Psychological Society at Moscow University fed a resurgence of interest in Kant and German Romantic philosophy.3 Professors and philosophers openly identified themselves as “idealists” – but this did not imply reclusive mystics or ivory-tower intellectuals. Idealists argued passionately in the public arena against the reigning tenets of positivism (the theory, made famous by Auguste Comte [1798–1857], that valid knowledge is received solely through sense experience) and on behalf of the autonomy of philosophy, professionalization in all disciplines, and non-reductive approaches to the human being. Spiritual life had reemerged as a serious competitor among public ideologies promising to restore human dignity. Several events in particular were key for the three Modernist writers whose novels are the focus of this chapter.
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The fin de sie`cle: Solovyov, Nietzsche, Einstein, Pavlov’s dogs, political terrorism
Between 1877 and 1881, Russia’s first great speculative philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) delivered a series of spellbinding lectures in St. Petersburg on what he called “Divine Humanity” or “Godmanhood.”4 The audience included both a skeptical Tolstoy and an enthusiastic Dostoevsky, who was Solovyov’s good friend. The first lecture was devoted to Russia’s need for “positive [or affirmative] religion,” understood as the striving toward an absolute or ideal principle, which was the opposite of materialist positivism. “Contemporary religion is a pitiful thing,” Solovyov declared. Reduced to a ritual, “a personal mood, a personal taste,” it was no longer able to inspire or unite humanity. Several candidates had been put forward to fill the void, but all had proven inadequate: the institution of the Church, the ideals of socialism, the French Revolution, empirical science. Christian faith provided one part of the solution, by affirming the unconditional significance of each individual in the eyes of God. But secular humanism must complement this faith and converge with it.
A second factor in this religious renaissance, and seemingly at cross purposes to it, was the profound impact on Russian culture of Friedrich Nietzsche. Debts here were varied and vast. The ideas of the “super-human,” a radical reassessment of all values, and a “will to power” that could bestow health, dignity, and autonomy on creative artists naturally appealed to the tiny trapped Russian intelligentsia. The debt was to some extent reciprocal. In 1888, Nietzsche had remarked that the Dostoevskian underground “contained the most valuable psychological material known to him” – suggesting that the German philosopher was prone to take seriously metaphysical worldviews that Dostoevsky subjected to cruel satire; the novelist’s doubts were congenial to Nietzsche, the Christian epiphanies were not. Still, turn-of-the-century Russians found much to admire in Nietzschean thought. Symbolist journals like
The first generation of Russian Symbolism coincided with a renaissance of interest in Classical Greece and Rome, and to this group the most vital mythic vision revealed by Nietzsche was the myth of Dionysus. In that vision, the life force is simultaneously destructive and creative, cyclical, rebellious, ecstatic, at times nihilistic, but always transformative. The end point of Russian Dionysianism was a “new man.” For some, this coveted figure coincided with
the Second Coming of Christ; for others, with a charismatic leader of the masses or a neo-Romantic cult of the poet as quasi-divine prophet. The poetic variant was especially attractive, since it integrates Dionysian inspiration with the Apollonian ideals of restraint, sobriety, and disciplined form. In this spirit, Merezhkovsky wrote an essay for the 1899 Pushkin Centennial claiming that this most perfect of poets was precisely “the Russian solution to the tragedy of dualism dramatizedbyNietzscheand symbolizedbytheApollonian–Dionysian polarity” – the genius who could bridge spirit and flesh, art and life, East and West.6 Unsurprisingly, Leo Tolstoy vigorously condemned the Nietzsche cult (which he encountered in vulgarized form and which he vulgarized further). In January 1900, the same month
animals.”7
A final factor jolting Russian art out of the mimetic-Realist groove was Einstein’s revolution in the physics of time and space. The theory of relativity, made public in 1905, augmented Newtonian laws of energy, mass, and momentum with the innovative postulates that time could dilate, length could contract, and the “reality” of time and space depend upon the perspective, distance, and velocity of the observer. These ideas affected not only science; they also stunned and fascinated creative artists working in all media. In Russia, Einstein was invoked to legitimize multiple and local points of view, individual initiative, and fantastic theories for restructuring life and abolishing death. That consummate physicist fed into longstanding Russian debates over the freedom of the soul against the dead determinism of matter. Readers of
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To this confluence of philosophy, science, physiology and metaphysics we must add two crises of a different sort: the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution on the ruins of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and an intensification of political terrorism. After decades of isolated terrorist acts against the government – which some in the artistic avant-garde applauded, but most deplored – revolutionary violence against officials suddenly rose steeply.8 There were 9,000 targeted casualties throughout the country between 1905 and 1907. Terrorist attacks and banditry became so common that they were no longer featured individually in the newspapers but listed in special sections devoted to that day’s assassinations and “expropriations.” The type of terrorist also changed. In the nineteenth century (except in the fictive visions of Dostoevsky, who foresaw everything at its most ecstatic and terrible), an aura of self-sacrificing asceticism still surrounded such violent acts, as if they were the work of a righteous person, a
In 1923, Evgeny Zamyatin, a naval engineer, wrote an essay summing up the effectsonRussian Modernism of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, Einstein’srelativity, and the campaigns against the “illusion of realism.” He titled it “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.” His opening question was: “Ask point blank: ‘What is revolution?’” His answer:
