The Icon and the Axe

Under Nicholas I, Russia acquired both its "moral" and its "legal" catechism: the former in Metropolitan Philaret's Orthodox Catechism, the latter in Uvarov's famous circular outlining the doctrine of "official nationality." At the same time, social and economic policies followed the rigid lines set forth in Shcherbatov's novel. Class distinctions were strictly maintained; the peasantry remained in bondage; and commerce and industry were kept subordinate to agriculture, which Shcherbatov had considered the source of all wealth.

This represented in some ways a return to order and rationality after the confusions of Alexander's time. Nicholas discarded the most extreme figures in the "reactionary uprising" of the mid-twenties: Arakcheev for Benckendorff in the army, Magnitsky for Uvarov in education, Photius for Philaret in the Church, the archaic Slavicisms of Shishkov for the Euro-

peanized prose of Karamzin. Yet Nicholas' policies were more resented because of their finality, their refusal to leave room for further discussion of religion and politics by the aristocracy. His ideal society was the army, in which, "there is order … no impertinent claims to know all the answers … no one commands before he himself has learned to obey."134 God was the supreme commander and Nicholas "a subordinate officer determined to execute his orders well and to occupy an honorable place in the great military review to be held in the next world."135 Never again, except for a few brief years under Alexander II, were the Romanovs to encourage the discussion of political reform. Never again, except in the last decadent days under Rasputin, was the court to encourage the extra-ecclesiastical pursuit of religious truth.

Thus, the suspicions of rational enlightenment engendered during Alexander's lifetime had a debilitating effect on the subsequent development of Russian culture. It was particularly fateful that the high tide of anti-Enlightenment feeling should occur at the very time when Russia was becoming fully conscious of its national power and identity. Anti-rationalism was given special sanction within Russia because rationalism was identified with revolution, revolution with Napoleon, and Napoleon with the invasion of Russia and burning of Moscow.

The new Moscow that arose on the ruins of the old soon began to eclipse St. Petersburg and to think of itself as distinct from European culture. Following the burning of Moscow, Michael Zagoskin, one of the most widely read writers of the era, began a lifetime of gathering material for sketches on "Moscow and Muscovites," which enjoyed great popularity when they finally appeared in the 1840's. As he said in his introduction:

I have studied Moscow too much for thirty years and can say emphatically that it is not a city, not a capital, but an entire world that is profoundly Russian. . . . Just as thousands of rays of sunshine come to a focus at one point in passing through a magnifying glass, in precisely the same way in Moscow the different characteristics of our Russian popular physiognomy are unified in one national countenance . . . you will find in Moscow a treasure house of all the elements in the worldly and civil life of Russia, that great colossus for which Petersburg acts as the head, and Moscow the heart.136

The "heart" was more important than the "head" for the mystical romantics of the new Muscovite culture. Their attempts to find truths hidden in the physiognomy of a city was an extension of the occult fascination with statuary and phrenology under Alexander. The very uniqueness and asymmetry of Moscow appealed to their imagination. Marvelous meaning was discovered in the strange shapes of the old capital, whereas fear and

foreboding were found on the face of the new-in the contemporaneous Physiology of Petersburg and a number of literary works.187 This was no longer the Moscow which had appeared on Latin-inscribed medals struck in honor of the founding of Russia's first university, showing the Kremlin towers illumined by the rising sun,138 but a Moscow of mysterious moonlight:

How clear and brilliant is the moon

Contemplating sleeping Moscow. Can it have ever seen in all its journeys through the vault of heaven A city so magnificent? Can it have seen a second Kremlin?139

The remarkable cultural activity of Moscow under Nicholas I was, however, no mere return to the Muscovy of old. Catherine and Alexander I had wrought an irrevocable change in Russian thought. The aristocracy had undergone a stimulating exposure to the West, and to books that were hitherto inaccessible in the vernacular-from the complete New Testament to Diderot's Encyclopedia. They had acquired a taste for the fraternal and intellectual activity of small circles. Secular journalism and art, organized education and philanthropy, had all become part of the life of many Russian aristocrats.