The Icon and the Axe

The combination within the Polish camp of proselyting Jesuit zeal at « the highest level and crude sacrilege at the lowest led to the defenestration^?^ and murder of Dmitry by a Moscow mob in 1606, The pretender who had entered Moscow triumphantly amidst the deafening peal of bells on midsummer day of 1605 was dragged through the streets and his remains shot from a cannon less than a year later. However, the Polish sense of mission was in no way diminished. A Polish court poet spoke of Cracow in 1610 as "the New Rome more wondrous than the old,"102 and Sigismund described his cause in a letter to the Catholic king of Hungary as that of "the Universal Christian republic."103 Despite the coronation in Moscow of Michael, the first Romanov, in 1613, there was no clear central authority in Muscovy until at least 1619, when Michael's father, Patriarch Philaret Nikitich, returned from Polish captivity. Pro-Polish factions continued to be influential inside Muscovy until the 1630's, and Polish claimants to the Muscovite throne continued to command widespread recognition in Catholic Europe_ until the_i65q's.

The identification of the Catholic cause with Polish arms weakened |?

whatever chance thTTKoTn^^huTch might have had to establish its au

thority peacefully over the Russian Church. The military defeat of Poland

became the defeat of Roman Catholicism among the Eastern Slavs-

though not of Latin culture. For in rolling back the Polish armies in the

course of the seventeenth century, and slowly wresting from them control

of the Latinized Ukraine and White Russia, Muscovy absorbed much of

their literary and artistic culture.104L-J

. ?,. .the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Christian art.

*The famed early-twelfth-century "Vladimir Mother

plates i-ii°f God" (Plate I) has long been the most revered of

Russian icons: and the restoration of the original composition (completed in 1918) revealed it to be one of the most beautiful as well. Originally painted in Constantinople, the icon was believed to have brought the Virgin's special protective power from the "new Rome" to Kiev, thence to Vladimir, and finally to Mpscow, the "third Rome," where it has remained uninterruptedly since 1480.

This icon was one of a relatively new Byzantine type emphasizing the relationship between mother and child; it was known and revered in Russia as "Our Lady of Tenderness." Characteristic of this general type was the "Virgin and Child Rejoicing" (Plate II), a mid-sixteenth-century painting from the upper Volga region. The downward sweep of the Virgin's form conveys in visual terms the spiritual temper of the icon's place of origin: combining physical exaggeration with a compassionate spirit. The liberation and semi-naturalistic portrayal of the infant's arms are designed to heighten the rhythmic flow of sinuous lines into an increasingly abstract, almost musical composition.

'*Sm**:,*

PLATE I

PLATE III

LATE II

PLATE IV

icons of the Virgin and Child were the various repre-

sentations of the Virgin on the icon screens of °

Muscovy. The third picture in this series shows the plates ?-iv

Virgin as she appears to the right of Christ on the

central tryptich (deesis) of a sixteenth-century screen.

The richly embossed metal surface, inlaid with jewels,

that surrounds the painted figure is typical of the

increasingly lavish icon-veneration of the period. This

icon, presently in the personal collection of the Soviet

painter P. D. Korin, bears the seal of Boris Godunov,

who presumably used it for private devotions.

The picture to the left illustrates the survival of the theme of Virgin and Child amidst the forced preoccupation with socialist themes and realistic pofmntare~ amp;f~th~eSoviet era. This painting of 1920 (popularly known as "Our Lady of Petersburg" despite its official designation of "Petersburg, 1918"), with its unmistakable suggestion of the Virgin and Child standing in humble garb above the city of Revolution, continues to attract reverent attention in the Tret'iakov Gallery of Moscow. It is the work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who had studied under Leonid Pasternak, illustrator of Tolstoy and father of Boris Pasternak. Petrov-Vodkin turned from painting to teaching for the same reason that the poet Pasternak turned to translating-to keep his integrity during the oppressive period of Stalinist rule; both men attracted talented young followers and quietly passed on to later generations some sense of the older artistic traditions and spiritual concerns of Russian culture.

I

/ "" The Vatican-supported Polish offensive against Orthodox Slavdom

I served mainly to stimulate an ideological and national rising in Muscovy

| which drove out the Poles and gradually united Russia behind the new

/ Romano\^Jynasty. Fotjnore^Jhanthree… hundred years the Romanovs

reignei^yen if they did notjdways rule or ever fully escape the shadows

cast by the dark times in which they came to power. From early ballads

through early histories into the plays and operas of the late imperial period,