six 'spiritual schools' in 1764, there were 150 by 1808.85 Administered by the state-controlled Synod, these schools imparted the rudiments of a pious and patriotic education to the majority of those civil servants and professional people who made the empire ran. Teachers and alumni provided the grass roots support for the reactionary counterattack against the secularism and rationalism of the more cosmopolitan universities and lyceums, and of the more urbane teachers in the Church, such as Platon Levshin, who markedly improved the quality of the teaching in Church schools during his long tenure as Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 fo 1812, and fought to retain Latin rather than Russian as the basic language of instruction.
The generation of Orthodox leaders that rose to power after Platon's death resented the prominence of foreigners in the church school system, and shared the nationalistic enthusiasm that swept through Russia during the resistance to Napoleon. They were stung by the searching critique of De Maistre, who characterized the Orthodox Church as 'an object of pity' incapable of understanding, let alone defending Christianity.
Take away the Catholicizing and the Protestantizing groups: the illumin-ists who are the raskolniks of the salons and the raskolniks who are the il-Iuminists of the people, what is there left to it?86
There was growing agreement that Orthodox tradition needed more aggressive spokesmen if it was to survive in an age of ideological upheaval and confusion. The first important plan for a distinctively Orthodox battle against impiety, heresy, and revolution was provided by Alexander Sturdza, a gifted Moldavian nobleman who had become fascinated with occult orders when commissioned by the Russian court to write a history of Russian relations with the Maltese order. His Considerations on the Doctrine and Spirit of the Orthodox Church, written in 1816 for the benefit of the Lovers of Humanity Society, proposed in effect that the Orthodox Church be transformed into a kind .of spiritual overseer for the Holy Alliance. Two years later, he wrote his widely discussed Memoir on the Present State of Germany, which dealt mainly with the problem of education.87
In Sturdza's view, Germany's unrest was a direct result of undisciplined student activities. The Western Church had mistakenly granted the universities autonomy from the guiding discipline of the Church. Germany should revoke the medieval liberties of its universities. Orthodox Russia should not permit any such liberties to be granted in its new universities 'and should limit the numbers and regulate the curriculum of the German professors who were flooding into Russia's universities and seminaries.
If Sturdza sounded the warning, it was the remarkable figure of Michael .Magnitsky who produced the call to battle stations and the detailed blueprints for an Orthodox Christian assault against the armies of godless rationalism. Magnitsky illustrates the new blend of bureaucratic opportunism and philosophical obscurantism that was frequently to reappear in court circles during the remaining century of tsarist rule. In the early years of Alexander's rule, Magnitsky had done all the proper things for a member of the lesser nobility anxious to get ahead. He had served in the Preobra-zhensky Regiment and in Russian embassies in Paris and Vienna. He had composed sentimental verses and participated in masonic and philanthropic societies. Indeed, so liberal had his posture been that he was identified with Speransky's reformist ideas and forced to share his downfall in 1812.
Exiled to Vologda, Magnitsky's talents were soon put to use (like those of Speransky) in the provincial civil service. He became vice-governor of Voronezh on the upper Don, then governor of Simbirsk on the Volga. This city had a long record of extremism; it was the former center of peasant rebellion and was to be the birthplace of Lenin. It was in Simbirsk that
Russian Realism
PLATES XIII-XIV
Russian realist painters, is a rarity among modern Russian artists in that he had a relatively long life (1844- 1930) and enjoyed the favor of both official and radical circles. His career began with successful prize paintings in the Imperial Academy of Arts in the 1860's and imperial commissions in the 1870's, and he flourished during the brief liberal democratic era, when he painted portraits of leading politicians, and lived on in the U.S.S.R. (although he spent his last years abroad as an emigre), where he was hailed as a founder of the monumentalism and exhortative realism of Soviet art.
Repin capitalized on the peculiar fascination with historical themes that has animated Russian culture since the early illustrated chronicles. His famous representation of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son (1885; Plate XIII) used the new realistic medium melodramatically to convey the horror and fascination with which Russians had always regarded this decisive act in the severing of the sacred line of succession from Riurik. The real-life model for Repin's picture of the tsarevich was the prophetic writer Vsevolod Garshin, who died three years later at 33, the same age as Christ, whom friends thought he resembled.
Many of Repin's portraits (such as his Tolstoy standing barefoot in peasant dress) provided the images by which a famous personality came to be remembered. Particularly revered by fellow Russian artists was Repin's painting of Musorgsky (Plate XIV), completed during four days of visits to the psychiatric hospital just a few days before the composer died in March 1881. Repin's rendering of his suffering friend caused many figures of the populist era to contend that Musorgsky had-almost literally -'survived' death through this vindication of Repin's own search for a natural 'people's' art.
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PLATE XIII
PLATE XIV
fication with the simple, suffering people. His 'Haul- ?.Ub amp;lur
ers on the Volga' (1870-3; Plate XV) became a Realism
monumental icon of populist revolutionaries (even
PLATE XV
though it had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Vladimir) and vaulted Repin to the symbolic leadership of the new quest for a realistic 'art of the people' which the 'wanderers' had launched a decade earlier. Partly inspired by the famed song of the Volga boatmen, the painting in turn inspired Musorg-sky to seek a new music of redemption from the spontaneous sounds of his native Volga region. Revolutionaries saw a call to defiance and a plea for help in the proud bearing and searching gaze of the unbowed young boy. The ship provided a hint of other, distant lands to the East to which the river led; perhaps even of romantic deliverance by some future Stenka Razin from the toil and bondage of the landlocked empire.
The substantial amount of time that Repin spent planning this composition and traveling about in search of real-life models represented a continuation of the obsessive preoccupation of Russian painters with some single redemptive masterpiece-a tradition that began with Ivanov's 'Appearance of Christ' and which has continued to the
