a
new version of the iconographer's old belief that a painting was a means of communing with the saints. The private gallery of busts and paintings in the castle that Rastrelli built for the Stroganovs in St. Petersburg became a kind of hall of icons; and the Decembrist Bestuzhev's painting portraits in exile of all those who had participated in the uprising marked the beginnings of a new martyrological portraiture.126
Herzen, who launched the secular revolutionary tradition in an effort to avenge the fallen Decembrists, was also influenced by the culture of higher order Masonry: in his youthful oath-taking, his early talk of palingenesis ('rebirth');127 in the title of his first journal, Polar Star (which was taken from a Decembrist paper named after a key Masonic lodge and symbol); and in his decision to edit, even amidst the exciting early years of Alexander IPs reign, the works of the original 'spiritual knight,' Lopukhin. Many symbols of higher order Masonry seem, indeed, strangely applicable to the Russian revolutionary tradition: the basic slogan 'Victory or Death'; the supreme symbol of the sword (representing the need to fight for an idea); the lower symbol of the knife (representing the need to punish traitors); the idea of inscribing messages on a cross; and the candles within the temple symbolizing the light of Adam within man and the perfection of the starry firmament which they would soon bring down to earth. In extinguishing these candles, the Romanovs did not succeed in snuffing out the spark that had lit them; and the journal in which Lenin first developed his revolutionary ideas was to bear the name of this key Masonic symbol, The Spark-again through the intermediacy of Decembrist usage.
The Masonic culture of the Alexandrian age was, of course, a far different thing from the revolutionary movements that were to make use of its symbols and techniques. All Masons were pledged to belief in God, but he had many names and faces. One could find him equally well in the world (macrocosm), in oneself (microcosm), or in books of revelation (mesocosm). God's very name had symbolic and allegorical meaning for the Russian occultists. The letters BOG stood for blago ('good'), otets ('father'), and glagol' ('the word'), which were the three essential characteristics of the 'God above God' of Russian mysticism. The letter 'O' stood in the middle -a self-contained circle of perfection signifying that there was neither beginning nor end to God's fatherhood.128 The birth of Christ was said to have occurred in all three forms: as the moral incarnation of the good and the scientific incarnation of the true word. Thus the 'imitation of Christ' meant in higher order Masonry the attainment by man of the 'two-sided truth' of knowledge and justice.
But how did such a God relate to Russia? Beneath the anguish and frustrations of the Alexandrian age lies the pathos of intoxicated mystics
trying to apply their insights to the real world, and the deeper drama of an awakening nation in search of a national creed. De Maistre offered Russia the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Pietistic sectarians looked to Lopuk-hin's Moral Catechism of the True Free Mason to lead them away from 'dreams born of smoke from the dull light of false wisdom.'129 Conservative military leaders looked admiringly to the pietistic and patriotic Short Catechism for German Soldiers written in 1812 by Ernst Arndt for German soldiers fighting Napoleon in Russia.130 Rationalistic sceptics turned to Voltaire's Catechism of an Honest Man.131 Patriotic reformers admired the Russian translation of a Spanish Citizen's Catechism drawn up during the Peninsular War, and tended toward the view set forth in the Catechism of the Decembrist Murav'ev-Apostol that Russians should 'rise up all together against tyranny and establish faith and freedom in Russia. Whoever rejects this path will, like the traitor, Judas, be cursed with anathema. Amen.'182
The creed which Russia adopted under Nicholas I was far closer to that described by Catherine's courtier, the conservative historian M. Shcher-batov, in his 'Utopian' novel of 1783-4, A Voyage to the Land of Ofir, than to anything outlined in Alexander's time. Shcherbatov, for all his erudition and his unexcelled fifteen-thousand-volume library, was deeply suspicious of undisciplined intellectual activity. He proposed an absolute monarchy with a rigid class structure and an educational system that would be totally oriented toward practical problems. Religion was to be completely rational and authoritarian. In place of all other reading matter (even the Bible), the ordinary citizen was-to be given two new catechisms: a moral and legal catechism. Both the priests who taught the former and the police who taught the latter should have as their object the maintenance of order and the inculcation of respect for morality and law.133
Under Nicholas I, Russia acquired both its 'moral' and its 'legal' catechism: the former in Metropolitan Philaret's Orthodox Catechism, the latter in Uvarov's famous circular outlining the doctrine of 'official nationality.' At the same time, social and economic policies followed the rigid lines set forth in Shcherbatov's novel. Class distinctions were strictly maintained; the peasantry remained in bondage; and commerce and industry were kept subordinate to agriculture, which Shcherbatov had considered the source of all wealth.
This represented in some ways a return to order and rationality after the confusions of Alexander's time. Nicholas discarded the most extreme figures in the 'reactionary uprising' of the mid-twenties: Arakcheev for Benckendorff in the army, Magnitsky for Uvarov in education, Photius for Philaret in the Church, the archaic Slavicisms of Shishkov for the Euro-
peanized prose of Karamzin. Yet Nicholas' policies were more resented because of their finality, their refusal to leave room for further discussion of religion and politics by the aristocracy. His ideal society was the army, in which, 'there is order … no impertinent claims to know all the answers … no one commands before he himself has learned to obey.'134 God was the supreme commander and Nicholas 'a subordinate officer determined to execute his orders well and to occupy an honorable place in the great military review to be held in the next world.'135 Never again, except for a few brief years under Alexander II, were the Romanovs to encourage the discussion of political reform. Never again, except in the last decadent days under Rasputin, was the court to encourage the extra- ecclesiastical pursuit of religious truth.
Thus, the suspicions of rational enlightenment engendered during Alexander's lifetime had a debilitating effect on the subsequent development of Russian culture. It was particularly fateful that the high tide of anti- Enlightenment feeling should occur at the very time when Russia was becoming fully conscious of its national power and identity. Anti-rationalism was given special sanction within Russia because rationalism was identified with revolution, revolution with Napoleon, and Napoleon with the invasion of Russia and burning of Moscow.
The new Moscow that arose on the ruins of the old soon began to eclipse St. Petersburg and to think of itself as distinct from European culture. Following the burning of Moscow, Michael Zagoskin, one of the most widely read writers of the era, began a lifetime of gathering material for sketches on 'Moscow and Muscovites,' which enjoyed great popularity when they finally appeared in the 1840's. As he said in his introduction:
I have studied Moscow too much for thirty years and can say emphatically that it is not a city, not a capital, but an entire world that is profoundly Russian. . . . Just as thousands of rays of sunshine come to a focus at one point in passing through a magnifying glass, in precisely the same way in Moscow the different characteristics of our Russian popular physiognomy are unified in one national countenance . . . you will find in Moscow a treasure house of all the elements in the worldly and civil life of Russia, that great colossus for which Petersburg acts as the head, and Moscow the heart.136
The 'heart' was more important than the 'head' for the mystical romantics of the new Muscovite culture. Their attempts to find truths hidden in the physiognomy of a city was an extension of the occult fascination with statuary and phrenology under Alexander. The very uniqueness and asymmetry of Moscow appealed to their imagination. Marvelous meaning was discovered in the strange shapes of the old capital, whereas fear and
foreboding were found on the face of the new-in the contemporaneous Physiology of Petersburg and a
