truth with the aid of the absurd and fantastic!59
Akimov speaks of the influence upon his theatrical conceptions of pictorial images from Russian icons, Daumier, Van Gogh, and the post-war Italian cinema.60 Yutkevich speaks of the ideal Soviet movie of the future as a 'synthesis of the style of Watteau and Goya.'61
One of the most remarkable of recent Soviet short stories, 'Adam and Eve' by Yury Kazakov, tells of a young painter and a girl going to a deserted island. It is a kind of return to Eden in search of artistic truth. Yet the painter is as restless as the Soviet youth he personifies. He sees himself as 'a prophet without an idea.' In a deserted church, however, he has a kind of vision of rediscovering 'the genuine life of the earth, the water, and the people.' He climbs the belfry, and looks down from the sky above to 'another sky . . . the whole immeasurable mass of surrounding waters luminous with reflected light.'62 In the last scene, he departs over those waters amidst the strange, unearthly whiteness of the northern lights.
One is left again with the image of a ship at sea and no fixed destination. But one feels certain that the destination is not to be found on the approved itineraries of the state travel agency. One can almost imagine a middle-aged Communist official rebuking him with the words addressed by a Pravda editorial five years earlier 'to all Soviet workers in literature and the arts':
He who tries to reject the method of socialist realism imitates the irresponsible captain who throws the ship's compass overboard on the high seas so that he may guide his ship 'freely.'63
The title and imagery of Kazakov's story are but one illustration of the fourth, and most surprising, aspect of the cultural revival: the renewed interest in religion.
There is, to be sure, no dramatic religious revival in progress; and regular churchgoing continues to be primarily an activity of women and elderly people. But there is a continuing fervor in the liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church which attracts a steady stream of brief appearances for baptism and Easter services.64 The growing appeal of church marriages has forced the regime to set up its own grotesque 'marriage palaces' designed to provide all the material accouterments of a church (music, flowers, and solemn decor) for the approved civil ceremonies of the atheistic state. The number of those seeking training for the priesthood in the post-Stalin era increased to the point where a correspondence course was even introduced to accommodate those who might otherwise have been barred by distance, poverty, or bureaucratic obstruction. A program of sharply increased persecution built around the requirement that all would-be semi-
narians submit to a preliminary interrogation and discussion with specially chosen committees of the Young Communist League has enabled Soviet authorities to report with grim satisfaction that the numbers in seminaries have sharply declined since 1959 as a result of 'extensive individual work with the students.'65
But there still appears to be some validity to the old comparison reputedly made between religion and a nail by Lunacharsky in the early days of atheistic propaganda: 'The harder you hit it, the deeper you drive it into the wood.' Some of the continuing excesses of atheistic evangelism-the noisy interruption of church services, the offering of rewards for unearthing secret prayer meetings, and the official glorification of those who break with religion and publish lurid exposes-all serve to arouse a certain sense of sympathy even among the atheists and agnostics who still predominate within the younger generation.
In an ironic inversion of the classical conflict between fathers and sons, the younger generation now often picks up religious interests as a means of shocking their atheistically conformist parents. Young Russians seem particularly fond of ridiculing and embarrassing the stereotyped party lectures on scientific atheism, which were increased in number some threefold in 1958. A favorite cartoon in the Soviet humor journal Krokodil shows believers praying for the return of another anti-religious lecturer to their region.66
On a deeper level, the story is frequently told among the younger generation of the old peasant woman whose stubborn religious convictions were impairing the ideological training of the young. A leading party propagandist was brought all the way from Moscow to give her a highly technical illustrated lecture on the material origins and evolutionary laws of creation. The old woman listens intently to this brilliant performance designed to demonstrate once and for all the irrefutable wisdom of scientific atheism; and at the end she nods her head and says: 'Yes, comrade, great indeed-greater than I had supposed-are the works of the Lord.'
The new interest in religion is more than casual curiosity. It arises in the first place out of the re-examination of the Russian past that has been quietly going on among the young in the wake of the denigration of Stalin. The high price now placed on religious art, the staging of Dostoevsky's novels, Melnikov-Pechersky's tales of Old Believer life, and Rimsky-Korsakov's long-proscribed Invisible City of Kitezh-all respond to the extraordinary interest of the young in rediscovering these 'survivals of the past.' A new community of interest began to develop in the fifties between the very young and the very old at the expense of the middle-aged 'heirs of Stalin.'
Solzhenitsyn's use of the vernacular in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave an evocative power to that pioneering revelation of suffering under Stalinism not unlike that which Awakum's use of an earlier vernacular had imparted to his harrowing autobiography. Solzhenitsyn subsequently turned more calmly but no less passionately than the arch-priest to the forms of the Old Russian Church for such consolation as he was able to find.
When you travel the byroads of Central Russia you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside.
It is in the churches . . . they lift their bell towers-graceful, shapely, all different-high over mundane timber and thatch . . . from villages that are cut off and invisible to each other they soar to the same heaven. . . .
People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods. Reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world, and give time and thought to eternity. These chimes, which only one old tune keeps alive for us, raised people up and prevented them from sinking down on all fours.67
At the very least, religious ideas have opened up new areas of the imagination to a substantial number of young people seeking release from boredom inside the contemporary USSR. The literature of the post-Stalin era contains an increasing number of themes and images borrowed from the Orthodox heritage. Biblical titles are often used, as in Dudintsev's novel, Not by Bread Alone. Names often have a symbolic value, as in The Shadow, where the idealistic hero who struggles with his shadow is named Christian Theodore, and the maiden who alone stays by him is called Annuntsiata. In the original version of Everything Depends on People (which was entitled The Torch) the Orthodox priest is represented not as a caricatured reactionary but as an ideal Soviet man-a mathematician and war hero-who converted to Christianity in order to serve humanity. Even after such details were stricken by the censor, the priest in the revised version still manages to explain his beliefs with some dignity. He does not attempt to refute the traditional anti-religious arguments of the atheistic scientist but rather counterattacks at a deeper level, insisting that 'our young people are asking questions for which you have no answers.'68
This very phenomenon makes the revival of interest in religion profoundly disturbing to the regime, whatever the extent of actual religious conviction. In calling 'for more atheist books, good ones and varied!'69 Communist officials rightly complain that much of the literature ostensibly designed to expose religious sects in the USSR is dispassionately objective if not even sympathetic to the object of study. The bizarre life and beliefs
