The Magical Chorus

there. According to Benois, the greatest enthusiast of the idea was Rozanov, who babbled, eyes aglow, “Yes, we must, we must do this and do it now.” Benois, who generally had the greatest sympathy for Rozanov and his eccentricities, this time suspected “depraved curiosity,” since Rozanov obviously was planning to wash the white, slender legs of the seductive Hippius, and no one could guess where that would lead. The cautious art critic, horrified by the specter of unbridled group sex, stopped the religious ecstasy of his fellow guests in their tracks, for which Rozanov later berated him; Benois, he said, your skepticism scared off an infusion of the Holy Spirit.

Benois recalled that he and the people of his artistic circle “were in those years acutely interested in the mystery of life and sought an answer in religion.”⁷ To debate these issues, they decided to form The Religious-Philosophical Assembly, which opened in November 1901 in the building of the Imperial Geographical Society on Theater Street, across the way from the famous Imperial Ballet School.

For Russia, which lacked a tradition of regular public religious debates with the participation of the intelligentsia, this was an unprecedented event. They first had to get permission from the Holy Synod, which had only nine months previously excommunicated Leo Tolstoy. The Synod gave its approval. While the intellectuals wanted to break the hold of positivism, which had reigned in the Russian discourse since the 1860s, the church officials were eager to show that they were open to dialogue with the intelligentsia. So a delegation of the founding fathers of the Assembly went for the blessing of Metropolitan Anthony of St. Petersburg at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Benois, who described the trip with a bit of humor, was quite impressed by the white hood with a diamond cross pin of the regal but gentle metropolitan and by the excellent tea in heavy, faceted glasses and the delicious pastries. He was also amused by the fact that the delegation included, besides the Russian Orthodox Merezhkovsky and Hippius, two Jews (Nikolai Minsky and the artist Leon Bakst) and, as the Catholic Benois put it, the “definitely Jew-obsessed” Rozanov. Thus, the delegation had first to discuss whether or not to approach for the metropolitan’s personal blessing, and if they did, whether or not to kiss his hand as he made the sign of the cross over them.

These recollections of an avid participant in the Russian religious revival of the early twentieth century are very telling. They evince the extraordinary breadth of the movement’s spectrum, which is forgotten now, sometimes intentionally in an attempt to underscore its fundamentalist characteristics. And yet this religious renaissance, which played such an exceptional role in Russia’s twentieth-century culture, included both conservatives and innovators—“two of each kind,” like Noah’s Ark: religious fanatics but also anticlericals like Maxim Gorky, the composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Sergei Taneyev, the poet Sergei Esenin; monarchists, populists, and Bolsheviks (the latter represented by Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov); realist painters and the founders of abstract art (Vassily Kandinsky); and committed homo-phobes and some open homosexuals (most famous among the latter, the poets Mikhail Kuzmin and Nikolai Klyuev).

Early exponents of the ideas of the religious renaissance were the painters Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Nesterov (considered today by some nationalists as the best Russian painter of the twentieth century; Nesterov lived to receive the Stalin Prize in 1941), who began painting stunning frescoes at the end of the nineteenth century in monasteries and churches. With them was Mikhail Vrubel, the most formidable personality in Russian Symbolist art, still underappreciated in the West, but now regarded in Russia as a seminal figure of the era.

Vrubel, of Polish descent with an admixture of Russian, German, Danish, and Tatar blood, sometimes called the Russian Cezanne (with Van Gogh’s temper, one might add), was notable for his artistic dualism. He began with the creation of an iconostasis for a church and ended with an enormous, mysterious painting Demon Downcast (1902), the culmination of almost twenty years of obsession with that theme. (Demonism in a Nietzschean interpretation was fashionable among Russian Symbolists.) Even Vrubel’s prophet Moses (for the frescoes in the church of St. Cyril in Kiev) was endowed with a strangely demonic gaze. The artist felt that his demons were not so much evil as suffering and grieving androgynous spirits. Vrubel’s downcast Demon, spread out on a fantastical mountain landscape, had an elongated body, with slender arms behind his head, and a feminine gaze, injured, fragile, but at the same time imperious and winning.

