The Icon and the Axe

The idealists of early Nicholaevan Russia agreed that their land must play a significant role in the solution of the common problems of Christian civilization. But what are the real problems? they began to ask. What is the nature of Russia vis-a-vis the West? and what should its role in history be? In response to such questions Russian thinkers produced a remarkable rash of analyses and prophecies in the twenties and thirties.

There was general agreement that the absence of a classical heritage was responsible for much of the difference between Russia and the West. The extravagant praise of Pushkin's poetry and Glinka's music was partly

produced by the desire to overcome this deficiency. There was deep resentment of Nicholas' policy of downgrading the classical emphases that Alexander had introduced into Russian education. Chaadaev's editor, Nadezhdin, was expelled from theological seminary in 1826 for his interests in classical writers, and his widely hailed Latin thesis of 1830, De Poesi Romantica, argued that Russia should fuse classicism and romanticism in order to play a role in "the great drama of the fate of man."36

Nadezhdin's conception of the classical age was itself romantic. Schelling was the new Plotinus, Napoleon the new Caesar, Schiller the new Virgil; and the implication was clear that the Russians were the new Christians. Nadezhdin had read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in his lectures at Moscow University in the early thirties, he likened Russia to a new band of barbaric hordes swarming over the collapsing West. Gogol wrote a historical essay on the barbarian conquest of Rome and lectured on the fall of Rome during his brief period as history lecturer at St. Petersburg University. Briullov's "The Last Days of Pompeii" was thought to be fraught with contemporary meaning by Russian critics after its first showing in 1836.

The young idealists also agreed that the woes of contemporary Europe followed from the materialism and scepticism of the eighteenth century which led to the French Revolution. Though influenced by De Maistre, Saint-Martin, and the entire anti-Enlightenment tradition, they were particularly indebted to German romantic thought for their conception of the deeper, historical causes of Western decline. Kireevsky argued that the defeat of Pascal and Fenelon by the Jesuits was a critical turning point in the loss of Western spirituality; Khomiakov blamed it on the annexation of the Western church by lawyers and logicians in the twelfth century; Odoevsky on Richelieu's philosophy of raison d'etat, which made war between nations inevitable by "taking away the thin lining of paper which had kept the porcelain vases apart."37

The young idealists all viewed Russia's suffering and humiliation by Europe during the early modern period as a purifying process guaranteeing Russia a redemptive role in the new era that is coming into being. German pietist preachers and their philosophic heirs, Baader and Schelling, encouraged Russians to believe that the evangelical ideal of the Holy Alliance must be kept alive; that Russia must remain a new supra-political force dedicated to healing the spiritual wounds of Europe. An even more vivid conception of the nation as suffering messiah was developed by the leaders of suppressed nationalist movements within the Russian empire: Poles like Mickiewicz and the Ukrainians of the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.38

The idealists generally agreed that (in the words of Pogodin's inaugural lecture as professor of history at Moscow in 1832) a "grandiose and almost infinite future"39 lies before Russia, and with the literary critic Shevyrev's declaration in the same year: "We all have one task: to set forth thought that is all-encompassing, universal, all-human, and Christian in the Russian vernacular of today."40

Yet the idealists rejected the social and political conservatism of Pogodin and Shevyrev as well as the example of the bourgeois West. Their despair over all existing alternatives gave an increasingly prophetic and revolutionary cast to their writings. Much attention was paid to a pessimistic look into the future cast in 1840 by Philarete Chasles, a relatively obscure French journalist. Even more emphatically than Tocqueville, Chasles wrote that the future belonged to Russia and America, "two young actors seeking to be applauded, both ardently patriotic and expansive." He spoke of a coming time when men will "discover twelve thousand new acids . . . direct aerial machines by electricity . . . imagine ways of killing sixty thousand men in one second."41 He could well have been describing his admirer, Chaadaev, as he depicts the prophetic philosopher looking down at this picture of destruction,

. . . from the heights of his solitary observatory, gliding over the obscure expanse and howling waves of the future and past . . . burdened down with sounding the hours of history . . . forced to repeat the lugubrious cry: Europe is dying.42