novel (and Tolstoy his last great one) in the late seventies. Pisemsky, another pioneer of the realistic novel, died within a few weeks of Dostoevsky and Musorgsky in 1881. By the end of the decade Saltykov, Shelgunov, Eliseev, and Cherny-shevsky had died, thus severing the last living links with the critical journalistic traditions of the sixties. Of the leading populist writers, only Uspensky and Mikhailovsky remained active in Russia and uncompromised in their fidelity to populist ideals throughout the eighties. But the former was going slowly insane after completing his bleak masterpiece The Power of the Land (1882) and such prophetic fragments as Man and the Machine (1884). Mikhailovsky had developed a marked nervous tic and was increasingly preoccupied with publishing the memoirs of himself and his friends.
It was, in general, a time for memoir writing and commemorative meetings in imitation of the Pushkin fete of 1880. Some former revolutionaries like Tikhomirov publicly renounced their previous beliefs and achieved notoriety inside Russia; others like Kravchinsky (Stepniak) and Kropotkin fled abroad and earned reputations in Western radical circles as martyred heroes and revolutionary theorists. The pathetic conspiratorial effort to kill Alexander III in 1887 (in which such unlikely bedfellows as Pilsudski and Lenin's older brother were involved) reflected the futility and
addiction to old patterns that prevailed among the few who continued as active revolutionaries inside Russia.
More typical of the age than this isolated act of terroristic heroism was the emotional but essentially apolitical student demonstration of 1886 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dobroliubov's death. With the death of Ostrov-sky in the same year and of Garshin and Saltykov in 1888 and 1889 respectively, the age of realism in Russian literature can be said to have ended.
In its place a new popular culture appeared that sought neither to depict reality nor to answer vexing questions but to distract the masses with sex, sensationalism, and crude chauvinism. Illustrated weeklies captured the attention of those who might previously have turned to the thick monthly journals for ideas and inspiration. One of these journals, Niva, grew rapidly from its relatively obscure origins in 1869 to gain, by the end of the reign of Alexander III, the totally unprecedented circulation of 200,000. It and other journals offered a new literature of faded romantic escapism. Exotic travel literature, sentimentalized love stories, and stereotyped historical novels rushed in to fill a void created both by the tightened censorship and by general exhaustion at the no-exit realism of the previous era.
Amidst the lassitude and bezideinosf ('lack of ideology') of the era, two powerful figures struggled, as it were, for the soul of Russia: Constantine Pobedonostsev and Leo Tolstoy. They had both opposed and outlived the revolutionaries of the sixties and were already relatively old men by the eighties, yet both were destined to live on into the twentieth century. Neither of them founded a movement, yet each contributed to the climate of fanaticism that made revolution rather than reform the path through which modernization was accomplished in twentieth- century Russia.
These two figures helped define the unresolved and often unacknowledged conflict of political ideas within the thought of the populist age: between irrational adherence to authoritarian tradition and rationalistic insistence on a direct transformation of society. Pobedonostsev, the lawyer and lay head of the Church Synod, was the symbol and author of Alexander Ill's program of reaction. Tolstoy, the novelist turned barefoot religious teacher, was the enduring symbol and example of anarchistic populist protest. However bitterly they were opposed to one another, each was in a sense true to the populist age in which he was nurtured. For each of them was uniquely willing in the succeeding age of small deeds and great compromises to sacrifice his personal happiness and well-being to the ideal in which he believed. The ideal of each was, moreover, that of a totally renovated Christian society rather than of partial improvement through practical economic or political reforms.
Their paths first crossed in 1881, when Pobedonostsev withheld from Alexander III Tolstoy's letter urging clemency for the assassins of the Tsar's father. 'As wax before the fire, every revolutionary struggle will melt away before the man-tsar who fulfills the law of Christ,' Tolstoy wrote; but Pobedonostsev correctly retorted that 'our Christ is not your Christ.'4 They met again in 1899, when Tolstoy included in his last novel Resurrection a thinly veiled caricature of Pobedonostsev. The latter responded in 1902 by excommunicating Tolstoy, whose followers countered with the defiant statement that 'your anathemas will far more surely open to us the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven than could your prayers.'
Like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Pobedonostsev favored theocratic rule through mystery and authority. He was opposed to all freedom of expression and favored the systematic subordination of sectarian and minority cultures to a monolithic Russian Orthodox culture. Access to pernicious foreign ideas was to be confined to an intellectual elite; but otherwise education was to be limited to catechistic indoctrination in Russian traditions and moral values.
In some respects Pobedonostsev's social doctrine resembles the theory of 'freezing up Russia to avoid rotting' contemporaneously being advanced by Constantine Leont'ev. He detested the tendency toward uniformity in 'the Europe of railroads and banks … of increasing material indulgence, and prosaic dreams about the common good.'5 Reminiscent of Nietzsche is his aesthetic antagonism to bourgeois mediocrity, which amplifies a sentiment already found in Herzen as well as Pisemsky and other anti-nihilist novelists of the populist era:
Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments-only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life 'individually' or 'collectively' on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?0
There will be no beauty in life without inequality and violence. To pluck the rose, man must be willing to pierce his fingers on the thorns. Even before the outbreak of the first Balkan War in the mid-seventies Leont'ev insisted that 'liberal nihilism' has produced such 'decrepitude of mind and heart' that what is needed for rejuvenation may well be 'a whole period of external wars analogous to the Thirty Years' War or at least to the epoch of Napoleon I.'7
For aristocratic and aesthetic reasons, Leont'ev rebelled at all reforms, proposing a total return to the ritual and discipline of Byzantine rale. He died as a monk in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, bemoaning the end of the age of poetry and human variety. Pobedonostsev, on the contrary, was a thoroughly prosaic lay figure, whose ideal was the gray efficiency and uniformity of the modern organization man. He was the prophet of duty, work, and order-shifting his bishops around periodically to prevent any distracting local attachments from impeding the smooth functioning of the ecclesiastical machine. He was unemotional, even cynical, about his methods. But they were generally effective and earn him a deserved place as one of the builders of the centralized bureaucratic state. Like the modern totalitarian regimes which his own rule often seems to anticipate, he has a low view of human nature and insists that regimes based on a more optimistic reading of the masses will collapse. 'The state must show in itself a living faith. The popular mind is suspicious and may not be seduced … by compromise,'8 he insists in criticizing advocates of constitutional processes for Russia. Any efforts to transplant democratic institutions to Russia will merely lead to revolution.
Organization and bribery are the two mighty instruments used with such success for the manipulation of the masses. … In our time a new means has been found of working the masses for political ends .. . this is the art of rapid and dexterous generalization of ideas disseminated with the confidence of burning conviction as the last word of science.9
