NATASHA

and gaze At you with stone-lipped love and hate.

Russia still had what Europe had long lost - 'a love that burns like fire' - a violence that renews by laying waste. By joining the Russian Revolution, the West would experience a spiritual renaissance through peaceful reconciliation with the East.

Come to us from the horrors of war,

Come to our peaceful arms and rest.

Comrades, before it is too late,

Sheathe the old sword, may brotherhood be blest.

But if the West refused to embrace this 'Russian spirit', Russia would unleash the Asiatic hordes against it:

Know that we will no longer be your shield But, careless of the battle cries, We shall look on as the battle rages Aloof, with indurate and narrow eyes

We shall not move when the savage Hun

Despoils the corpse and leaves it bare,

Burns towns, herds the cattle in the church,

And the smell of white flesh roasting fills the air.¹⁵¹

The inspiration of Blok's apocalyptic vision (and of much else besides in the Russian avant-garde) was the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. The opening lines of his memorable poem 'Pan-Mongolism' (1894) were used by Blok for the epigraph of The Scythians. They perfectly expressed the ambivalent unease, the fear and fascination, which Blok's generation felt about the East:

Pan-Mongolism! What a savage name! Yet it is music to my ears.¹⁵²

In his last major essay, Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of History (1900), Soloviev described a vast Asiatic invasion of Europe under the banner of the Antichrist. For Soloviev this 'yellow peril' was an awesome threat. But for the Scythians it represented renewal. Mixed with Russia's European culture, the elemental spirit of the Asiatic steppe would reunite the world.

Andrei Bely was another disciple of Soloviev. In Petersburg Bely maps a city living on the edge of a huge catastrophe. Set in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, when Russia was at war with Japan, its Petersburg is swept by howling winds from the Asiatic steppe that almost blow the city back into the sea. The novel builds on the nineteenth-century vision of an all-destroying flood, which was a constant theme in the literary myth of the Russian capital. Built in defiance of the natural order, on land stolen from the sea, Peter's stone creation was, it seemed, an invitation to Nature's revenge. Pushkin was the first of many Russian writers to develop the diluvial theme, in The Bronze Horseman. Odoevsky used it, too, as the basis of his story 'A Joker from the Dead' in Russian Nights.*

By the middle of the nineteenth century the notion of the flood had become so integral to the city's own imagined destiny that even Karl Bruillov's famous painting The Last Days of Pompeii (1833) was

* The story of a beautiful princess who abandons her young lover to marry a middle-aged official. One stormy autumn night they attend a ball in St Petersburg, where she has a fainting fit. In her dreams the Neva breaks its banks. Its waters flood the ballroom, bringing in a coffin whose lid flies open to reveal her dead lover. The palace walls come crashing down, and Petersburg is swept into the sea.

viewed as a warning to St Petersburg.* Slavophiles like Gogol, a close friend of Bruillov, saw it as a prophecy of divine retribution against Western decadence. 'The lightning poured out and flooded everything', commented Gogol, as if to underline that the city on the Neva lived in constant danger of a similar catastrophe.¹⁵³ But Westernists like Herzen drew the parallel as well: 'Pompeii is the Muse of Petersburg!'¹⁵⁴ As the year 1917 approached, the flood became a revolutionary storm. Everybody was aware of imminent destruction. This was expressed in all the arts - from Benois' illustrations for The Bronze Horseman (1905 -18), which seemed to presage the impending revolution in the swirling sea and sky, to the violent ('Scythian') rhythms of The Rite of Spring and the poetry of Blok:

And over Russia I see a quiet Far-spreading fire consume all.¹⁵⁵

Bely portrays Petersburg as a fragile Western civilization precariously balanced on the top of the savage 'Eastern' culture of the peasantry. Peter the Great - in the form of the Bronze Horseman - is recast as the Antichrist, the apocalyptic rider spiralling towards the end of time and dragging Russia into his vortex. The bomb which structures the thin plot (a student is persuaded by the revolutionaries to assassin-ate his father, a high- ranking bureaucrat) is a symbol of this imminent catastrophe.

The novel takes division as its central theme. The city is divided into warring class-based zones, and the two main characters, the senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov and his student revolutionary son Nikolai Apollonovich, are on opposing sides of the barricades. Like Russia itself, the Ableukhovs are made up of discordant elements from Europe and Asia. They are descended from the Mongol horsemen who rode into Russia with Genghiz Khan; however Europeanized they might appear, this Asiatic element is still within them. Nikolai is a

* Apocalyptic fantasies of modern technological cities destroyed by Nature obsessed the literary imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (see G. Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, 1971),

pp.20-24)

follower of Kant but 'entirely Mongol' in his way of life, so that 'his soul is divided in two halves'. Apollon is a typically European bureaucrat, who thinks on rational lines and likes well-ordered city grids. But he has a morbid fear of the Asiatic steppe, where he was once nearly frozen as a boy, and he thinks he hears the thundering sound of horses' hoofs as Mongol tribesmen ride in from the plain.

He had a fear of space. The landscape of the countryside actually frightened him. Beyond the snows, beyond the ice, and beyond the jagged line of the forest the blizzard would come up. Out there, by a stupid accident, he had nearly frozen to death. That had happened some fifty years ago. While he had been freezing to death, someone's cold fingers, forcing their way into his breast, had harshly stroked his heart, and an icy hand led him along. He had climbed the rungs of his career with that same incredible expanse always before his eyes. There, from there an icy hand beckoned. Measureless immensity flew on: the Empire of Russia.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov ensconced himself behind city walls for many years, hating the orphaned distances of the provinces, the wisps of smoke from tiny villages, and the jackdaw. Only once had he risked transecting these distances by express train: on an official mission from Petersburg to Tokyo. Apollon Apollonovich did not discuss his stay in Japan with anyone. He used to say to the Minister: 'Russia is an icy plain. It is roamed by wolves!' And the Minister would look at him, stroking his well-groomed grey moustache with a white hand. And he said nothing, and sighed. On the completion of his official duties he had been intending to…

But he died.

And Apollon Apollonovich was utterly alone. Behind him the ages stretched into immeasurable expanses. Ahead of him an icy hand revealed immeasurable expanses. Immeasurable expanses flew to meet him.

Oh, Rus', Rus'!

Is it you who have set the winds, storms and snows howling across the steppe? It seemed to the senator that from a mound a voice was calling him. Only hungry wolves gather in packs out there.¹⁵⁶

This agoraphobic fear of Asia reaches fever pitch in a nightmare vision of his revolutionary son:

Nikolai Apollonovich was a depraved monster… he was in China, and there Apollon Apollonovich, the Emperor of China, ordered him to slaughter many thousands (which was done). In more recent times thousands of Tamerlane's horsemen had poured down on Rus'. Nikolai Apollonovich had galloped into this Rus' on a charger of the steppes. He was then incarnated in the blood of a Russian nobleman. And he reverted to his old ways: he slaughtered thousands there. Now he wanted to throw a bomb at his father. But his father was Saturn. The circle of time had come full turn. The kingdom of Saturn had returned.¹⁵⁷

The thunder of those chargers from the steppe was the approaching sound of 1917. For in the minds of Russia's Europeans, the destructive violence of the revolution was an Asiatic force.

Among the scattered emigres who fled Soviet Russia was a group of intellectuals known as the Eurasianists. Stravinsky found himself at the centre of their circle in Paris in the 19 20s; his friends the philosopher Lev Karsavin and the brilliant music critic Pierre Souvchinsky (Karsa-vin's son-in-law) were leading members of the group. But Eurasianism was a dominant intellectual trend in all the emigre communities. Many of the best-known Russian exiles, including the philologist Prince N. S. Trubetskoi, the religious thinker Father George Florovsky, the historian