The Icon and the Axe

To both the scholar and the general reader I would offer this work, not as a systematic analysis or thorough coverage, but as an episode in the common, continuing quest for inner understanding of a disturbed but creative nation. The objective is not so much the clinical-sounding quality of "empathy" as what the Germans call Einfiihlung, or "in-feeling,"' and the Russians themselves proniknovenie-meaning penetration, or permeation, in the sense in which a blotter is filled with ink or an iron with heat. Only some such sense of involvement can take the external observer beyond casual impressions, redeem unavoidable generalizations, and guard against unstable alternation between condescension and glorification, horror and idealization, Genghis Khan and Prester John.

This quest for deeper understanding has long agitated the introspective Russian people themselves. Alexander Blok, perhaps their greatest poet of this century, has likened Russia to a sphinx; and the Soviet ex-

perience has added fresh controversy to the unresolved earlier disputes of Russian history. This search for understanding also belongs to the outside world, which has been deeply affected by the two major events in modern Russian culture: the literary explosion of the nineteenth century and the political upheaval of the twentieth. Historians are inclined to believe that study of the past may in some way deepen one's understanding of the present-perhaps even provide fragmentary hints of future possibilities. However, the history of Russian culture is a story worth telling for its own sake; and even those who feel that this earlier culture has little relevance to the urbanized Communist empire of today may still approach it as Dostoevsky did a Western culture which he felt was dead:

I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but to a most precious graveyard. . . . Precious are the dead that lie buried there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life that once was there, of such passionate faith in their deeds, their truth, their struggle, and their learning, that I know I shall fall on the ground and shall kiss those s'.ones and weep over them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly indebted to the libraries in which I have been privileged to work: the Firestone (including the Shoumatoff collection) at Princeton, the Widener and Houghton at Harvard, national libraries at Stockholm, Vienna, and Marburg, the university library at Leiden, the library of the Institut fur osteuropaische Geschichte in Vienna, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinsky Dom), and the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and the Lenin Library, Tret'iakov Gallery, and Archive of Ancient Acts in Moscow. I am especially grateful to Drs. Valenkoski and Haltsonen and to the excellent national library at Helsinki for a valuable year spent reading in its rich Russian collection. I deeply appreciate the support I received for this work from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, from the Fulbright program in Finland, and from the Council of the Humanities and University Research Funds of Princeton University. I also thank the Center of International Studies at Princeton, the Russian Research Center at Harvard, and the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants for assistance not directly related to this project, but of real benefit to it. I am grateful to Gregory and Katharine Guroff for, respectively, preparing the index and typing the most difficult sections of this manuscript.

I owe a special debt to Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and the Reverend Professor Georges Florovsky. They are in many ways the spiritual fathers of this book, having generously fortified me with ideas, criticism, and references during and since my years at Oxford and Harvard. I also profited from discussions with Professors Mavrodin and Bialy and Messrs. Malyshev, Gol'dberg, and Volk during my visits to the University of Leningrad as an exchange lecturer in March 1961, and again in January 1965, while on an exchange with Moscow University. On this latter occasion, I had the privilege of lecturing on the substance of this book at both universities. In Moscow, I benefited from discussions with Professors

CONTENTS