Vigabatrina

An appreciation of the Russian cultural preference for continuity may also help our understanding of why it was that the Old Believers rejected Nikon’s reforms: in Russian Orthodoxy, progress and change possess no intrinsic value.38 _{On the contrary, unsolicited progress and change have been signs of}

the antichrist, of the looming apocalypse, to be feared, prevented and fled from at all costs, necessitating communal withdrawal at best and justifying self-immolation through burning at worst.39

Russian Orthodoxy, as one of the main carriers of Russian culture through-

38_{Kallistos Ware,The Inner Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,}

2000), pp. 181–192; Procaccia, p. 90; James R. Payton Jr.,Light from the Christian East:

An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), pp. 87–89.

39_{Cf. Sinyavsky, Ivan the Fool, pp. 299–310; Basil Louri´e, ‘Russian Christianity’, The}

Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, ed. by Ken Perry (Malden, MA, Oxford

and Victoria: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 207–230 (pp. 220–223); Tatiana Filosofova,Geistliche

out the centuries, has doubtlessly played a major role in perpetuating certain Orthodox values and attitudes in Russia’s wider culture, whether directly or indirectly. While the Russian Revolution brought an end to the church’s ac- tive role in society and culture, the values which it had promoted remained deeply ingrained. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, for example, points to the exis- tence throughout the centuries of a culture ofsmirenie (‘humility’) in Russia, a value imparted by Christianity and perpetuated by the Orthodox church and political and social structures, resulting in the establishment of what he terms a ‘slave soul’, which in its own turn facilitated authoritarianism in Russia;40 _{this will be discussed at length in Chapter 6.}

It has been argued by Procaccia that, unlike the numerous artistic styles that developed in the West, ranging from mediaeval art to the Renaissance and romanticism and so forth, Russia has in fact never known any other art form than that of the icon. Much Soviet art relied on secularised icono- graphic principles, for example sometimes portraying the leaders in a Christ- like guise.41 While it may be countered that in the Soviet Union, which harnessed art to ideological purpose, iconographic principles were purposely used in order to reach the people through a medium with which it was famil- iar, the fact that it was realised that the icon is, more than any other artistic medium, the one which the Russian people understood — and accepted as carrying a transcendent value beyond that as a mere ‘work of art’ — tes-

40_{Daniel Rancour-Laferriere,The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult}

of Suffering (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995).

41_{See Procaccia, pp. 13–17, for a discussion of examples of Soviet art exhibiting such}

characteristics, such as Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin or the piece of plaster art

‘We Swear to You, Comrade Lenin’ of 1949, which portrays a reverent crowd in front of a tribune on Red Square before the Kremlin walls, with Stalin standing on the tribune below an engraved image of Lenin, graciously addressing the people and bestowing his presence upon them.

tifies to the persistance of such an iconographic understanding of art well into the twentieth century.42 _{Further examples would be the abstract artists}

Kazimir Malevich and Vasilii Kandinskii, who were very much rooted in the iconographic tradition. Kandinskii, in his 1912 workOn the Spiritual in Art, expressed the view that his abstract art was not aesthetically motivated at all, but that its colour and form were a ‘language’ or ‘music’ which narrated and caused the viewer to respond emotionally. Icon paintings were intended to deliver a non-pictorial message,43 _{and Kandinskii viewed his creative ac-}

tivity along similar lines. Kandinskii did not wish to distance himself from mimesis because he believed that beauty of expression was an aim in itself; rather, his interest consisted in a dialogue with the viewer.44 He criticised the art ‘connoisseur’ whose focus on formal characteristics kept him from perceiving the spirit of ‘purposeful creation’ in the light of ‘a new spiritual realm’:45 _{‘[d]azzled by external devices, his spiritual eye is unable to seek out}

what it is that lives by these means’.46

Iconographic principles deeply influenced the thinking and work of Male- vich and Kandinskii, therefore. One of the core characteristics of icon- painting is identified by Procaccia as

42_{Cf. Billington,The Face of Russia, pp. 64–65.}

43_{For a discussion of the Orthodox icon, see Sinyavsky, Ivan the Fool, pp. 220–221;}

and Leonid Ouspensky, ‘The Meaning and Content of the Icon’, in Eastern Orthodox

Theology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. by Daniel B. Clendenin, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 33–63.

44_{Procaccia, pp. 18–19.}

45_{Vasilii Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular’, 2nd edn (Mu-}

nich, Piper: 1912), in: Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art. Volume One: 1901–1921,

ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), pp. 120–219 (p. 219).

the assumption that the phenomenal world cannot be cap- tured by artistic means and conveyed to the viewer ‘as [it] is.’ The artist cannot, and is not allowed to, observe external objects with the eyes of the flesh. He is required to look into his own soul for spiritual communion with God’s creation. Realism must be discarded as [a] heretical attempt to revoke this principle, and hence all Russian iconography is two-dimensional, stylized, spir- itual, transcendent, and unrealistic.47

Essentially, iconographic representation is an indirect one, highlighting the ‘sharp distinction between objects and their representation’.48 _{In his essay}

‘The Artist’, Malevich himself wrote that ‘I imagine a world of inexhaustible unseen forms [...] The artist uncovers the world and shows it to man’.49

In another short piece, ‘I am the Beginning’, he explained why the artist’s expression of a certain non-realistic world is of significance: ‘that which at present is mysterious will later be clearer than the sun’.50 Elsewhere, he stated that the ‘Suprematists have deliberately given up objective represen- tation of their surroundings in order to reach the summit of the true “un- masked” art and from this vantage point to view life through the prism of pure artistic feeling’.51

47_{Procaccia, p. 20.}

48_{Procaccia, pp. 20–21.}

49_{Kazimir S. Malevich,The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished Writings 1913–}

33, trans. by Xenia Hoffmann, ed. by Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978), iv,

p. 9.

50_{Malevich,The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, p. 13.}

51_{Kazimir Malevich, The Nonobjective World, trans. by Howard Dearstyne (Chicago:}

Theobald, 1959), pp. 61–100, in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists

and Critics, ed. by Herschel Chipp (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 337–346 (p. 344).

The icon consists of a certain material and a specific artistic form in or- der to embody the representation of an immaterial, non-objective, spiritual reality. Malevich and Kandinskii, despite their modernist abstract forms, because of which they are regarded as representatives of modernism, typo- logically followed the Orthodox iconographic concept of art. Perhaps this gives reason for re-evaluating the notion of ‘modernism’ in Russia, given that external, formal innovation can deflect awareness from the question of what lies, in terms of meaning, behind the vehicle of a painting or a literary text. We will return to this issue in a subsequent chapter when we offer thoughts relating to the nature of literary modernism and ‘postmodernism’. Before doing so, however, there are more examples of cultural continu- ity reaching even into the post-Soviet era that need to be examined, some of which are no less rooted in Russian Christianity than that of the icon. They all express a deep longing for a sure truth, real community and for transcending the limitations of social reality in Russia. Russian intellectual life has arguably always been dominated by religious, and later also secular, utopian and eschatological ideas, reaching an apogee with its ready embrac- ing of communist utopia.52 _{Another theme to be returned to affirmatively in}

later parts of the present work is the proposition that throughout the history of Russian thought and literature, men of letters have always been specifi- cally concerned about the state and destiny of their own nation as well as that of humanity more generally. Isaiah Berlin, referring to this as ‘acute self-consciousness’, wrote that

[t]here has surely never been a society more deeply and exclu- sively preoccupied with itself, its own nature and destiny. From the eighteen-thirties until our day the subject of almost all critical

and imaginative writing in Russia is Russia. The great novelists, and a good many minor novelists too, as well as the vast majority of characters in Russian novels, are continuously concerned not merely with their purposes as human beings or members of fam- ilies or classes or professions, but with their condition or mission or future as Russians, members of a unique society with unique problems.53

In later chapters it will be demonstrated that this statement, made in 1957 and referring to the preceding hundred-thirty years (and most likely account- ing for a period stretching even further back into history), still holds true today. As such it is one of a number of indications speaking of cultural con- tinuity in Russia despite all external ruptures, and by extension militates against the straightforward application of terms like ‘modernism’ or ‘post- modernism’ relative to Russian culture.

