The Icon and the Axe

of freedom, which tends to be treasured by those who do not have it and profaned by those who do. Here, too, is the enduring irony of creative culture, which comes into being through the painful self-denial of an individual opening himself up to larger worlds. True creativity in the USSR today involves voluntary suffering, or as Pasternak put it, "an offer of consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord's Supper."

Such a role seems close to the monastic conception of the dedicated artist; and insofar as this burden of dedication continues to be taken up inside the USSR, it is likely to be sustained, if not by the faith of the Church, at least by its central belief in the Resurrection. Resurrection was the title of Tolstoy's last novel, the theme of Dostoevsky's and Pasternak's. It is only in resurrection that there is any final, ironic sense either in the comic incongruity of God disguised as man or in the tragic incongruity of human rebellion against divine authority. It is only in resurrection, some unforeseeable "metamorphoses of God," that sense could ultimately be made out of the implausible aspirations of Russian thought and the repeated rejection of higher ideals in Russian reality.

None can say that rebirth will occur; none can be sure even that there is any sense to be found in the history of a culture in which aspiration has so often outreached accomplishment and anguish impaired achievement. There may be nothing for the historian of culture to do except provide accompanying notes for the great novels, luminous icons, and lovely music and architecture that can be salvaged from an otherwise blighted inventory. Repeatedly, Russians have sought to acquire the end products of other civilizations without the intervening process of slow growth and inner understanding. Russia took the Byzantine heritage en bloc without absorbing its traditions of orderly philosophic discourse. The aristocracy adopted the language and style of French culture without its critical spirit, and variously sought to find solidarity with idealized sectarian or peasant communities without ever sharing in either the work or the faith of these non-aristocratic elements. The radical intelligentsia deified nineteenth-century Western science without recreating the atmosphere of free criticism that had made scientific advances possible. The exploration of "cursed questions" took place not in academies or even market places but in occult circles and "Aesopian" journals. Even Gogol and Ivanov in fleeing to the sun-drenched centers of Mediterranean classicism could not escape the nocturnal world of German romanticism, of forests and lakes, and of the dark northern winters.

High Stalinism provided a kind of retribution. Russia suddenly found

– itself ruled by Byzantine ritualism without Byzantine reverence or beauty,

and by Western scientism without Western freedom of inquiry. One is

tempted to see in the terrible climax, the "cleansing" (chistka) of the purge period, either total absurdity or some new and unprecedented form of totalitarian logic. But to the cultural historian, the horrors of High Stalinism may appear neither as an accidental intrusion upon, nor an inevitable by-product of, the Russian heritage. If he adopts the ironic perspective, he might even conclude that the cleansing did lead to a kind of purification far deeper than that which was intended-that innocent suffering created the possibility for fresh accomplishment.

Stalin may have cured Russian thinkers of their passion for abstract speculation and their thirst for earthly Utopias. The desire for the concrete and practical so characteristic of the post-Stalin generation may help Russia produce a less spectacular but more solid culture. The harvest may be long delayed in political institutions and artistic expression. But the roots of creativity are deep in Russia, and the soil rich. Whatever plants appear in the future should be more enduring than the ephemeral blossoms and artificial transplants of earlier ages. In an age of pretension, the cunning of reason may require a deceptively quiet rebirth. But Western observers should not be patronizing about a nation which has produced Tolstoy and Dostoev-sky and undergone so much suffering in recent times. Impatient onlookers who have come to expect immediate delivery of packaged products may have to rediscover the processes of "ripening as fruit ripens, growing as grass grows." The path of new discovery may well be parabolic, like that of Voznesensky's Columbus:

Instinctively

head for the shore . . . Look for

India- You'll find

America!8