'Prometheus' is longing for the Banks of the Ganges."148 Khlebnikov was preoccupied with mystical, Asian themes and called himself "A dervish, a yogi, a Martian . . ."147 adopting the ancient Slavonic version of Vladimir, "Velimir," as his pen name. His search for a language of pure sounds as a prerequisite for the Utopian society to be created by his "society for the presidents of the world" also bears some resemblance to the quest of earlier, Slavic Christendom. There, too, the liturgy, the "common work" of salvation, proceeded through the rhythmic incantations of the human voice to the joyous and climactic ringing of bells: a pure "language beyond reason," a zaumny iazyk prefiguring the celestial rejoicing of the world to come.

The entire emphasis on the non-literary, supra-rational arts is a throwback to the culture of Old Muscovy, with its emphasis on sights, sounds, and smells. Yet in Old Russia there had been a unifying faith to give each of the art media a common focus and a willingness to accept its limitations. In modern Russia the poetry of Blok and Khlebnikov was straining to burst into music. The music of Scriabin was seeking to unravel the language of color; and the colors of Kandinsky, the language of music. Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art, was in some ways the most deeply rooted of all in the aesthetics of Muscovy. He sought not art for its own sake but "the spiritual in art," and sought to end idle spectatorism by re-creating the intimacy between man and art that existed in earlier religious art. His painting was based on pure line and color-the two primary ingredients of icon painting. Kandinsky's art was-like that of the ancient icons-not concerned with the visual aspects of the external world, but was rather a kind of "abstract musical arabesque . . . purified like music of all but its direct appeals to the spirit."148

Yet the most abstract and purified of all sound, the language farthest "beyond reason," is that of silence. The most inclusive of all colors is the all-containing womb of white: the "white on white" of Malevich's painting, the bely which the "symphonic" novelist chose for his very name. An unleashed fantasy of line leads men into the infinity of space. A mystical longing for annihilation often followed the frenzied assertion of Promethean power. Whiteness, space, and infinity had replaced the sea as the symbol of this fulfillment-in-obliteration.