nations of tBe
fdisiSrfeSecfttescr^
Vest, France
and England, for techniques and ideas. Russia embarked Hesitantly but ir- / reversibly on the path toward m3ustrialization and the redefinition of its ' social structure. No one realized better than the admirers of Nicholas' rule what defeat in the Crimea meant for Russia. Even before the war was irrevocably lost, Thitchev saw in it 'the birthpangs of a new world.'24 Pogodin summoned up the fire symbol with a strange mixture of apocalypticism and masochism that was to become characteristic of the new nationalism:
?
Burn with your burning fire which the English have lighted in hell, burn … all our political relations with Europe! Let everything be burned with fire! Qui perd gagne!25
'ii iu rMEVV SHORES
1. The Turn to
3
°f a^e^materiaUigns of change in post-Crimean Russia, none was moretangibleand lnescaplEETEanTSrbnflaingaf ranroads7Noth!rIglp7e~ad to t^ro^ncg?so'girectly anTSamaticluh^^
in thejnaE5g''as' tEeTorward ??^?^?????? |gS^^^-CQ^g^^rtgBr^TBqrmterior of Russia in the sixties and seventies.' / The gM^mpdmg,^rTroSaToTRu^ia hadj^en ini8i2 (as they wereltiif ? t0 be in 1941) a form o?defense against heayjahTequip^ed invadersfaom the
L WesS-JSLa,ggurre^~pctoreiquelppeal to the romantic inW^rmH^
Radishchev, for all his reforming zeal, had been charmed by the oldToad used on his famous trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow; and Gogol had made them symbols of the beauty and mystery of Old Russia.
The new railroads were to become symbols gf modern Russia with its interrejatsd^rocess of spiritual destructionlnTrnaterial progress' At first
into Russian culture. Fedor Chizhov, the son of a priest and a close friend of Gogol, Ivanov, and Khomiakov, lectured in physics and mathematics at St. Petersburg and published in 1837, at the age of 26, an anthology giving a history and description of steam machines. He wrote that 'the railroad is for me the slogan of our time,' and his resolve to lead Russia into the railroad age was undampened by a long period of arrest for allegedly fostering discontent among the Slavs of the Hapsburg empire during the late years of Nicholas' reign. When railroad building began in earnest under Alexander II',?ni?!10v became consumed with a passionate desire to prevemlorelgners
fro?f2fifr0^
this newfoliroT^oweTTKr^in i860 formed a company
which had as its first project the penitential building of a railroad from Moscow to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius. But he was soon outstripped by his Anglo-French rivals and died disillusioned in 1877, to be buried near Gogol.26 The sense of^conf^joji_an?bitoriiessJsward the' railr°^ds^is_reflected in the speech whichjhe rectoToTthe RjgaTheoTogiFaT
bridge:'-~-
Conflicting thoughts rise up in the soul when looking on a new route like this. What is it going to bring us? . . . Will it not be in part the expediter of that would-be civilization, which under the guise of a false all-humanity and a common brotherhood of all . . . destroys . . . true humanity, true brotherhood?27
Not only tradi^naMsts but Westernizing reformers found themselves
brooding over these baibingersjof a.new hraTa^eT^lth^^
fesscd admiration for railroads''and loved to watch them~being~built, the
'reality' from which he rebelled assumed the shape of a steam^egg
'iron'Tnonster with'
that belched forth 'smoke and tongues
of fire.' The more moderate Westernizer, Prince^iazemsky, haTwritten in. 1847 in his 'Review of Our Literature in the Decade since Pushkin':
Railroads have already annihilated, and in time shall ^eornjletely^
anruhuateTairpTeylou^mother
steaffisTfave already long ago put out the fire of the winged horse, whose weighted hoof has cut off the life- giving flow that has quenched the thirst of so many gracious and poetic generations.28
In the novels of the age of Alexander II, the earth-bound Pegasus of Russian realism found itself repeatedly crossing railroad tracks. It is in a railroad coach that Dostoevsky's„CluisJb.figureJ Prince Myshkin, returns to Russia at the beginning of the Idiot and first meets the dark and venal figure with whom his fajsJjgcomes so sjjar^ely^iatomi amp;gd. Just as the peasants likened the railroads to the spinning of a giant spider web over the Russian land, so Dostoevsky's Idiot sees in them the fallen star Wormwood spoken of in the Book of Revelation (8:11). Turgenev's Smoke sees in the billows of the steam engines transporting Russians back and forth to the West an image of their confused state of mind and the obscurity surrounding Russia's future. The early leader and guiding force in the movement toward programmatic realism in music, Mily Balakirev, worked as a porter in a railroad station in St. Petersburg in the 1870's as his form of penitential 'movement to the people.' Tolstoy died in an obscure railroad station, and his great novel Anna Karenina beginsanO ends Willi a Iranian being~crushed_ under_a train? ine ????????????? coinecTthe tenrT^King Hunger' (Jsar Gpjgrf)Jn^a poem he wrote in 1865, 'The Railroad.'
ATthesame time, railroads became a symbol'ol light and nope to those who drejimSnmmariry of drjimlSLmatexial transformations. The 'Tidingl of Zioi?sect of the 1840's had seen the millennium in terms of a new civilization to be built along a vast Eurasian railway whose stations were to serve as giant distribution centers of material benefits. Il'in, the founder of the sect, died in Solovetsk in 1890, just a year before his vision began to be
