present with a painting like 'Requiem of Old Russia, the Uspensky Sobor,' which P. D. Korin, a principal designer of the monumental historical frescoes in the Moscow subway, has worked on for more than twenty-five years. Repin's greatest obsession (from 1878 to 1891) was his 'Za-porozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan,' in which a historical theme was successfully blended with the genre style. Revolutionaries took heart at the rustic glorification of Cossack liberties, while conservative Pan-slavs took equal pleasure in the anti-Turkish subject.
Magnitsky began in i§i8 his extraordinary war on the educational system of the Russian empire. In an anonymous letter to the Simbirsk branch of the Bible Society he urged the establishment of a Russian Inquisition to extirpate heresy from all published works. He then began public attacks on the influential new Masonic lodge, 'Key to Virtue,' in Simbirsk, as a center of subversion.88 Early in 1819 he was empowered to investigate the University of Kazan, where Lopukhin's ideas had found particular receptivity;89 and in April he became famous overnight with his lurid expose.
Twenty of twenty-five professors are 'hopeless,' Magnitsky reported as a result of his inspection tour. Heretical German philosophy has replaced Orthodox theology in the curriculum, but 'fortunately the lectures are so badly delivered that no one can understand them.'90 Like an outraged taxpayer, Magnitsky rhetorically demands to know why two million rubles have been spent on a den of heresy and subversion in which lectures are mainly given in languages unintelligible to Russians.
His proposed remedy administered a real shock to the vague euphoria of tolerance then prevalent in the empire. He recommended to Golitsyn that the university be not reformed, but closed, formally sentenced like a criminal, and then razed. In its place should be established a controlled gymnasium, a medical institute, and a school for indoctrinating Tatars and teaching the Orthodox about the East.91 These measures were not adopted, but he was made head of the university in June and proceeded with reforms that were almost as drastic.
The university was henceforth to base its entire curriculum on the Bible and 'on piety, in accordance with the decrees of the Holy Alliance.'92 Each student was required to own a Bible, and scriptural passages were I written all over the walls and corridors often in ornate gold letters. Geology was outlawed as hostile to Biblical teachings, and mathematicians were instructed to point out that the hypotenuse of a right triangle represented the mercy of God descending to man through Christ.93 Books were removed from the library, professors forced to write long spiritual autobiographies, and puritanical discipline and communal scripture readings instituted. Three grades of punishment were instituted for student infractions, the highest involving solitary confinement in a barred room containing only a wooden table and bench, a large crucifix, and a picture of the Last Judgment. Students were ordered to pray for offenders in this category, who were in some cases forcibly transferred to military service.94
The supreme danger of modern universities was, in Magnitsky's view, their teaching of philosophy, which was bound to raise doubts about repealed religion. He found an invaluable ally in Runich, the first curator of the new university in St. Petersburg, who was called 'Magnitsky's echo'
and 'a corpse stimulated to life by Magnitsky.' A German professor had been dismissed at Kharkov in 1816 for teaching that Napoleon's crimes lay in overthrowing the natural rights of the people rather than the traditional rights of monarchs. In 1820 Runich and Magnitsky broadened the assault with a combined attack on a professor of the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo who had just presented a copy of his book, Natural Law, to the Emperor. In the following year they succeeded in obtaining the dismissal of three key professors from St. Petersburg University.
Early in 1823 Magnitsky launched an expanded campaign against the 'Hellish Alliance' which he claimed was now at war with the Holy Alliance. He claimed to find the 'doctrines of Marat' in one professor's book and the secret plans of 'illuminists' in another. In February he proposed the outlawing of philosophy, warning that 'from one line of a professor can come 200,000 bayonets and 1,000 ships of the line.'95 In May he denounced the 'bloody cap of freedom' which 'used to be called only philosophy and literature and is now already called liberalism.'™
'Down with altars, down with sovereigns, long live death and hell.' They are already howling forth in several countries in Europe. How can one fail to recognize who is speaking? The Prince of Darkness himself is coming visibly closer to us; the veil covering him is becoming more and more transparent and soon, no doubt, will fall altogether. This assault, the last perhaps that he will lead against us, is the most terrible, for it is spiritual. The word is being spread from one end of the world to the other invisibly and rapidly like an electric shock, and suddenly culminates in a shattering of the earth. The human word, that is what transmits this diabolical force; the printing press is its arm. Godless university professors are distilling the atrocious poison of disbelief and of hate towards legiti mate power for our unhappy youth. . . .97
Russia should simply
separate herself from Europe so that not even a rumor about the horrible events taking place there could reach her. The present war of the spirit of evil cannot be arrested by the force of arms, for against a spiritual assault an equally spiritual defense is needed. A clairvoyant censorship united with a system of popular education founded on the unshakable base of faith is the only dike against the flood of disbelief and depravity engulfing Europe.98
There was little support within the ministry of education and spiritual affairs for such an extreme position. One member pointed out that countries like Spain and Portugal in which revolutions had occurred were precisely the ones in which enlightenment was least far advanced;89 another wrote
that a successful state could not function in this manner even 'if we could surround our fatherland with a Chinese Wall. . . transplant to Russian soil the Spanish Inquisition . . . and blot out everything that has ever been written about philosophy.'100 But Magnitsky found more powerful allies in Archimandrite Photius, a young ascetic influential with the Tsar who had recently turned from long friendship with Golitsyn to violent denunciation of the Bible Society. 'It is the cleverness of Hell itself that the ancient faith is being destroyed by pious foreigners,' echoed an anonymous informant of Admiral Shishkov.101 Runich wrote that it was essential 'to pluck even one quill from the dark wing of the foe of Christ.'102
Magnitsky followed the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, to the Winter Palace in the spring of 1824, when the latter went to request Golitsyn's dismissal. He waited outside on Admiralty Boulevard in order to tell immediately from the expression on Seraphim's face whether or not the Tsar had acceded to the request. The news was, of course, good for the Orthodox reactionaries: Golitsyn was dismissed from all posts: replaced as head of the Bible Society by Seraphim, as minister of education by Shishkov. 'Foreign cults' were placed in a separate category, subordinate at last to the Orthodox Synod and to the Draconian Arakcheev. Thus, Golitsyn's unique concentration of spiritual and pedagogical authority was broken up; and the dream of a new universal church destroyed.
The Orthodoxy which Magnitsky opposed to syncretism made use of the same supra-confessional terminology from higher order Masonry that Lopukhin had used before him. He described life as 'passing through the Great Temple … in holy darkness' in order to reach 'the all-seeing eye of holiness … the Church of the first centuries.'103
Like De Maistre, Magnitsky's main concern was the mobilization of Russia to combat the infection of Russia with the rationalism that had been spawned by the Protestant Reformation in religion and by the French Revolution in politics. But there were critical differences between the absolutist remedies proposed by the two men. Whereas
