The Icon and the Axe

Hegel had given them an "algebra of revolution" without any equivalents for the formula. Thus, the Russian disciples differed widely in their understanding of who was the agent of the absolute at the present stage of history. Bakunin looked by turns to Western urban revolutionaries, East European peasants, Nicholas I, the anarchist movement in Switzerland and Latin Europe, and finally to conspiratorial terrorists in Russia. Herzen looked to Paris, to the Russian countryside, and to Alexander II before losing both his influence and his faith in the 1860's. Although Herzen never participated in revolutionary activity in the Bakunin manner, he was hypnotized by it. "Better to perish with the revolution than live on in the alms house of reaction,"73 he had advised his son in 1849; ar,d in his late years one detects a certain elegant nostalgia for the days when it was possible to believe in absolute liberation as he wrote his pessimistic "letters to an old comrade," Bakunin.74

There were perhaps only two constant elements in the troubled careers of these, the two most interesting figures of the "remarkable decade." First was their romantic attachment to the image of a better society probably derived not so much from socialist blueprints as from nostalgic reminiscences of childhood and literary portrayals of fraternal heroism and happiness. Second was their essentially Hegelian conviction that a revolutionary repudiation of the existing order of things was historically inevitable.

The fascination with Hegel led many Russians to believe in a coming liberation without deepening their understanding of liberty. Hegelianism revived in a secular form the prophetic hopes of the Muscovite ideology and provided a philosophy of history that was no less absolute and metaphysical (though considerably less clear). The idea that negation was merely a stage in the preparation for the final realization of the absolute was a kind of depersonalized, philosophical version of the Christian conception that the reign of the Antichrist would precede the second coming of Christ. It is a tribute to the depth of Hegel's influence on Russian thought that even those who subsequently rejected his philosophy still felt the need for a philosophy of history: Comte's positivism, social Darwinism, or Marxist materialism. Hegel encouraged Russian secular thinkers to base their ideas on a prophetic philosophy of history rather than a practical program of reform, to urge action in the name of historical necessity rather than moral imperatives.

The Prophetic Role of Art

If there was any supreme authority for the emancipated men of the "remarkable decade," it was not a philosopher or historian but a literary critic like Belinsky or a creative artist like Gogol. The extraordinary prestige of those connected with art followed logically from romantic philosophy. For the creative artist was in many ways the prophet; and the critic, the priest, of romanticism.

The Enlightenment had found truth in objective laws, physical and moral, which were assumed to be uniformly valid throughout the natural world. They could be discovered by study and explained rationally by the natural philosopher. In romantic thought, however, truth was organic and aesthetic; its hidden meaning was best perceived intuitively and communicated poetically. Since different cultures were an important expression of the variety and hidden patterns of history, the romantic artist bore a special responsibility to find the meaning of national identity.

The contrast between pure and propagandistic art, which became so important to a subsequent generation, did not concern the idealistic romantics of Nicholaevan Russia. All art was pure in the sense that it expressed little direct concern over social and political problems, yet strongly propagandistic in the sense that it conceived of artistic ideas as a force capable of transforming the world. It was called "??????!.' by Khomia-kov;75 Saint-Martin, "the unknown philosopher" of the anti-Enlightenment, spoke of it as "prophetic." It was indeed infused with prophecy in the Biblical sense of purporting to represent the word of God to man. It can also be characterized with the less familiar Greek term theurgic used by Saint-Martin to describe the spiritualist's act of establishing contact with other worlds, and by Berdiaev to suggest that art was viewed as divine work and not merely divine words.76