A further issue to be briefly addressed is that of the shared belief that human purpose has an absolute, total, even religious nature. The fact that such an attitude was deeply ingrained in Russian thinking was one of the reasons why it was possible for a totalitarian system to develop later on Rus- sian soil. Such an all-embracing notion of life involved the acceptance of central authority as arbiter of absolute truth, be it the church or the com- munists in the twentieth century. A Western concept of the inviolability of persons was hardly likely to develop in Russia against the background of such a view of life; for Russians, such a view would have been tantamount to meshchanstvo (petty bourgeois philistinism), nepravda (falsehood) and

krivda(wrong, crookedness)54and an ‘effort to limit, to narrow, to conceal, to

53_{Berlin, ‘Silence’, p. 1.}

shut out the light, to preserve privilege, to protect some portion of ourselves from the universal truth—and therefore the central source of error, weakness, and vice.’55 Russia’s intelligentsia has arguably always been driven by the search for the ultimate truth; Berlin saw evidence for this in the enthusiastic welcome given to a number of notions from the West by the Russian intel- lectual classes, and the extent to which such ideas were radicalised to a far greater degree than in the West. They became doctrines and ‘fighting faiths’, whereas in the West they usually declined and were simply replaced by new ideas. In Russia the Western ideas like those of Rousseau, Saint Simon, Hegel, Comte, Darwin etc., and eventually of Marx, were transformed into secular theologies. In Russia, argues Berlin, an intellectual concept never remained just that, but frequently acquired a metaphysical, religious dimension.56 _It

may be that the Russian tradition of belief in a simple ideology or system as offering all-embracing ‘salvation’ even facilitated the early post-Soviet fas- cination with capitalism, of which more will be said in our discussion on Tuchkov in Chapter 6.

Another field in which Russia has followed its own distinct path concerns the nature of freedom. We shall argue later that the thematicisation of freedom in such writers as Khurgin, Sorokin and Tuchkov is thematically largely congruent with the Russian classical tradition. Much has been written about the specificity of the Russian notion of freedom, of course, and there is no need to recapitulate fully that body of scholarship here. In essence, the Russian concept of freedom differed from that in the West. Whereas the latter tended to focus on individual, human and citizens’ rights, the former

(1956/1957.1), 525–530 (p. 528).

55_{Berlin, ‘Silence’, p. 5.}

56_{Berlin, ‘Silence’, pp. 2–5; Billington, ‘The Renaissance of the Russian Intelligentsia’,}

has society as its most important reference point. Richard Peace, in his 1978 article ‘Russian Concepts of Freedom’,57 _{argues that in spite of the growing}

interest in Russia from the eighteenth century on in the serf as a fellow human being, evident in sentimentalism and romanticism, it cannot be truly compared to the Western notions of the freedom of the individual.58 The reason for why the notion of individual freedom has not properly taken root in Russian culture, is that it was subordinate to the rival notion of absolute truth, a notion that has defined Russian culture, society and politics right into the twentieth century, as we have discussed above. This is an important further indication suggesting that modernity in Russia was indeed much less like its Western kind.

Relative to the cultural explosion that took place in Russia during the nineteenth century, Peace employs the term Renaissance with a capital letter; however, it might better be replaced with a lower case renaissance, thereby describing a culturalexplosion rather than a distinct cultural evolution that is inescapably associated with humanism, the Reformation, and resulting political and social change, since Russia participated in such developments only superficially, at best. Procaccia points out that Renaissance humanism was interested in ‘the nongeneric, individual differences that set people apart from each other [. . . ] [in] the unique, the different, the idosyncratic of each person’s sphere of existence’.59 _{In contrast, even the Russian sentimentalist}

and romanticist concern with ‘individualism’ appears to have been less indi- vidualistic and non-generic than what is understood by this concept in the West. Andreas Sch¨onle writes that ‘Russian sentimentalism failed to adopt some essential tenets of western Enlightenment and sentimentalist thinking,

