The Icon and the Axe

The hopes for a transformation of Russia through Alexander were too vague and romantic, too unchastened by experience in the real world. Yet Alexander-like other well-meaning political leaders who have been looked to as saviors-appears to have become hypnotized by the adulation he received. In his late years he became even more incapable than before of sober statesmanship. "Moving from cult to cult and religion to religion," complained Metternich, "he has upset everything and built nothing."120 He died in a distant Southern retreat from reality, after visiting various churches, mosques, and a synagogue and rejecting medical treatment.121 The champion of tolerance had permitted Russia to become the scene of ideological interrogation, anonymous denunciation, and arbitrary exile. The most beloved tsar in modern Russian history had let Russia drift into policies that were in some respects even more reactionary than those of Paul.

Most of the leading theorists of the age-whether Russians like

Radishchov, Novikov, Karamzin, Speransky, Pestel, Lopukhin, and Magnit-sky, or foreign teachers like Schwarz, De Maistre, Baader, and Fesler- had been active in the Masonic movement. Though Masonry was formally neither a political nor a religious movement, it had profound influence in both of these areas. Higher order Masonry excited Russians to believe that self-perfection was possible and that the new temple of Solomon to be built by "true Masons" was nothing short of the world itself. But there was no way of knowing exactly how or where this rebuilding was to take place. "One can have knowledge about Masonry," one leader was fond of saying, "but Masonry itself is a secret."122

The lodges filled for the culture of aristocratic Russia something of the role that had been played by the monasteries in the culture of Muscovy. They provided islands of spiritual intensity and cultural activity within a still bleak and hostile autocratic environment. Like the monasteries of old, the Masonic lodges represented both a challenge and an opportunity to the ruling authorities. But Catherine and eventually Alexander chose to view Masonry as a challenge, just as Peter had regarded monasticism. If the various protest movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a kind of counterattack against the autocratic destruction of the old monastic culture, so the ideological rebellion of the nineteenth-century intellectuals appears in some ways as a form of protest against the autocratic destruction of the new Masonic culture.

The sacred chants of this Masonic culture were the declamatory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Initiation into the lodge was a kind of second, adult baptism. Sacred texts were those of Boehme, Saint-Martin, Jung-Stilling, and other mystical thinkers who were regarded as equal to the evangelists and early Church fathers. The Masons, however, sought no salvation in the next world, which was the goal of the monks, but truth in this world: pravda, the "two-sided truth" of wisdom and justice.

The icons of the Masonic culture were statues and busts of great figures of the past. It was only under Catherine that statuary had first assumed importance in Russian art.123 The bronze statue of Peter the Great was her monumental icon to Westernization, her statue of Voltaire her icon for private veneration. Lopukhin had a private garden full of symbolic sculpture and busts of the "spiritual knights" of his "inner church."124 Magnitsky made statuary crucifixes a key part of his decor for the reformed university at Kazan; and Runich kept a private bust of Christ with a crown of thorns.125

The extraordinary attention paid to physical characteristics of the face was partly the new enthusiasm of a people just discovering the naturalistic art that had been present in the West for several centuries but partly also a

new version of the iconographer's old belief that a painting was a means of communing with the saints. The private gallery of busts and paintings in the castle that Rastrelli built for the Stroganovs in St. Petersburg became a kind of hall of icons; and the Decembrist Bestuzhev's painting portraits in exile of all those who had participated in the uprising marked the beginnings of a new martyrological portraiture.126