frivolities of the opera eliminated in an effort to depict that which Nietzsche had written in the margin of his score of Bizet's Carmen at the 'Habanera': 'Eros as the Greeks imagined him, bitterly demonic and untamed.'103
The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic. Solov'ev, the author of the turn to sensualism, had begun in his last years to have visions of the devil rather than of sophia, and seems to have felt himself strangely drawn toward the Antichrist of his last writings.104 Within a few years of Solov'ev's death, his follower Alexander Blok moved from his earlier mystical reverence for 'the beautiful lady' who brought harmony to the universe to his poetic preoccupation with 'the unknown woman,' an enigmatic prostitute from the nether world of the city taverns. The less well remembered figure of Alexander Dobroliubov actually championed the worship of Satan, and wrote poems and tracts extolling 'the beauty of
death' before turning to a life of ascetic self-mortification and radical sectarian preaching.106 Demons are everywhere in the literary world of Sologub, where the lure of the flesh is almost invariably related to the power
of Satan,
Alexis Remizov, one of the most popular storytellers of the late imperial period, believed that the world was ruled by the devil. His portrayal of Satan in the vernacular language and fantastic metaphor of the Russian countryside made him seem almost a congenial figure. Remizov's popular marionette production The Devil's Show was a kind of satanic mystery play; and his Flaming Russia of 1921 paid tribute to Dostoevsky as the author of the strange dualism and 'theomachism' (bogoborchestvo, or 'struggle with God') that underlay his own exotic writings. Chiurlionis suggested that the sun was really black; and in Satan's Diary, the last work of Leonid Andreev, the author identifies with Satan, who-in the shape of an American millionaire-records his deceptions and triumphs in a deeply corrupted world.106
Diabolism also found expression in music, where Scriabin professed to find a kind of exaltation of the devil in the music of Liszt and in his own celebration of sensual delights. The devil found his most notable conquest in the field of painting, where the gifted figure of Vrubel moved from early religious paintings to experimentalism to anguish and insanity in the course of an artistic quest centered on representing Lermontov's Demon in painting.107
From his early representation of the demon as a seated figure similar in form to his earlier Pan, Vrubel proceeded to a final picture which showed the demon stretched out horizontally, as if on a rack, with his head cocked up at an unnatural angle, staring out in horror at the viewer. It is as if the devil were conducting a kind of final satanic review of his lesser servants: those 'pillars of society' who always lined up in ignorant admiration before any work of a widely acclaimed artist. Vrubel both shocked and fascinated society by returning periodically to retouch and further distend his devil even after it was placed on public exhibit. The only refuge left on earth was to be found in an insane asylum, where Vrubel spent the last years before his death in 1910. The devil which haunted Vrubel had, of course, fascinated thinkers of the romantic age throughout Europe. Faust was, after all, inconceivable without Mephistopheles; and in their brooding about paradises lost or regained, the romantics found Milton's Satan somehow more credible and interesting than his God. In their determination to revitalize the mechanistic universe of the eighteenth-century philosophers, romantic philosophers often preferred to equate vitality with Satan rather than attempt to redefine or rehabilitate the discredited idea of God.
Yet there is something strange and uniquely Russian about Vrubel's
effort to encase Satan in a painting. It was a kind of inversion of the quest launched in Russian painting by Alexander Ivanov a half century earlier.108 As in the case of Ivanov, Vrubel's effort became a kind of focal point of the communal interests and expectations of the entire intellectual elite. Just as Ivanov had attempted to portray 'The Appearance of Christ to the People,' Vrubel was trying to have the devil make his appearance to the people. But whereas Ivanov's Christ was an artistic failure, Vrubel's Demon was a relative success. Romanticism had found its icon; and the sensualists of late imperial Russia, their patron saint.
Apocalypticism
This sense of the satanic presence led to a brooding and apocalyptic mentality. Apocalypticism, the third key characteristic of the era, was in many ways the by-product of the unresolved psychological tension between the other two: Prometheanism and sensualism. How, after all, can one reconcile great expectations with petty preoccupations? an intellectual belief in a coming Utopia and a simultaneous personal involvement in debauchery? One way of holding on to both commitments was to convince oneself with a certain amount of Schadenfreude that apocalyptical change was in the offing, that the sensualism of today forebodes the transformation of tomorrow. As Diaghilev put it during the revolutionary year of 1905 (in a toast delivered in connection with the exhibit of three thousand Russian historical portraits which he organized at the Tauride Palace):
We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.109
The second and more obvious source of apocalypticism was the popular religious mentality which tended to influence even many of the openly irreligious contributors to the emerging mass culture of the early twentieth century. Reading and writing were now becoming regular activities of many with a primitive, peasant background for whom it seemed natural to talk of change in apocalyptical terms.
The stridently secular manifestos of the futurists were filled with
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images of prophecy and martyrdom. The poet Maiakovsky, who rapidly became their leader, called himself 'the thirteenth apostle' and 'an uncrowned king of souls,' whose body will someday be 'lifted to heaven like the communion wafer by prostitutes to cleanse them of their sins.' His sonorous verse captures, like the zaumny iazyk, the language of pure sound of Khlebnikov, some of the musical cascading quality of the original zaumny iazyk of the church: the blagovestie of church bells. If the bells of 'rejoicing' are harsh ones, jangled out of tune by the iconoclastic poet, his ultimate assurance of salvation is phrased in the language of apocalypse, which is, after all, a kind of 'theology beyond reason.' He alone, the ultimate romantic, 'will come through the buildings on fire' to see 'the second tidal flood.'110 If futurist poets were led into a kind of masochistic apocalypticism in their effort to reach beyond the ordinary world, abstract artists tended to follow a similar path in their quest for a new art of pure form and color. Kandinsky in the critical period of his development, during 1912-14, repeatedly returned to the theme of apocalyptical horsemen and the Last Judgment in the canvases with which he slowly rode altogether out of the world of objective art.111
In the feverish literature of this decade of war and revolution, apocalypticism became an increasingly central theme. Solov'ev's posthumously published short story of the Antichrist heralded a host of imitators who were, for the most part, less interested in his positive vision of ultimate Christian unification than in his negative vision of the coming Asian domination of Europe.
Merezhkovsky's trilogy, Christ and Antichrist, presented a vast historical panoply of the death of gods under Julian the Apostate, their resurrection under Leonardo da Vinci, and a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist
