The Icon and the Axe

though it had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Vladimir) and vaulted Repin to the symbolic leadership of the new quest for a realistic "art of the people" which the "wanderers" had launched a decade earlier. Partly inspired by the famed song of the Volga boatmen, the painting in turn inspired Musorg-sky to seek a new music of redemption from the spontaneous sounds of his native Volga region. Revolutionaries saw a call to defiance and a plea for help in the proud bearing and searching gaze of the unbowed young boy. The ship provided a hint of other, distant lands to the East to which the river led; perhaps even of romantic deliverance by some future Stenka Razin from the toil and bondage of the landlocked empire.

The substantial amount of time that Repin spent planning this composition and traveling about in search of real-life models represented a continuation of the obsessive preoccupation of Russian painters with some single redemptive masterpiece-a tradition that began with Ivanov's "Appearance of Christ" and which has continued to the present with a painting like "Requiem of Old Russia, the Uspensky Sobor," which P. D. Korin, a principal designer of the monumental historical frescoes in the Moscow subway, has worked on for more than twenty-five years. Repin's greatest obsession (from 1878 to 1891) was his "Za-porozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan," in which a historical theme was successfully blended with the genre style. Revolutionaries took heart at the rustic glorification of Cossack liberties, while conservative Pan-slavs took equal pleasure in the anti-Turkish subject.

Magnitsky began in i§i8 his extraordinary war on the educational system of the Russian empire. In an anonymous letter to the Simbirsk branch of the Bible Society he urged the establishment of a Russian Inquisition to extirpate heresy from all published works. He then began public attacks on the influential new Masonic lodge, "Key to Virtue," in Simbirsk, as a center of subversion.88 Early in 1819 he was empowered to investigate the University of Kazan, where Lopukhin's ideas had found particular receptivity;89 and in April he became famous overnight with his lurid expose.

Twenty of twenty-five professors are "hopeless," Magnitsky reported as a result of his inspection tour. Heretical German philosophy has replaced Orthodox theology in the curriculum, but "fortunately the lectures are so badly delivered that no one can understand them."90 Like an outraged taxpayer, Magnitsky rhetorically demands to know why two million rubles have been spent on a den of heresy and subversion in which lectures are mainly given in languages unintelligible to Russians.

His proposed remedy administered a real shock to the vague euphoria of tolerance then prevalent in the empire. He recommended to Golitsyn that the university be not reformed, but closed, formally sentenced like a criminal, and then razed. In its place should be established a controlled gymnasium, a medical institute, and a school for indoctrinating Tatars and teaching the Orthodox about the East.91 These measures were not adopted, but he was made head of the university in June and proceeded with reforms that were almost as drastic.

The university was henceforth to base its entire curriculum on the Bible and "on piety, in accordance with the decrees of the Holy Alliance."92 Each student was required to own a Bible, and scriptural passages were I written all over the walls and corridors often in ornate gold letters. Geology was outlawed as hostile to Biblical teachings, and mathematicians were instructed to point out that the hypotenuse of a right triangle represented the mercy of God descending to man through Christ.93 Books were removed from the library, professors forced to write long spiritual autobiographies, and puritanical discipline and communal scripture readings instituted. Three grades of punishment were instituted for student infractions, the highest involving solitary confinement in a barred room containing only a wooden table and bench, a large crucifix, and a picture of the Last Judgment. Students were ordered to pray for offenders in this category, who were in some cases forcibly transferred to military service.94

The supreme danger of modern universities was, in Magnitsky's view, their teaching of philosophy, which was bound to raise doubts about repealed religion. He found an invaluable ally in Runich, the first curator of the new university in St. Petersburg, who was called "Magnitsky's echo"