57_{Peace, ‘Russian Concepts of Freedom’, 3–15.}

58_{Peace, p. 6.}

while radicalising others’,60 further highlighting the fact that, on the socio- cultural level, individualism and self-fashioning in Russia were curtailed by ‘collective constructions of identity’.61 In addition, he points to the broader religious and philosophical dimension of Russian-Orthodox culture, which proved to be unreceptive to the notion of the autonomous and subjectivist self.62 _{While the Renaissance was characterised by man’s assertion of his}

free agency, thereby breaking with the mediaeval view of personality as be- ing corporatively bound,63 _{the evidence in Russian culture seems, therefore,}

to suggest a stronger continuity with a mediaeval philosophical anthropol- ogy. On the other hand, Gareth Jones argues that the Enlightenment faith in reason exercised a pervasive influence on Russia’s educated elite of the eigh- teenth century.64 _{At the same time, however, Jones acknowledges evidence}

to the effect that even ‘the outstanding personalities of the Enlightenment in Russia rarely accepted the spirit of western individualism and the political conclusions that flowed from it.’65 Without a strong notion of individualism, there can be no liberal tradition as conceptualised in the West.

Peace emphasises the fact that in the Russian literary tradition, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Dostoevsky, Zamiatin and Gor"kii, freedom (vo- lia, which also translates as ‘will’) is both etymologically and philosophically connected with the individual and society. Pushkin’s poem Tsygany (The

60_{Andreas Sch¨onle, ‘The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in}

Russian Culture, 1780–1820’,Slavic Review, 57 (1998), 723–746 (p. 725).

61_{Sch¨onle, p. 746.}

62_{Sch¨onle, p. 746.}

63_{Aron J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. by G. L. Campbell [Lon-}

don, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992 (first published as

Kategorii srednevekovoi kul"tury, Moscow, 1972)], pp. 85–86.

64_{W. Gareth Jones, ‘Russia’s Eighteenth-century Enlightenment’, in: A History of Rus-}

sian Thought, pp. 73–94.

Gipsies) presents freedom as a form of punishment, in that the hero Aleko, who does not wish to submit to and become integrated with the small gipsy social group, is free to leave at the cost of being excluded from them. Essen- tially, Aleko seeks freedom from commitment and social obligation, an atti- tude which amounts to pure egotism and unrestrained exercise of the will, something which can only be indulged outside society; at the same time, social exclusion is a kind of punishment ordained by the gypsies following a crime which he committed in his pursuit of freedom. This reflects a mat- ter of fact, namely that human beings are essentially relational creatures, and that exclusion from human intercourse can indeed be form of punish- ment, for whatever reason. Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Zamiatin, Gor"kii and Leonov moreover went on to present freedom as intricately linked to crime (Zamiatin, however, does so ironically in We); such works as A Hero of our Time,Crime and Punishment andThe Devils,Chelkash andThe Thief imply that freedom, understood as the relentless pursuit of one’s own will (volia), eventually leads to crime and, ultimately, to social exclusion, unhappiness and even self-destruction (pp. 7–11). This idea has been well formulated by Terry Eagleton, who, referring to the contemporary West, writes that ‘[s]ince limits make us what we are, the idea of absolute freedom is bound to be terroristic’;66 _{Rowan Williams, meanwhile, interprets the pursuit of volia}

in Dostoevsky’s fiction as empty and self-destructive:

the dream of a liberty completely without constraint from any other, human, subhuman or divine; because it has no ‘other,’ it can also have no content. But this means that the hunger for such freedom can only manifest itself in destruction, flinging

66_{Terry Eagleton,Holy Terror (Oxford, New York, Aucklandet al.: Oxford University}

itself against existing limits; and when those limits are destroyed, it has to look around for more ‘others’ to annihilate, culminating in self-destruction.67

The emphasis on social responsibility is central to the Russian notion of freedom. This is further illuminated by peasant attitudes to the land they ploughed. The latter was of more relevance to them than being spared the condition of serfdom — they would still have been subjects of the tsar or

imperator in any case. The landlords had an obligation to care for their serfs, a theme which is echoed in Dostoevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ and which in inverted ways will be returned to in our analysis of Tuchkov’s stories below. The freedom which the peasants desired was a ‘freedom within the framework of a tightly knit social organization’;68 and in Chekhov’s play

Cherry Orchard, liberation for the serfs is referred to by Firs as neschast"e