Mochalov was the first in a series of great stage personalities that was to make the Russian theater of the late imperial period unforgettable. The remarkable feature of Mochalov's acting-like that of Nizhinsky's dancing and Chaliapin's singing-was his ability to be the part. Just as later generations found it difficult to conceive of Boris Godunov without Chaliapin, or of The Specter of the Rose without Nizhinsky, so Russians of the forties could not think of Hamlet without Mochalov. The simple peasant, of course, always thought of Christ as he appeared on icons. Popular saints were 'very like' the figures on icons, and the aristocratic hero felt impelled to become 'very like' the figures on the stage. Stankevich confessed that he came to regard the theater as a 'temple' and was deeply influenced in his personal patterns of behavior by watching Mochalov.150
Turgenev used Hamlet as a symbol of the late-Nicholaevan generation of intellectuals in his famous essay 'Hamlet and Don Quixote.' Having just created one of the most famous Hamlet figures in Russian literature in his first novel, Rudin, Turgenev now spoke of the contrasting but also typical Quixotic type: the uncomplicated enthusiast who loses himself in the service of an ideal, unafraid of the laughter of his contemporaries. Such figures were to become prominent in the Quixotic social movement of subsequent decades, but 'Hamletism' remained typical of much of Russian thought. Indeed, many of Turgenev's subsequent literary creations were to end in suicide.
The conflict of these two types is mirrored in the career of one of the most interesting thinkers of late Nicholaevan Russia: V. S. Pecherin. There seems a kind of poetic justice in the similarity of his name to that of Pechorin, Lermontov's wandering and brooding 'hero of our time.' For this real-life Pecherin was an even more peripatetic and romantic figure. He moved from philology to poetry, from socialism to Catholicism, to an English monastery, and finally to an Irish hospital, where he died in 1885 as a chaplain to the sick-a distant admirer and faint echo of the populist movement in Russia. Yet he was tortured throughout-not so much by the fear that his ideas were Utopian as by gnawing uncertainty whether life itself was worth living. He had in his student days been driven to 'the Hamlet
question' by Max Stirner, whose lectures at Berlin inspired him to embark on one of the many unfinished trilogies of the Russian nineteenth century. The first part of this untitled drama is a weird apotheosis of Stirner's idea that man can achieve divinity through his own uncaused act of self-assertion: suicide. The leading character (with the heroic Germanic name of Woldemar) not only kills himself but convinces his lover (with the spiritualized name of Sophia) to do likewise. 'Sophia,' he tells her, 'thy name means Wisdom, Divine Wisdom. . . . There is but one question: To be or not to be.'161
The second part of the trilogy, entitled The Triumph of Death, elaborates this theme with ghoulish delight, as King Nemesis watches the destruction of the entire world-announced by a storm, a musical chorus, and five falling stars representing the slain Decembrist leaders. The chorus in praise of death echoes some of the dark thoughts of Pushkin's 'Hymn in Praise of the Plague' and draws freely from both apocalyptical and romantic symbolism. Death appears as a youth on a white horse and is hailed as 'the God of freedom, the God of striving.' Then the stage is cleared for one last monologue, which ends this second (and last) part of the trilogy. It is a song of the dying poet. 'The poet,' says Pecherin, 'is Don Quixote . . . (who) will save the fatherland . . . find the new world for us.' Then, in an ending that runs off into dots to indicate its incompleteness, the 'dying poet' speaks of Russia as the land of 'the brightening dawn' and says: 'I shall pour forth abundant strength on Russia, and the steeled Russian knife . . .'162
If 'the Hamlet question' was never resolved by the aristocratic intellectuals, preoccupation with it nonetheless served to clear away secondary concerns. Indeed, the oft-ridiculed generation of 'the fathers,' the romantic, 'superfluous' aristocrats of the forties, in some ways did even more to tear Russian thought away from past Russian practices and traditions than the iconoclastic 'sons,' the self-proclaimed 'new men' of die sixties. The fantasy-laden romanticism of the Nicholaevan age swept away petty thoughts with the same decisiveness with which actors were swept off the stage in the last act of Hamlet or the final scene of The Triumph of Death. The passion for destruction which burst onto Europe in the late forties in the person of Bakunin was only the most extreme illustration of the philosophic desperation produced by the interaction of German ideas, Slavic enthusiasm, and the personal frustrations and boredom of a provincial aristocracy. Bakunin illustrates as well the transfer of the vision of a 'brightening dawn,' of 'abundant strength,' and 'steeled knives' from the lips of a 'dying poet' to the life of a living revolutionary. His volcanic career anticipated, and in some degree influenced, the proliferation of quixotic
causes and crusades which swept through Russia during the eventful reign of Alexander II. All of these movements-Jacobinism, populism, Pan-Slavism, and variants thereof-elude the usual categories of social and political analysis and can be seen as parts of an implausible yet heroic effort to realize in life that which had been anticipated in prophecy but could not be realized in art: the final act of Pecherin's play, the Paradise of Gogol's Poema, the new icons for Ivanov's temple.
One of the powerful if invisible forces driving Russian aristocrats to the 'cursed questions' was the oppressive, inescapable boredom of Russian life. To Francophile or Germanophile aristocrats, Russia appeared as the immense and final province of Europe. Life was an unrelieved series of petty incidents in one of those indeterminate towns 'in N province,' in which the stories of Gogol generally take place. Pent-up hysteria Was released in prophetic utterance. Even in their travels Russians complained with Belinsky: 'Boredom is my inseparable companion.'153 They were impelled onward to question the value of life itself by the feeling expressed in the world-weary last lines of Gogol's tragicomic 'How the Two Ivans Quarreled': 'Life is boring on this earth, gentlemen.'
When a revolutionary social transformation finally came to Russia in the twentieth century, Stalin's 'new Soviet intelligentsia' sought to ridicule Hamlet as a symbol of the brooding and indecisive old intelligentsia. A production of Hamlet during the period of the first five-year plan portrayed the Danish prince as a fat and decadent coward who recites 'To be or not to be' half-drunk in a bar.154 A critic of that period went so far as to claim that the real hero of the play was Fortinbras. He alone had a positive goal; and the fact that he came from victory in battle to pronounce the final words of the play symbolized rational, militant modernity triumphing over the 'feudal morality' of pointless bloodletting that had dominated the last act prior to his arrival.155
Modernization under Stalin was to be far from a rational process, however; and the Russian stage was not to be dominated entirely by faceless Fortinbras figures. The aristocratic century left a legacy of unresolved anguish and unanswered questions that continued to agitate the more complex culture that emerged in the following century of economic growth and social upheaval.
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ON TO NEW SHORES
The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
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The search for new forms of art and life in the midst of social dislocation, industrial development, and urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth century. The symbol of a ship at sea in search of another shore. The gradual turn to social thought during the late years of Nicholas I's reign; the influence of moralistic French socialism; the Petrashevsky circle of the 1840's; the transfer of hopes to Russia by Alexander Herzen (1812 -70) and Michael Bakunin (1814-76) after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in the West. Railroads as a bearer of change and symbol of apocalypse in the countryside.
