The Icon and the Axe

Amidst the rapid expansion of Russian power under Ivan III, the Russian hierarchy appears to have found both a challenge to its authority-and an answer to that challenge-coming from distant Spain. Whether or not the search for "Judaizers" in the late fifteenth century was prompted by a confusion between the early Russian word for "Jew" (Evreianin) and that for "Spaniard" (Iverianin), as has been recently suggested,63 there seems little doubt that many of the proscribed texts used by these alleged heretics (such as the Logic of Moses Maimonides) did in fact come from Spain. Looking for a way of dealing with this influx of foreign rationalism, the Archbishop of Novgorod wrote admiringly to the Metropolitan of Moscow in 1490 about Ferdinand of Spain: "Look at the firmness which the Latins display. The ambassador of Caesar has told me about the way in which the king of Spain cleansed (ochistil) his land. I have sent you a memorandum of these conversations."64 Thus began the Russian fascination with, and partial imitation of, the Spanish Inquisition-and the use of the word "cleansing" for ideological purges.65 There seems little doubt that the subsequent purge of "Judaizers" was undertaken "not on the model of the Second Rome, but of the First."66 The techniques of ritual investigation, flagellation, and burning of heretics were previously unknown to the Russian Church and vigorously opposed by the traditionalist trans-Volga elders. Although the Muscovite purges were directed against Roman Catholics, often with special fury, the weapons used were those of the Inquisition that had flourished within that church.

A strange love-hate relationship continued to exist between these two proud, passionate, and superstitious peoples-each ruled by an improbable folklore of military heroism; each animated by strong traditions of veneration for local saints; each preserving down to modern times a rich musical tradition of primitive atonal folk lament; each destined to be a breeding ground for revolutionary anarchism and the site of a civil war with profound international implications in the twentieth century.

As national self-consciousness was stimulated by the Napoleonic invasion, Russians came to feel a new sense of community with Spain. The leader of Russian partisan activities against Napoleon in 1812 drew inspiration from the Spanish resistance of 1808-9: the original guerrilla, or "little war."67 The Decembrist reformers of the post-war period also drew inspira-

tion from the patriotic catechisms and constitutional proposals of their Spanish counterparts.68

Ortega ? Gasset, one of the most perceptive of modern Spaniards, saw a strange affinity between "Russia and Spain, the two extremities of the great diagonal of Europe . . . alike in being the two 'pueblo' races, races where the common people predominate." In Spain no less than in Russia the "cultivated minority . . . trembles" before the people, and "has never been able to saturate the gigantic popular plasma with its organizing influence. Hence the protoplasmic, amorphous, persistently primitive aspect of Russian existence."69 If less "protoplasmic," Spain was equally frustrated in its quest for political liberty; and "the two extremities" of Europe developed dreams of total liberation, which drove the cultivated minority to poetry, anarchy, and revolution.

Modern Russians felt a certain fascination with Spanish passion and spontaneity as a spiritual alternative to the dehumanized formality of Western Europe. They idealized the picaresque roguery of Lazarillo de Tormes, and the implausible gallantry of Don Quixote, in the book Dostoevsky considered "the last and greatest word of human thought."70 One Russian critic attributed his preference for Spanish over Italian literature to the Spaniards' greater freedom from the confinements of classical antiquity.71 Even Tur-genev, the most classical of the great Russian novelists, preferred Calderon's dramas to those of Shakespeare.72 Russians loved not just the world-weary beauty and sense of honor that pervaded the works of Calderon, but also the fantastic settings and ironic perspectives provided by a man for whom "life is a dream" and history "is all foreshadowings." The malaise of the Russian intelligentsia in the twilight of Imperial Russia is not unhke that of the great dramatist who lived in the afterglow of the golden age of Imperial Spain:

The cause lies within my breast Where the heart is so large That it fears-not without reason- To find the world too narrow for it.73