To shine always
To shine everywhere
To the depth of the last days
To shine
And nothing else.144
Maiakovsky invokes the Sun God of antiquity in the final ecstatic hymn of his Mystery Bouffe, the famed dramatic apotheosis of the new order, which he presented on the steps of the St. Petersburg stock exchange building in the early days of the Soviet regime:
Over us sun, sun and sun . . .
The sun-our sun!
Enough! . . .
Play a new game!
In a circle!
Play with the sun. Roll the sun. Play in the sun!145
'Mystery' had, of course, also been the title of Scriabin's unfinished revolutionary symphony of sound, speech, and smell-which seems strangely reminiscent of the Church liturgy. There, too, drama, speech, and music were fused with the color of the icons and the smell of incense. Scriabin and Maiakovsky were, each in his own idiom, writing mystery plays for a new organic society in which all participated in the common ritual the aim of which was not entertainment but redemption. But if they were Christian in form, they were in many ways mystical and semi- Oriental in content. Meierhold insisted that there were no mystery plays in modern times and
that 'the author of 'Prometheus' is longing for the Banks of the Ganges.'148 Khlebnikov was preoccupied with mystical, Asian themes and called himself 'A dervish, a yogi, a Martian . . .'147 adopting the ancient Slavonic version of Vladimir, 'Velimir,' as his pen name. His search for a language of pure sounds as a prerequisite for the Utopian society to be created by his 'society for the presidents of the world' also bears some resemblance to the quest of earlier, Slavic Christendom. There, too, the liturgy, the 'common work' of salvation, proceeded through the rhythmic incantations of the human voice to the joyous and climactic ringing of bells: a pure 'language beyond reason,' a zaumny iazyk prefiguring the celestial rejoicing of the world to come.
The entire emphasis on the non-literary, supra-rational arts is a throwback to the culture of Old Muscovy, with its emphasis on sights, sounds, and smells. Yet in Old Russia there had been a unifying faith to give each of the art media a common focus and a willingness to accept its limitations. In modern Russia the poetry of Blok and Khlebnikov was straining to burst into music. The music of Scriabin was seeking to unravel the language of color; and the colors of Kandinsky, the language of music. Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art, was in some ways the most deeply rooted of all in the aesthetics of Muscovy. He sought not art for its own sake but 'the spiritual in art,' and sought to end idle spectatorism by re-creating the intimacy between man and art that existed in earlier religious art. His painting was based on pure line and color-the two primary ingredients of icon painting. Kandinsky's art was-like that of the ancient icons-not concerned with the visual aspects of the external world, but was rather a kind of 'abstract musical arabesque . . . purified like music of all but its direct appeals to the spirit.'148
Yet the most abstract and purified of all sound, the language farthest 'beyond reason,' is that of silence. The most inclusive of all colors is the all-containing womb of white: the 'white on white' of Malevich's painting, the bely which the 'symphonic' novelist chose for his very name. An unleashed fantasy of line leads men into the infinity of space. A mystical longing for annihilation often followed the frenzied assertion of Promethean power. Whiteness, space, and infinity had replaced the sea as the symbol of this fulfillment-in-obliteration.
Moving within a generation from authoritarian traditionalism to ego-futurism, Russian culture had produced an extraordinary 'commotion of verse and light.'149 But everything had been taken to excess; and it seems strangely symbolic that the awesome decimation of the artistic community in the mid-thirties began with Andrew Bely's death in 1934 from overexposure to the sun.
Russia was not yet a fully self-sustaining industrial power, and had not yet evolved social and political institutions capable of combining the philosophy of its new leaders and the traditions of its people. By the late twenties the awesome decision was made to build socialism with 'the methods employed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids.'150 The thirties witnessed the merciless herding of workers into new industrial complexes and of peasants into new collectives. The 'commotion of verse and light' gave way to the coercion of prose and darkness. It is to the fate of Russian culture in the wake of Stalin's 'second revolution' that attention must now be turned.
2. The Soviet Era
J4or a long time after 1917, it was not entirely clear how profound a break in cultural tradition was implied in the founding of a new social order. The various proposals for bringing about a total break with past culture-whether through the God-building intoxication of Proletkult or the masochistic Eurasianism of the Scythians-were rejected along with the visionary social and economic programs of 'war communism.' Following the end of the Civil War and beginning of the New Economic Policy in 1921, a more permissive atmosphere was established; and some came to think in the course of the twenties that considerable cultural variety was to be tolerated within the new Revolutionary state.1
Perhaps the dominant literary group of the early twenties, the so-called fellow travelers (poputchiki), accepted the new Soviet state while professing reservations about its ideology. The even more heterodox 'Serapion Brotherhood' took shape in 1921, and a number of leading pre-revolution-ary literary figures soon returned to resume their writing careers. Two gifted young novelists, Alexis Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg, came back from the emigration in 1923 to produce works that showed little hint of the servility to Stalin that became characteristic of their later works. Tolstoy incorporated into his prose writings many of the anti-urban, anti-utopian ideas of the peasant poets, notably in his 'Sky-blue Cities,' in which an anarchistic intellectual sets fire to a newly constructed Soviet town.2 Ehrenburg introduced Jewish themes into his writings of the twenties. The founding of the Yiddish magazine Shtrom {Stream) in Moscow in 1922 helped Russia retain its central role in vernacular Yiddish culture despite Jewish population losses to newly independent Poland and to the emigration. A more ancient Hebrew culture also spoke forth through the newly formed Moscow Habima Theater, which was soon taken over by the prestigious advocate of 'fantastic realism,' Eugene Vakhtangov. Until his death in 1924, this Hebrew theater exerted a strange fascination on its Russian audiences. Ancient chants mixed with modern gestures in humorous yet
haunting scenes showing the soul-the famed Dybbuk-coming back from the dead to take possession of the living.
… all of Moscow, ravaged, reduced to rags, weary from hunger, fear, and revolution without regard to race or
