The Icon and the Axe

The changes that had already taken place in the intellectual atmosphere are illustrated by the figure who finally set down the official state philosophy of Nicholas I, Sergius Uvarov. From the time he first propounded his sacred trilogy of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" as the newly installed minister of education in 1833 until he died just a few months after Nicholas in 1855, Uvarov was an urbane and effective apologist for the anti-Enlightenment. Just as Speransky's new law code of 1833 spelled an end to the hopes of the Russian Enlightenment for political-constitutional reform, so Uvarov's circular of the same year brought to a close hopes for educational reform. But in contrast to the law code, Uvarov's writings helped open up new avenues for Russian thought by keeping alive some of the ideological passion of the preceding era.

Superficially, Uvarov appears as yet another epigon of occult Masonry -arguing that some supra-rational basis must be found for truth and authority and that one must look to the ancient East for surviving reflections of the "lost light of Adam." Russia should treasure its links with Asia and conduct extensive "metaphysical archeology" into its Eastern heritage, Uvarov argued, in his blueprint of 1810 for an Asian Academy.140 Two years later, his Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries idealized the authority of mystery in a primitive Greek civilization still thought to be linked to its Oriental heritage. The implication was that the democracy and critical

philosophy for which Greece had generally been praised in the Age of the Enlightenment were, in fact, corrosive forces that had destroyed the "intellectual solidarity"141 of an earlier, proto-Oriental society.

This early statement of pro-Asian sentiment attracted increased attention as Napoleon's invasion of Russia fanned anti-European and anti-Enlightenment sentiment. Uvarov's reiteration of this position in the 1830's benefited from a second wave of anti-Western feeling that followed the Polish uprising of 1830. Pletnev, Uvarov's leading lieutenant and popularize^ insisted that Western classicism was incompatible with autocracy; Osip Senkovsky, professor of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg, became a propagandist for Uvarov's views; and Count Rostopchin, the reactionary pamphleteer who had defended Moscow from Napoleon, was posthumously assigned a genealogy from Genghis Khan.

"We must Easternize ourselves [ovostochifsid]," proclaimed one leading critic,142 and, as if in response, Asians suddenly became heroes in a number of new and distinctly second-rate historical plays and novels-such as those of the prolific Raphael Zotov, which ranged from the embellished saga of his Tatar father's battles against Napoleon, The Last Descendant of Genghis Khan, to the picture of enlightened Chinese struggling with corrupt Western intruders in Tsin-Kin-Tong, or the Three Good Deeds of the Spirit of Darkness. A play of 1823, The Youth of Ivan III, or the Attack of Tamerlane on Russia, even goes so far as to have the Mongol invader tutor the Russian tsar. An almanac of 1828 completed the picture by offering an anthology of Mongolian proverbs to a people always responsive to this type of folk wisdom.148

Pan-Asianism did not become part of Uvarov's doctrine of "official nationality"; but his fascination with the Orient illustrates his own remoteness from any simple doctrine of returning to primitive, purely Russian practices. Instead, he appears as an uncertain seeker for some new form of authoritarianism. He speaks of "complete societies . . . where the philosophic element triumphs,"144 and where shallow philosophes are confounded by "complete thought" which integrates intelligence, imagination, and sentiment.145

Uvarov fully shared the general aristocratic contempt for the commercially oriented West and its periodical press which has "dethroned the word."146 But he places on his ideological throne not the Word that was in the beginning but slogans that never were before. Orthodoxy comprised only one third of his formula; and his critical writings reveal a general indifference to Christianity-if not actual atheism.147 He is the voice not of faith but of inner uncertainty and romantic longing. He seems to be looking not for a philosopher-king or Christian emperor, but for the grand master

of some occult order. His image of the "complete society" is not one in which each individual has perfected his rational faculties and remade the social order in accordance with moral law. Rather it is a rigidly hierarchical society ruled by an "intelligence" that is unintelligible to all but the inner initiates.