The Icon and the Axe

Moving within a generation from authoritarian traditionalism to ego-futurism, Russian culture had produced an extraordinary "commotion of verse and light."149 But everything had been taken to excess; and it seems strangely symbolic that the awesome decimation of the artistic community in the mid-thirties began with Andrew Bely's death in 1934 from overexposure to the sun.

Russia was not yet a fully self-sustaining industrial power, and had not yet evolved social and political institutions capable of combining the philosophy of its new leaders and the traditions of its people. By the late twenties the awesome decision was made to build socialism with "the methods employed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids."150 The thirties witnessed the merciless herding of workers into new industrial complexes and of peasants into new collectives. The "commotion of verse and light" gave way to the coercion of prose and darkness. It is to the fate of Russian culture in the wake of Stalin's "second revolution" that attention must now be turned.

2. The Soviet Era

J4or a long time after 1917, it was not entirely clear how profound a break in cultural tradition was implied in the founding of a new social order. The various proposals for bringing about a total break with past culture-whether through the God-building intoxication of Proletkult or the masochistic Eurasianism of the Scythians-were rejected along with the visionary social and economic programs of "war communism." Following the end of the Civil War and beginning of the New Economic Policy in 1921, a more permissive atmosphere was established; and some came to think in the course of the twenties that considerable cultural variety was to be tolerated within the new Revolutionary state.1

Perhaps the dominant literary group of the early twenties, the so-called fellow travelers (poputchiki), accepted the new Soviet state while professing reservations about its ideology. The even more heterodox "Serapion Brotherhood" took shape in 1921, and a number of leading pre-revolution-ary literary figures soon returned to resume their writing careers. Two gifted young novelists, Alexis Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg, came back from the emigration in 1923 to produce works that showed little hint of the servility to Stalin that became characteristic of their later works. Tolstoy incorporated into his prose writings many of the anti-urban, anti-utopian ideas of the peasant poets, notably in his "Sky-blue Cities," in which an anarchistic intellectual sets fire to a newly constructed Soviet town.2 Ehrenburg introduced Jewish themes into his writings of the twenties. The founding of the Yiddish magazine Shtrom {Stream) in Moscow in 1922 helped Russia retain its central role in vernacular Yiddish culture despite Jewish population losses to newly independent Poland and to the emigration. A more ancient Hebrew culture also spoke forth through the newly formed Moscow Habima Theater, which was soon taken over by the prestigious advocate of "fantastic realism," Eugene Vakhtangov. Until his death in 1924, this Hebrew theater exerted a strange fascination on its Russian audiences. Ancient chants mixed with modern gestures in humorous yet

haunting scenes showing the soul-the famed Dybbuk-coming back from the dead to take possession of the living.

… all of Moscow, ravaged, reduced to rags, weary from hunger, fear, and revolution without regard to race or religion . . . rushed every evening to assault the 125 seats of the minute and improvised Habima amphitheater. . . . Subjugated, gasping for breath in this suburb-cemetery of the vanities of a condemned nobility-men who had just lived through the most modern, the most implacably mechanical of revolutions crowded around words that they did not understand. . . . The theater was returning to its origins and they were submitting to its religious spell. The mysticism, the ancient chaos, the animal divinity of the crowd-all that makes up the secret and powerful depth of revolutions was expressed by the Dybbuk and imposed on Moscow.3

It may seem surprising that a Hebrew troupe was able to provide such a vital leaven for Russian culture, particularly at a time when the native stage was itself in full flower. But

In certain liturgical hymns each verse is preceded with a word in Hebrew. The faithful do not understand it; but by modulating it strangely and mysteriously, the clear Christian hymn is impregnated, the unknown word strikes against the faithful and confers an unsuspected profundity. Thus did the Hebraic soul of the Habima act upon the Russian soul.4