Stravinsky’s outburst reflected a swiftly expanding gap between the Russian intelligentsia and the autocracy. Nicholas II was losing his credibility. This was an unstoppable development influenced also by cultural giants such as Tolstoy, Chekhov with MAT, Gorky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, each in his way and degree. The Red Wheel, to use Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, started to roll.
The dizzying events of 1905, and in particular the tsar’s manifesto of October 17 granting constitutional freedoms, which encouraged liberals, also brought into the political arena powerful conservative forces that came to be known as the Black Hundred. The term applied to the members of the Union of the Russian People, a party on the extreme right that existed from November 1905 until the revolution of February 1917. In a broader sense, it was henceforth used for all proponents of a rigidly conservative and xenophobic line in Russian public and cultural life.
Over the years, the term “Black Hundred” became strongly pejorative, which is why leading conservatives like Solzhenitsyn disliked it. But the original Black Hundred was proud of it. One of the founders of the movement, Vladimir Gringmut, in his 1906 article “Manual for the Monarchist Black Hundred,” explained, “The enemies of autocracy use the term ‘Black Hundred’ for the simple, black [in Russian, the word also means illiterate, unenlightened] Russian people who during the armed revolt of 1905 stood up to defend the sovereign Tsar. Is it an honorable name, ‘black hundred’? Yes, very honorable.”1 Vadim Kozhinov, a leading neoconservative of the late twentieth century, also considered the term appropriate.
According to Kozhinov, the Black Hundred was an “extremist monarchist” movement, which led an uncompromising battle with revolution. Russian Jews, in the views of the Black Hundred, played a disproportionately active or even leading role in the revolutionary movement. This was formulated succinctly by the monarchist Vassily Shulgin: “For me the ‘Jewish preponderance’ in the Russian intelligentsia class was clear at the turn of the century. The Jews have taken over, besides the universities, the press and through it, control over the intellectual life of the country. The result of this preponderance was the power and virulence of the ‘liberation movement’ of 1905, of which the Jews were the backbone.”2 In the opinion of Shulgin and other ultraconservatives, by 1905 “Jews had taken over political Russia…. The brains of the nation (except for the government and government circles) were in Jewish hands.”3
The essayist and philosopher Vassily Rozanov, perhaps the most brilliant and most controversial exponent of Russian antiliberal thought, a figure some find attractive and repellent simultaneously, had a somewhat different opinion of the matter. “Kikes, madness, enthusiasm, and the holy purity of Russian boys and girls—that is what wove our revolution, which carried the red banner down Nevsky Prospect the day after the manifesto of October 17 was proclaimed.”4
Rozanov cut an eccentric figure. Physically quite unattractive (red hair sticking out in all directions, rotted black teeth, mumbled speech with spittle flying), he exaggerated that ugliness in his frank autobiographical writings. He started out his literary career with a thick philosophical treatise of more than seven hundred pages, which he published at his own expense and which went unnoticed. Rozanov gradually developed a quasi-Nietzschean aphoristic style, never seen before in Russian literature.
Ideologically Rozanov was a committed proponent of monarchy and a devout Orthodox Christian. But readers of his best books in the aphoristic genre
Rozanov was very proud of his innovative literary manner. For all the profundity and perceptiveness of his remarks on literature or religion, it sometimes seems that stylistic originality was more important to him than his ideas. “Not every thought can be written down, only if it is musical.” Because he willfully published articles pro and contra the revolution, in support of the monarchy and criticizing it, anti-Semitic pieces and Judophilic ones, Rozanov was labeled unprincipled. He shot back, “Isn’t there one hundredth of truth in revolution? And a hundredth in Black Hundred?…So, you should all bow down to Rozanov for, let’s say, ‘cracking the eggs’ of various hens—geese, ducks, sparrows—constitutional democrats, Black Hundred, revolutionaries—and then dropping them on a single ‘frying pan,’ so that you can no longer distinguish ‘right’ and ‘left,’ ‘black’ and ‘white.’”5
For Rozanov perhaps the central theme was the connection between God and sex. He spoke and wrote about it with disarming frankness, which was shocking in those days (his book
The “sex problem” was a dominant topic in the influential intellectual salon of the St. Petersburg writer and philosopher Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Hippius, a red-haired beauty with the eyes of a mermaid. As Berdyaev noted, “an unhealthy mystical sensuality, which had not existed previously in Russia, was everywhere.”
This erotic-religious obsession crystallized into a notorious incident in St. Petersburg. On May 1, 1905, a group gathered at the apartment of the decadent poet Nikolai Minsky, including Berdyaev, the influential Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, the writer Alexei Remizov (all with their wives), Rozanov, Fedor Sologub, soon to be celebrated for his novel,
The point of the gathering was to perform a blood sacrifice. Ivanov and his wife, Lydia Zinovyeva-Annibal, dressed in red chitons with sleeves rolled up (“just like an executioner,” that eyewitness put it) cut the musician’s wrist, mixed the blood with wine in a chalice and offered it around the circle. The ritual ended with “fraternal kisses.”
Word of the strange ritualistic gathering quickly spread through St. Petersburg, picking up new, spicy details. In the version of the writer Mikhail Prishvin, who had not been there, Rozanov became the main protagonist: “They dined, drank wine, and then took communion with the blood of a Jewess. Rozanov crossed himself and drank. He tried to get her to undress and get under the table, and offered to undress and be on the table.”6
It was no surprise that Prishvin, who knew Rozanov well, imagined him to be the initiator of such a risque sexual-religious rite. Rozanov’s philosophical writings were always balancing on the edge of erotic provocation, and many suspected that he was prepared to cross the line not only in theory but in practice. The proper Alexandre Benois, the leading art critic of the period, recalled with a shudder another time that Rozanov almost turned an evening into “an outrage.”
Rozanov, Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius, Benois, and a few others were debating the symbolic significance of the episode in the New Testament when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper. The Merezhkovskys hailed that “deed of humiliation and service,” and suggested that they enact the ritual then and