Researchers have found that the same young woman’s face served as the model for the twenty-eight-year-old Vrubel’s study for an icon of the Virgin and for the first sketches of the Demon’s image. The philosophical and artistic antinomy that tore at the artist’s mind (as well as bad genes) brought Vrubel in 1902 to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1910, at the age of fifty-four, completely blind. The artist Sergei Sudeikin left a description of his visit at the clinic, Vrubel’s tiny body, bright pink face with the whites of his eyes a horrible pale blue, and with a blue cast beneath the eyes and around his lips. Sudeikin thought those colors symbolized “frozen madness,” but Vrubel astonished him by reciting The Iliad in Greek, Virgil in Latin, Faust in German, Hamlet in English, and Dante in Italian, adding commentary in French.⁸ Sudeikin saw a drawing of the head of the Demon in Vrubel’s room— the image continued to haunt the artist.

In 1906, Sudeikin attended an exhibition of Russian artists organized by Sergei Diaghilev at the Paris Salon d’Automne. It began with icons and ended with Vrubel. The Vrubel hall included the grand panel, ten by sixteen meters, Mikula Selyaninovich, depicting the Russian mythological hero. In 1896 it was presented at the National Russian Industrial Art Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod. Even though its sketch had been approved by Nicholas II, the panel’s unusual modernist manner created a scandal among viewers and in the press (in particular, it was viciously attacked by the young reporter Maxim Gorky). At the insistence of the Academy of Arts, the panel was removed from the official pavilion. It was one of the more infamous artistic-political imbroglios at the turn of the century.

Sudeikin and the refined mystical artist Pavel Kuznetsov, both of whom had their own works in the Diaghilev show, restored Vrubel’s panel, which had begun flaking in storage, folded up like a blanket. With his friend, the Futurist artist Mikhail Larionov, Sudeikin wandered around the Autumn Salon every day, and always saw a stocky man in the Vrubel hall, standing for hours in front of Mikula Selyaninovich. It was the young Pablo Picasso.⁹ This must have been the only case when the tastes of an avant-garde Spanish artist and an extremely conservative Russian monarch coincided.

At Vrubel’s funeral on April 3, 1910, in St. Petersburg, the only eulogy at the open grave was given by Alexander Blok, the best-known Russian Symbolist poet in the West and one of the most esteemed twentieth-century poets in Russia. Looking “grim, remote, charred”(in the words of his friend and rival, the writer Andrei Bely), Blok, twenty- nine, his face an enigmatic Apollonic mask, uttered sad words in a monotone about the victory of the night, both in Vrubel’s paintings and in life, for “what is darker wins.”¹⁰

Blok’s speech was heard in silence by the luminaries of the Russian art world: Benois, Bakst and Diaghilev, Valentin Serov, Nikolai Roerich, Boris Kustodiev, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Did they guess that in eulogizing Vrubel, Blok was also metaphorically mourning the defeat of the revolution of 1905? Like Vrubel’s art, Blok’s poetry was antinomic: it contains the lofty and base, the altar and the tavern, the Madonna and the heroine of one of his most popular poems, The Unknown Woman, a prostitute slowly wending her way through the drunks “with rabbit eyes” in a bar.

Blok’s poetry charted the path of Russian Symbolism, which appeared as the native response to the French experiments of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. But like everything Russian, this literary movement blossomed with mysticism and heightened philosophical aspirations modeled on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Boris Eikhenbaum, in a speech at a memorial for Blok in 1921, said: “The knight of the Beautiful Lady; Hamlet pondering nonexistence; the wild profligate, nailed to a bar counter and giving himself up to gypsy charms; the grim