THE ICON AND THE AXE
An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
by James H. Billington
Vintage Books
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK
PREFACE
This is an interpretive history of modern Russian thought and culture. It is the product of one man's scholarship, reflection, and special interests. There is no illusion-and I hope no pretense-of offering an encyclopedic inventory of the Russian heritage or any simple key to understanding it. This is a selective account which seeks to provide new information and interpretation and not merely to codify an already established consensus: to open up rather than to 'cover' this vast subject.
The period under consideration is the last six hundred years, during which Russia has emerged as a powerful, distinctive, creative civilization. The narrative will deal with some of the anguish and aspiration as well as the achievements of Russian culture; restless dissenters as well as ruling oligarchies; priests and prophets as well as poets and politicians. No attempt will be made to provide a complete picture of any individual cultural medium or personality, or to make the quantity of words devoted to a given subject a necessary index of intrinsic cultural quality. This work will draw on those materials which seem to illustrate best the distinctive central concerns of each era of Russian cultural development.
Two artifacts of enduring meaning to Russians-the icon and the axe-have been chosen for the title. These two objects were traditionally hung together on the wall of the peasant hut in the wooded Russian north. Their meaning for Russian culture will be set forth in the early pages of this book; they serve to suggest both the visionary and the earthy aspects of Russian cultufeTThe eternal split between the saintly and the demonic in all human culture is, however, not provided in the Russian case by any simple contrast between holy pictures and unholy weapons. For icons have been used by charlatans and demagogues, and axes by saints and artists. Thus, the initial focus on these primitive artifacts contains a hint of the ironic perspective with which we shall end our examination of Russian culture. The title also serves to suggest that this is a work which will seek
to locate and trace symbols that have played a unique role for the Russian imagination rather than examine Russian reality primarily in terms of the ideas, institutions, and art forms of the West.
The emphasis in this work is on the elusive world of ideas and ideals which Russians refer to as dukhovnaia kul'tura: a term far less narrowly religious in suggestion than its English equivalent of 'spiritual culture.' This work does not purport to relate ideology systematically to economic and social forces, or to prejudge the deeper question of the relative importance of material and ideological forces in history. It seeks only to establish more fully the historical identity of the spiritual and ideological forces which are recognized even by Marxist materialists in the USSR to have been of great importance in the development of their country.
This work does attempt in some measure to balance the frequent concentration on political and economic history by providing a general historical guide for the oft-visited but less charted terrain of thought and culture. The term 'culture' is used here in its broad meaning of a 'complex of distinctive attainments, beliefs, and traditions,'1 and not in any of the more specialized senses in which 'culture' is sometimes understood: as an early stage in social development that precedes the higher stage of civilization; as a quality of refinement nurtured in museums; or as a distinct type of accomplishment that can be altogether disembodied from its material context.2 Within the general category of cultural history, which 'concentrates upon the social, intellectual and artistic aspects or forces in the life of a people or nation,'3 this work emphasizes the intellectual and artistic-dealing only incidentally with social history and hardly at all with sociological analyses. The basic framework for this study is chronological sequence, which is as important in cultural history as in economic or political history. There will be flashbacks and anticipations- particularly in the first, background section; but the main concern is to provide in the sections that follow a chronological account of successive eras of Russian cultural development. The second section portrays the initial confrontation of primitive Muscovy with the West in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Then follow two long sections covering a century each: the third section dealing with the protracted search for new cultural forms in the rapidly growing empire of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century; the fourth, with the brilliant if uneasy aristocratic culture that flowered from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Two final sections are devoted to the last hundred years, when the problems of industrialization and modernization have been superimposed on earlier patterns and problems of Russian cultural development. The fifth section deals with the richly creative and experimental era that began during the reform period of
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Alexander II. The last section considers twentieth-century Russian culture in relation to that of the past.
There has been a kind of unity in most of Russian culture, a feeling that individual Russians and separate artistic forms are all in some sense subordinate participants in a common creative quest, philosophic controversy, or social conflict. To be sure, Mendeleev's chemistry, Lobachev-sky's mathematics, Pushkin's poetry, Tolstoy's novels, Kandinsky's paintings, and Stravinsky's music can ?? be appreciated with relatively little reference to their Russian background or to criteria other than those of the particular scientific or artistic medium. But most of Russian culture- indeed much of that created by these truly European figures-acquires added meaning when set in the Russian context. Some understanding of the national context of individual creative activity is more necessary in the case of Russia than of many other national cultures.
As a result of this feeling of common involvement and interdependence, the kind of debate that is usually conducted between individuals in the West often rages even more acutely within individuals in Russia. For many Russians 'to think, feel, suffer, and understand are one and the same thing,'4 and their creativity often bespeaks 'a vast elemental strength combined with a relatively weak sense of form.'5 The exotic contours of St. Basil's Cathedral, the unorthodox harmonies of a Musorgsky opera, the impassioned vernacular of a Dostoevsky novel offend the classical spirit. Yet they speak compellingly to most men, reminding us that the alleged lack of form may be only nonconformity with the traditional categories used to analyze a culture.
As one looks at the history of Russian culture, it may be helpful to think of the forces rather than the forms behind it. Three in particular- the natural surroundings, the Christian heritage, and the Western contacts of Russia- hover bigger than life over the pages that lie ahead. These forces seem capable of weaving their own strange web of crisis and creativity out of the efforts of men. Usually they are working at cross-purposes, though occasionally-as in some fleeting moments in Dr. Zhivago-all three forces may seem to be in harmony.
The first force is that of nature itself. It has been said that Russia's thinkers are not formal philosophers but poets; and behind the apparently accidental similarity of the Russian words for 'poetry' and 'element' (stikhi, stikhiid) lie many intimate links between Russian culture and the natural world. Some speak of a 'telluric' sense of communion with the earth alternating with a restless impulse to be skitaltsy or 'wanderers' over the Russian land;6 others of a peculiarly Russian insight in the poem in which a fetus asks not to be born, because 'I am warm enough here.'7 The underground
