sister, the unborn son appears to her, gives her a kiss, and thanks her for sparing him the agony of being born into the world. She goes in then to see her sister 'full of calm and happiness,' suddenly armed with 'power to strengthen and console.'76
The happiness of those who are never born was preached most eloquently by Vasily Rozanov, the high priest of the new cult of sex who likened himself to a fetus in the womb asking not to be born 'because I am warm enough here.'77 Through Rozanov, the Dostoevskian origins of the new sensualism can be most dramatically traced. Rozanov gave a kind of physical immediacy to this link by seeking out and marrying Dostoevsky's former mistress, Apollinaria Suslova, and launched the new philosophic interest in Dostoevsky with his lengthy essay of 1890, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
For Rozanov, Dostoevsky appeared as the harbinger of a new supra-rational freedom: a liberation first hinted at in the Notes from the Underground and finally developed in the Legend. Rozanov insists that Lobachev-sky's non-Euclidian mathematics (which were being reproduced in a variety of new editions in the 1880's) demonstrated the teritativeness of scientific truths,78 and that Dostoevsky's works showed the falsity of any scientific attempt to organize society. Neither God nor reality can be apprehended by reason alone. The only way to rediscover both is through sexual experience.
The cult of the immediate, which had been a precarious way back to traditional Christianity in Dostoevsky, became for Rozanov the way back to a God who is not Christ but Dionysius. Rozanov's 'sexual transcendentalism'79 exalts the religion of the early Hebrews and primitive fertility cults over the ascetic and unnatural traditions of Christianity, which by sterilizing the idea of God have prepared the way for atheism: the inevitable attitude of thought devoid of sex.
Rozanov agreed with the general preference for the earthy, anguished Dostoevsky over the aristocratic, moralistic Tolstoy expressed in Merezhkov-sky's famous series on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But he dissented from Merezhkovsky's view that Dostoevsky was a kind of Christian seer. This tendency to view Dostoevsky as the prophet of a renovated Christianity and The Brothers Karamazov as (to cite Gorky's phrase) 'a fifth gospel,' predominated in the Religio-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg from the time of its dedication 'to the memory of Vladimir Solov'ev' in 1907 until its dissolution in 1912. The view was perpetuated in the brilliant critical works on Dostoevsky written by two of the society's most famous members: Viacheslav Ivanov and Nicholas Berdiaev.
Although Berdiaev has subsequently become better known in the West, Ivanov was in many ways the more seminal thinker. A student of Mommsen in Berlin who had become converted to the Nietzschean idea that 'a new organic era' was at hand, Ivanov bade his associates join him in plunging 'from the real to the more real'; to leave behind the prosaic realities of the present for a future that will bring with it a new tragic sense. Ivanov insisted that he longed not for the unattainable but simply 'for that which has not yet been attained.'80 'Viacheslav the Magnificent' was the crown prince and chef de salon of the new society, which met in his seventh-floor apartment 'The Tower,' overlooking the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Walls and partitions were torn down to accommodate the increasing numbers of talented and disputatious people who flocked to the Wednesday soirees, which were rarely in full swing until after supper had
been served at 2 a.m.
Nietzsche was in a sense the guiding spirit, for Ivanov looked nostalgically to the lost world of classical antiquity through the eyes of Nietzsche's own academic discipline-philology-and worshipped at the shrine of the vitalistic Dionysus: the god of fertility and wine and patron of drama and choral song. But from the time of his early studies of 1904-5, 'Nietzsche and Dionysus,' 'The Religion of Dionysus,' and 'The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God,' to his scholarly dissertation on Dionysus defended at Baku in 1921,81 Ivanov tended to see in the Dionvsian cult a prefiguration of Christianity; and he became after his exile
in 1925 a resident of Rome and convert to Catholicism. Berdiaev, who later became an emigre apologist for Christianity within the Orthodox fold, was in pre-Revolutionary days closer to Nietzsche in such books as The Meaning of the Creative Act of 1916.
Rozanov went much further, insisting that there was a basic conflict between Dionysus and Christ. In a famous speech to the Religio-Philo-sophical Society, Rozanov attacked Jesus as a figure who never laughed or married, and pleaded for a new religion of uninhibited creativity and sensuality.82 Rozanov's proposal was given support by Nietzsche's suggestion that all morality is rationalization and that a new type of superman is needed with the courage to live beyond the stultifying categories of good and evil. Shestov's Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy saw these two figures as the twin prophets of a new world in which the tragic spirit was to be freed from the shackles of morality for a new life of sensual and aesthetic adventure.83 Shestov later sought to contrast the German with Tolstoy, the bete noire of silver age aestheticism, in his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche.84 The tendency to identify Dostoevsky with Nietzsche rather than Christ was particularly marked among those of Jewish origins like Shestov and A. Shteinberg, who tended to see in Dostoevsky a revolutionary new 'system of freedom,' to cite the title of a lecture series he gave in St. Petersburg in 1921.85
Another important source of the new sensualism was the return to primitivism in the arts. Kandinsky had turned to the lubki, or popular wood cuts, of Old Russia for inspiration, and published in 1904 his Poems without Words, a portfolio of his own cuts, en route to his more abstract and experimental compositions. Malevich also went through a primitivist period; as did Michael Larionov, who turned to folk themes, simple figures, and distorted anatomies in a desperate effort to find a truly original Russian style of art. He eventually created a purely abstract style of 'rayonism,' which sought to base painting on 'rays of color' rather than lines and fields of color. But in the experimental, interim period that followed the Revolution of 1905, Larionov championed the introduction of pornographic material into painting: salacious slogans in his 'Soldier' series and ingenious improvisations on sexual shapes in his subsequent 'Prostitute' series.86 These and other primitive and suggestive paintings were exhibited in Moscow early in 1912 by a group with the deliberately shocking name 'The Donkey's Tail,' which represented 'the first conscious breakaway from Europe'87 within the artistic avant-garde. A similar movement through primitivism to modernistic innovation can be traced in music. Stravinsky's revolutionary 'Rite of Spring' was suggested to him by an unexpected and erotic vision
of a solemn pagan rite in which a circle of elders watched a young girl dance herself to death to propitiate the god of spring and fertility.88
The bawdiness of Larionov endeared him to the literary futurists, who used him and his friends as illustrators for their works. The use of erotic motifs, infantile forms of expression, and vulgar epigrams became common to painters and poets alike of the 'futurist' persuasion, who were in pre-war Russia generally more preoccupied with the sensuous and personal than the original Franco-Italian futurist Marinetti, who had been more interested in 'the aesthetics of the machine.' Russian futurism represented, in the title of its most famous manifesto, 'a slap in the face of public taste.' Rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes and dandies of Edwardian England, the Russian futurists delighted in bizarre attire-appearing on the street with abstract signs painted on their cheeks and radishes in their buttonholes. The painter-poet Burliuk brothers, who organized the futurist tour of 1913-14, typified the egocentric exuberance of the movement. Vladimir, a professional wrestler, carried mammoth weights with him everywhere he went, and his equally gigantic older brother, David, appeared with the legend 'I am Burliuk' painted on his forehead.
If one can speak of a synthetic proclamation of liberated sensualism comparable to Scriabin's Promethean proclamation, it would probably be the futuristic movie 'Drama in Cabaret No. 13,' which was filmed late in 1913. In contrast to the melodramas set in remote times and places which were the standard fare of the infant Russian
