prophet; and the critic, the priest, of romanticism.
The Enlightenment had found truth in objective laws, physical and moral, which were assumed to be uniformly valid throughout the natural world. They could be discovered by study and explained rationally by the natural philosopher. In romantic thought, however, truth was organic and aesthetic; its hidden meaning was best perceived intuitively and communicated poetically. Since different cultures were an important expression of the variety and hidden patterns of history, the romantic artist bore a special responsibility to find the meaning of national identity.
The contrast between pure and propagandistic art, which became so important to a subsequent generation, did not concern the idealistic romantics of Nicholaevan Russia. All art was pure in the sense that it expressed little direct concern over social and political problems, yet strongly propagandistic in the sense that it conceived of artistic ideas as a force capable of transforming the world. It was called '??????!.' by Khomia-kov;75 Saint-Martin, 'the unknown philosopher' of the anti-Enlightenment, spoke of it as 'prophetic.' It was indeed infused with prophecy in the Biblical sense of purporting to represent the word of God to man. It can also be characterized with the less familiar Greek term theurgic used by Saint-Martin to describe the spiritualist's act of establishing contact with other worlds, and by Berdiaev to suggest that art was viewed as divine work and not merely divine words.76
The idea that artjwas_diyine activity was particularly rooted for Russians in Schelling's philosophy. He defined philosophy as 'higher poetry' and sought to relate philosophic speculation to artistic rather than scientific pursuits. Inspired by Schelling, the Russians were quick to conclude that new progress in philosophy required the development of new art forms. The Schellingian Nadezhdin accordingly drew up the first of many calls for new prophetic art beyond either classicism or romanticism in his writings and lectures as professor of art and archeology at Moscow. As early as 1818 he defined the poet's calling:
To teach people the good is the duty of the poet. He is the true herald, the dread teacher of the world, His task is to strike down and unmask vice, To teach and guide people onto the true path. A Christian poet is the organ of eternal truths.77
Belinsky served his journalistic apprenticeship under Nadezhdin in the thirties, and, for all his philosophic convolutions, remained faithful to his teacher's belief in the high calling of the artist: 'Art is the direct intuition of Jrjjth, i.e. thought in the form of images.'78 These images of truth had-for the awakening imagination of Nicholaevan Russia-a uniquely national configuration. As Glinka was reputed to have said, 'nations create music, composers only arrange it.' The artist thus became 'the nerve end of the great people,' who 'like a priest or judge should not belong to any party' and must never substitute 'earthly reason for the heavenly mind.'79 Literary criticism became a kind of exegesis of sacred texts, the chief critic of any major 'thick journal' a high priest, and his desk 'the altar on which he performs his holy rites.'80 Through Kireevsky, Nadezhdin, and Belinsky literary criticism became the major medium for discussing philosophical and social questions. Far from being mere reviewers, the critics of this period acquired a key place in the development of intellectual life. Belinsky, in particular, acquired a unique moral authority through his uncompromising moral fanaticism. His mantle was passed on in a kind of apostolic succession to Chernyshevsky in the sixties and Mikhailovsky in the seventies. Problems and ideas raised in his writings found their way back into the literary milieu from which they had come and reached a new level of intensity in the ideological novels of Dostoevsky.
The first proclamation of the new exalted conception of the artist was made by the Schellingian Prince Odoevsky in a new journal he founded in 1824 (with the Decembrist poet Kiichelbecker) to help create 'a truly Russian poetry.' Enjoying the collaboration of Pushkin and many of the leading poets of the age, the journal was appropriately called Mnemosyne (the mother of the muses). 'Sculpture, Painting, and Music,' a story by the young poet Venevitinov, illustrates the general feeling that the arts were all divinely inspired. The three arts are depicted as three celestial virgins with a common mother, Poetry, of whom the whole world is an expressive creation. In a similar vein stands Odoevsky's idea that 'poetry is the number, music the measure and painting the weight' of a common truth.81 Similarly, the story 'Three Artists' by Stankevich, the philosopher-artist who dominated the philosophical life of the thirties as much as Odoevsky had the twenties, told of three brothers trying to capture 'the eternal beauty of mother nature' in different media, each inspiring the other until at last
'the three lives flowed into one life, the three arts into beauty . . . and an invisible force was in their midst.'82
This sense of divine interdependence of all art media was of great importance for the creative artists of Nicholaevan Russia. Artists in one medium generally knew those working in others. It was customary for poets to draw pictures and for artists to write poems in the notebooks that they kept and exchanged. The Ukrainian poet Taras, Shevchenko began his career as a painter, and Lermontov left behind almost as many paintings and sketches as poems.83 His Demon later inspired Rubinstein's opera of the same name (one of the most popular of the many Russian operas that remain virtually unknown abroad), and many of the best canvases of Vrubel (one of the best of the many painters who also remain little known outside of Russia). Briullov's painting, 'The Last Days of Pompeii,' was inspired by an opera, and in turn inspired the novel of Bulwer-Lytton. Odoevsky as a music critic and Botkin as an art critic acquired positions of general influence almost as great as those of the literary critics (and were themselves creative writers).
Poetry was viewed, at least until the late thirties, as the first and greatest of the art forms: 'the first-born daughter of the deathless spirit, the holy hand-maiden of eternal elegance, nothing less than the most perfect harmony.'84 Such flowery tributes seem not altogether inappropriate; for the 1,820's and 1830's were the golden age of Russian verse. In the quantity of good poetry and the quality of its best, Russia drew equal to any other nation of Europe and far ahead of anything in its own past. The greatest of all, Alexander Pushkin, represents in poetry what his ill-fated Decembrist friends represented in politics: the final flowering of eighteenth-century aristocratic aspiration. But, whereas the Decembrists came to an inglorious end and had little impact on subsequent political thought, Pushkin was lionized even in his lifetime, and sounded forth many of the themes that were to dominate a rich literary culture in the late imperial period. His extraordinary success helped attract gifted Russians to art as a kind of alternative to politics during the reactionary period that followed the crushing of the Decembrists.
From a background of privilege and a largely French, neo-classical education at the newly founded imperial lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin grew continually in the range and depth of his interests. Within his relatively brief life of thirty-eight years, he wrote plays, stories, and poems with equal facility about a wide variety of times and places. His most influential work was the 'novel in verse' Eugene Onegin. Its portrayal of provincial aristocratic life and its muted tale of unfulfillment made it 'the real ancestor of the main line of Russian fiction,' while 'superfluous' Onegin and the
lovely Tatiana became 'the authentic Adam and Eve of the Mankind that inhabits Russian fiction.'85 One of his last poems, The Bronze Horseman, is probably the greatest ever written in the Russian language. A much shorter and more intense work than Onegin, The Bronze Horseman struck a resonant chord in the Russian apocalyptical mentality with its central image of a flood descending on St. Petersburg without any ark of salvation. Drawing on his own memories of the flood in 1824, Pushkin transforms Falconet's bronze statue of Peter the Great into an ambiguous symbol of imperial majesty and inhuman power. The clerk Eugene, in whose final delirium the statue comes to life, became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction-pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone control.
Pushkin remains the outstanding illustration of Russian aristocratic culture. In his hands, Russian poetry came close to Nadezhdin's ideal synthesis of classical and romantic elements; the Russian language attained an
