The Icon and the Axe

The age of Stalin was at last coming to an end: a quarter of a century dominated by the idea of zagovor, or "conspiracy." A conspiratorial code of revolutionary expediency had been transposed into a system of government, and Stalin's own intrigues camouflaged with tales of conspiracy by Trotskyite wreckers, capitalist encirclers, Titoist vampires, or simply "certain circles." All these forces were united in "a conspiracy of the condemned" against the USSR (to cite the title of Virta's violently anti-American drama of 1948). Within the USSR, Stalin's subordinates might be forming a "conspiracy of boyars" (the subtitle of the second part of Eisen-stein's Ivan the Terrible). Even inside the Kremlin, the possibility existed that conspiratorial doctor-poisoners were secretly at work.

From the populace in general, Stalin was aided by what came to be called "the conspiracy of silence" (a phrase used first in the 1820's by a disillusioned Westernizer, Prince Viazemsky, to describe the political passivity of Russians before the tyrannical methods of Nicholas I).1 Bruno Jasienski, a Polish Communist who moved to France and then to suicide in Russia during the purges, used the even more telling phrase "conspiracy of the indifferent" (the title of his important unfinished work of the thirties, which was published only after the denigration of Stalin in 1956).2

After the death of Stalin, the all-important question was: What could provide an antidote to conspiratorial government supported by conspiracies of silence and indifference? A prophetic hint was provided by yet another concept of conspiracy that had been put forth on the eve of Stalin's second revolution by the last of the short-blooming crop of humorists from Odessa, Yury Olesha. In his tale of 1927, Envy, Olesha gathered together a few Old World intellectuals into a "conspiracy of feelings"3 (which became the title of the dramatic form of the novel). Supremely superfluous people, envious of the brave new world being built about them, Olesha's "conspirators" are implausible egg-head cavaliers (one of them is named Kavalerov) among the revolutionary roundheads: vacillating, yet still princely Hamlets in an age when this symbol of the old intelligentsia was about to be abolished from the stage.

In Olesha's novel the strong arm of Soviet power is represented by two figures, one a soccer player and the other a sausage maker, bent on building a kind of giant supermarket system for the new society. They are clearly the wave of the future, and to sustain their conspiracy Olesha's errant cavaliers flee to the world of fantasy, where they build a machine to destroy all machines and name it "Ophelia." But this missing Madonna for the conspiracy of feelings will not permit herself to be used. It was Hamlet's coldness that killed Ophelia; and now, brought back to life by the Hamlets of the old intelligentsia, Ophelia proves a vengeful lady-turning on them rather than the machines.

The net effect of the story, however, is to arouse sympathy for the "conspiracy" and leave one with the impression that its apolitical opposition to the new order will somehow continue. The activity of the decade since Stalin can be viewed as a posthumous vindication of some of the feelings which Olesha's cavaliers had been unable to defend.

After a quarter of a century of Stalin's "conspiracy of equals" (the title of Ehrenburg's laudatory novel of 1928 about Babeuf's organization of that name4), the time had come for "the thaw" (to cite the title of the novel he published in 1954). The killing frost had stricken Russian culture in full blossom, and no one could be sure what would emerge after such a

winter. But one old branch survived unbent, and many new shoots did appear. Thus, one must turn to the envoi left by a "survival of the past," Boris Pasternak, and to the fresh voices raised by Soviet youth in the decade since Stalin.

The Reprise of Pasternak

Whatever his historical impact on Russian culture may prove to be, Pasternak set forth in the last writings before his death in i960 a remarkable human testament and a moving reprise on the culture of Old Russia that is deserving of study in its own right.

It was perhaps to be expected that this reprise should be that of a poet. Man's power to sing spontaneously and implausibly may well provide his only path to dignity and self-respect in an age of calculation, deception, and spiritual isolation. Boris Pasternak, one of the purest and most musical poets of the century, had that power. It put him in communion with the world of unheard melodies and higher harmony which has always been suspect to proponents of a closed and authoritarian society. Plato would have banished the poets from his Republic, and Lenin the sounds of the "Appassionata" from his memory.