The Icon and the Axe

Life out of death, freedom out of tyranny-irony, paradox, perhaps too much to hope for. One must return to the reality of plants not yet mature, of a ship still very much at sea. The last of the tempests may not have passed. We may still be in Miranda's "brave new world," and the perspectives of Prospero may not yet be in sight. This generation may only be, as Evtushenko has put it, "like the men in Napoleon's cavalry who threw themselves into the river to form a bridge over which others might cross to the other bank."9

Yet even here there is the image of that other hank. The melodramatic suggestion of a Napoleonic army somehow fades. One feels left rather in the midst of one of those long rivers in the Russian interior. There is no

bridge across, no clear chart for the would-be navigator. The natives still move along the river in zigzag patterns which often seem senseless to those looking on from afar. But the closer one gets, the more one notes a certain inner strength: "the good-humored serenity characteristic of people who see life as movement along the winding bed of a river, between hidden sandbanks and rocks."10 One senses that deeper currents may be slowly pulling those on this river away from bends and banks into more open seas. One feels that neither the "stormy passage"11 of recent times nor the deceptive reefs that no doubt lie ahead will prevent them from reaching their long-sought and still undiscovered destination: "the other shore."

Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader