to sleep together with his servants 'lest the Rats run away with them being single.'22
'The most mischievous enemies of unprotected and primitive man are not the big carnivora,' insisted a nineteenth-century student of the Russian peasantry, 'but the lower forms ot Creation-the insects, the mice, rats . . . which oveFwHafnHEIm by their numbers and ^Omnipresence.'23 No less than the revolutionary who wroFelhese words, conservative writers like Gogol equated the ever-increasing swarm of inspectors and officials sent out to the countryside with these ubiquitous insects and rodents. Dostoevsky was even more frightened and fascinated by man's links with the insect world from his early^Notes from the Underground to his apocalyptical images in The Possessed^ot a rat gnawing at an icon and the human community turning into an anthill. Dostoevsky fills his works with haunting references to spiders and flies,24 which are lifted to the level of the grotesque by his sole surviving imitator in the Stalin era: Leonid Leonov. From his Badgers to The Russian Forest, Leonov mixes realistic plots with such surrealist creatures as 'a new sort of cockroach,' a 270-year-old rat, and an unidentified 'giant microbe' prowling construction sites.25
Evenjstronger in the Jorest was^the fear of, and fascination with, fire. Ere was 'the host' in the house-the source of jwarnith and light thaTfe-quired cleanliness in its presence and reverent silence when being lrj^or extinguished. In the monasteries, the lighting of fires..for cooking and baking was a religious rite that could be performe^jmly bythe sacristan brinjyfl?jaj|ame from the lamp_in the sanctuary.26 One of the words for warmth. ????'??, vyas^yriQnyjnous-githjwealth.
Russians tended to see the heavenly ordeLjn_jwins^^if_the famous writings attributed~totrle' mysHcT5ic^sjmJfor_whom angels are 'living creatures of fireTTnTrrftastt^'with lightning, streams of flame . . . thrones are fire and the seraphims . . . blazing with fire.'27 Russians often mention Christ's statement that 'I have come to send fire on the earth' and the fact tiiat the Holy Spirit first came down TS~TnalTffifougir''45n^uljs ^FSre.'28 Wfre~nTfcTnTfch 6*Feve?'a^Tcoln'waT^rneins'MuscovyTFwas said to have 'gone on high.'29 Red Square in Moscow, the site of ritual processions then as now, was popularly referred to as 'the place of fire.'30 The characteristic onion dome of Muscovite churches was likened to 'a tongue of fire.'31
A basic metaphor for explaining the perfect combination of God and man in Christ had long been that of fire infusing itself into iron. Though essentially unchanged, this human 'iron' acquires the fiery nature of the Godhead: the ability to enflame everything that touches it. A Byzantine
X. I rw ruicsi
definition of Christian commitment that became popular in Russia explained that 'having become all fire in the soul, he transmits the inner radiance gained by him also to the body, just as physical fire transmits its effect to iron.'32 Or again from Dionysius:
Fire is in all things . . . manifesting its presence only when it can find material on which to work . . . renewing all things with its lifegiving heat . . . changeless always as it lifts that which it gathers to the skies, never held back by servile baseness. . . ,33
Heat not light, warmth rather than enlightenment, was the way to God. At the same time, fire was a fearful force in this highly inflammable civilization: an uninvited guest whose sudden appearance came as a reminder of its fragile impermanence. The popular expression for committing arson even today is 'let loose the red rooster,' and the figure of a red rooster was often painted on wooden buildings to propitiate him and prevent a dreaded visitation. Leonov likens a spreading forest fire to a horde of red spiders consuming everything in its way.34
Moscow alone was visited with some seventeen major_fires in the period from 1330 to 1453, and was'~to?? gutted by flames many mofe times between-thcn__ and the great ???'1???8?2???? recorded histories of Novgorod mention more T3ian a hundred serious fires.35 A sey^nteenth-century^yisitor^remarked that 'to make a conflagration remarkable in this country there must be at least seven or eight thousand houses consumed.'36 Small wonder that fire was the dominant symbol of the Last Judgment in Russian iconography7'Tfs red glow at the bottom ^f church frescoes and icons~was recognizable even from afar whenever, in their turn, the flames of the church candles were lit by the faithful.
Perun, the god of thunder and_creator of fire, held a pre-eminent_p_lace
in thepn^QijisJian^j^i^^bright-plumed firebird ?
specialplace in Russian myJtok2gyJb;^i_of_Mj^m,j^
lar Eerouoi3^r4stiawzeiL^the
Slavic name^oflthe prophet Eli|a^whQ__sent down fire on the enemies of Isra^aniascjejoo^djpjirawn jn_a fier^-chariot. The first form oTthe drama in Russia was the 'furnace show,' on the Sunday before Christmas, in which the three faithful Israelites-Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego- were rescued by God from Nebuchadnezzar's fire. Although taken over from Byzantium, this drama received a new richness of staging and musical setting in Russia. Real fire was introduced in the Russian version; and, after their rescue, the three Israelites circulated through church and town to proclaim that Christ was coming to save men, just as the angel of the Lord had rescued them from the furnace.37 In the first of the critical religious
controversies of the seventeenth century, the fundamentalists passionately and successfully defended the rite whereby flaming candles were immersed into the waters that were blessed on Epiphany to remind men that Christ came to 'baptise with the Holy Ghost and with fire.'38 In 1618 the head of Russia's largest monastery was beaten by a mob and forced to perform a penance of a thousand prostrations a day for trying to do away with this uncanonical rite. One of the tracts written to denounce him, On the Enlightening Fire, accused him of trying to deny Russia 'the tongue of fire that had descended upon the apostles.'39 Fire was the weapon of the fundamentalists in the 1640's as they burned musical instruments, foreign-style paintings, and the buildings of the foreign community itself in Moscow. After the fundamentalists had been anathemized in 1667, many of these 'Old Believers' sought self-immolation-often with all their family and friends in an oil-soaked wooden church-as a means of anticipating the purgative fires of the imminent Last Judgment.40
Apocalyptical fascination with the cleansing power of flames lived on in the traditions of primitive peasant rebellion-and indeed in the subsequent tradition of ideological aristocratic revolution. The atheistic anarchist Michael Bakunin? fascinated Europe during the revolutionary crisis of 1848-9 with his prophetic insistence that 'tongues of flame' would shortly appear all over Europe to bring down the old gods. After hearing Wagner conduct a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig in 1849, Bakunin rushed forward to assure him that this work deserved to be spared the imminent world conflagration. Fascinated by this man (whom he called the 'chief stoker' of revolution), Wagner was haunted by the fact that the opera house did perish in flames shortly thereafter, and may well have been influenced by Bakunin in his characterization of Siegfried, his own fire music, and his over- all conception of 'The Downfall of the Gods.'41 When Russia produced its own musical revolution in the early twentieth century, the symbol of fire was equally central: in Scriabin's 'Poem of Fire' and the spectacular fusion of music with the dance in Stravinsky and Diaghilev's 'Firebird.'
Their firebird, like the two-headed imperial eagle, perished in the flames of the 1917 revolution, which the winds of war had fanned out of Lenin's seemingly insignificant Spark. Some poets of the old regime feTT whaFone oFTIierrrcalled 'the attraction of the moth-soul to fiery death,'42 while one of the first and greatest to be killed by
