The Icon and the Axe

The title and imagery of Kazakov's story are but one illustration of the fourth, and most surprising, aspect of the cultural revival: the renewed interest in religion.

There is, to be sure, no dramatic religious revival in progress; and regular churchgoing continues to be primarily an activity of women and elderly people. But there is a continuing fervor in the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church which attracts a steady stream of brief appearances for baptism and Easter services.64 The growing appeal of church marriages has forced the regime to set up its own grotesque "marriage palaces" designed to provide all the material accouterments of a church (music, flowers, and solemn decor) for the approved civil ceremonies of the atheistic state. The number of those seeking training for the priesthood in the post-Stalin era increased to the point where a correspondence course was even introduced to accommodate those who might otherwise have been barred by distance, poverty, or bureaucratic obstruction. A program of sharply increased persecution built around the requirement that all would-be semi-

narians submit to a preliminary interrogation and discussion with specially chosen committees of the Young Communist League has enabled Soviet authorities to report with grim satisfaction that the numbers in seminaries have sharply declined since 1959 as a result of "extensive individual work with the students."65

But there still appears to be some validity to the old comparison reputedly made between religion and a nail by Lunacharsky in the early days of atheistic propaganda: "The harder you hit it, the deeper you drive it into the wood." Some of the continuing excesses of atheistic evangelism-the noisy interruption of church services, the offering of rewards for unearthing secret prayer meetings, and the official glorification of those who break with religion and publish lurid exposes-all serve to arouse a certain sense of sympathy even among the atheists and agnostics who still predominate within the younger generation.

In an ironic inversion of the classical conflict between fathers and sons, the younger generation now often picks up religious interests as a means of shocking their atheistically conformist parents. Young Russians seem particularly fond of ridiculing and embarrassing the stereotyped party lectures on scientific atheism, which were increased in number some threefold in 1958. A favorite cartoon in the Soviet humor journal Krokodil shows believers praying for the return of another anti-religious lecturer to their region.66

On a deeper level, the story is frequently told among the younger generation of the old peasant woman whose stubborn religious convictions were impairing the ideological training of the young. A leading party propagandist was brought all the way from Moscow to give her a highly technical illustrated lecture on the material origins and evolutionary laws of creation. The old woman listens intently to this brilliant performance designed to demonstrate once and for all the irrefutable wisdom of scientific atheism; and at the end she nods her head and says: "Yes, comrade, great indeed-greater than I had supposed-are the works of the Lord."

The new interest in religion is more than casual curiosity. It arises in the first place out of the re-examination of the Russian past that has been quietly going on among the young in the wake of the denigration of Stalin. The high price now placed on religious art, the staging of Dostoevsky's novels, Melnikov-Pechersky's tales of Old Believer life, and Rimsky-Korsakov's long-proscribed Invisible City of Kitezh-all respond to the extraordinary interest of the young in rediscovering these "survivals of the past." A new community of interest began to develop in the fifties between the very young and the very old at the expense of the middle-aged "heirs of Stalin."

Solzhenitsyn's use of the vernacular in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave an evocative power to that pioneering revelation of suffering under Stalinism not unlike that which Awakum's use of an earlier vernacular had imparted to his harrowing autobiography. Solzhenitsyn subsequently turned more calmly but no less passionately than the arch-priest to the forms of the Old Russian Church for such consolation as he was able to find.

When you travel the byroads of Central Russia you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside.

It is in the churches . . . they lift their bell towers-graceful, shapely, all different-high over mundane timber and thatch . . . from villages that are cut off and invisible to each other they soar to the same heaven. . . .